Meta had one hour before the ledger equations either thinned the wall or dissolved his office. He stood behind his desk in Xanadu, three tentacles pinning open the survey, a fourth holding binder four at tab seven: Catastrophic Miscalibration, Spatial. The wall behind him hummed. On the other side lay section 7-C of Cthulhu's outer corridor. His lease said he could cut. His math said he did not yet know where. The problem was simple and awful. He had forty-two equations pulled from a data haul off a black-market accounting rig shaped like a pirate ship, all cyan trim and constellation etchings. Six of them, in the right order, would thin the veil enough to carve. The other thirty-six would unmake the room. He did not know which six. Meta was a good accountant. He did not guess. He reconciled. He set the resonance blade on the desk. Crimson star at the fuller, cyan glow down the curve, grip fitted to his tentacle span, frequency locked. He picked up the ledger and read the first equation aloud. The wall did nothing. He crossed it out. Second equation. The air near the wall cooled by two degrees. He circled it. Third. His pen lifted off the page on its own. Circled. Fourth. Nothing. Crossed out. He worked the list the way his father worked receipts: every line touched, none skipped, no line trusted until it was checked twice. Forty minutes in, he had six circles and thirty-six crosses. He checked the six against binder four. None of them matched a known failure mode. That was as close to proof as he was going to get. Meta lifted the blade in his primary tentacle. He read the six equations in sequence. The wall behind the desk went thin as wet paper. He could see through it now: a corridor of black water and slow, wrong light. He cut. One pass, waist height, left to right. The blade moved clean. He turned it, cut down. Turned again, cut back. A square, precise, edges true. The wall fell inward without sound. What came through was not the corridor. Tentacles pressed into the office through a jagged hole that widened as he watched, green and violet, thick as his leg, pulling the edges of the cut wider. The survey said section 7-C was empty at this hour. The survey was wrong, or something had moved. A tentacle knocked binder four off the shelf. Another wrapped the desk lamp and squeezed it dark. Meta stepped back. The gateway was open. It was not permanent yet, and it was not his. He raised the blade again. The frequency held. His hand did not shake. He had cut the wall. Now he had to hold the doorway before whatever owned the other side finished claiming it.

The tentacles pulled. Air whistled past Meta's ear and dragged toward the hole. Papers lifted off the desk. Binder four skidded across the floor. The gateway edges vented pressure from the other realm into his office, and every loose thing in the room began to slide. Meta clamped two tentacles on the desk leg. He counted what he could lose. The survey. Binder four. The resonance blade if he set it down. The pen his father gave him. He needed the gap sealed before the room emptied through it. He reached under the desk with a free tentacle and hooked the caulking gun off its mount. It was a sleek silver cylinder banded in cyan, heavier than it looked, marked with the trim of the pirate-ship rig he'd bought it from. Reality caulk. One tube. He had never fired it under load. He crossed the floor in a low crouch. A tentacle from the rift lashed at his shoulder. He ducked. The blade in his primary tentacle came up and cut the reaching limb clean at the joint. It fell twitching and dissolved into violet smoke. The rest recoiled a foot into the hole. That bought him seconds. Meta braced against the wall. He set the nozzle to the top-left corner of the cut, where the pressure sang loudest, and squeezed the trigger. Cyan gel pushed out in a slow bead. It glowed. It stuck. Where it touched the torn edge, the whistling stopped. He worked the bead down the left side. His tentacles ached from bracing. The gel dripped where he moved too fast, cyan beads running down the wall like wet paint, but each drip hardened before it hit the floor. He turned the corner. Bottom edge. Right side. The suction dropped with every inch he sealed. A tentacle shot through the shrinking gap and wrapped his wrist. He did not drop the gun. He cut with the blade, one clean pass, and finished the bead across the top. The severed limb fell and smoked out. The gap closed to a ring the size of his fist. Wind died. Papers settled. The office went quiet except for his breathing. Meta lowered the gun. The seal held. The gateway was still there, glowing cyan around its rim, but the pressure was equalized and his files were safe. He had traded an open doorway for a sealed one. He could not walk through it now. Neither could anything else. He set the caulking gun on the desk beside the blade. He picked up binder four and shelved it. Then he looked at the ring of cyan holding back a realm. The tube was empty. He checked the gauge twice. Empty. To carve the gateway open again, on his terms, he would need more caulk than any shop in Xanadu stocked. He would have to go back to the ship that sold him the first tube.