Chapter 34 Intimacy & Guilt

• They descended stone stairs slick with cold, the air tightening with each step. Moss crept across cracked tiles and brass sconces long since extinguished. Berlin’s conservatory wasn’t on any map but it hummed with Velvet’s old world opulence: rotting tapestries, vaulted ceilings, and beneath the dust… reverence.
• Marek pushed open a rusted metal door.
• Inside: a theater gutted from below. Seats stripped bare, stage torn apart, but in its hollow belly something else thrummed. A wall of blinking screens, projections, code.