Waffle slips through the flea market portal with her catalog half-finished and her patience already thin. The portals are broken, the worlds she needs to document are cutting themselves off one by one, and she's running out of time to map what's left. She moves between stalls on all fours, orange and black fur catching the light from a dozen mismatched realities. The wooden stall appears three rows in, tucked between a vendor selling frozen time and another hawking probability dice. Shelves of bottles glow with liquids that shouldn't be liquid. But one shelf holds glass vials filled with blue-violet strands that twist and loop against the glass. Waffle stops. Her black ear flicks forward. Those aren't liquids at all. She knows the exact weight of portal thread between her paw pads. She knows the way it resists when pulled, the static charge it leaves behind. The bottles on that middle shelf hold the same material she wove into her door. The same thread she used to claw her way out of the gap. Someone harvested it, stabilized it, and brought it here in a weathered supply wagon that still sits behind the stall. Waffle's claws extend slightly into the packed dirt. If portal thread can be bottled and sold, then someone else knows the portals are failing. Someone else has been inside the spaces between worlds. Her catalog suddenly feels incomplete in a way that has nothing to do with missing entries.

Waffle's claws scrape against the wagon's wooden side. The hum rises from deep in the wood, climbing through frequencies she remembers too well. This is the same sound the portals made right before they came apart around her. She backs away from the wagon and drops her catalog onto the dirt. The device projects upward immediately, violet spheres blooming into a star map of documented worlds. Waffle scans the connections between them — thin lines showing portal routes she's already logged. Half the map pulses with amber warnings where portals have gone unstable. The other half shows gaps where connections used to be. She touches one sphere with her paw and watches the route data flicker. Three portals on that path collapsed yesterday. She didn't log the collapse. She logged the worlds before they cut themselves off. The wagon's hum shifts frequency. Waffle's fur stands up along her spine. She recognizes this part too — the moment right before the collapse locks in. Behind the wagon, air ripples in waves of indigo and violet. The distortion spreads outward in rings, each layer slightly offset from the last. Portal resonance. Not from the flea market entrance. From something inside the wagon itself. Waffle doesn't think. She lunges forward and tears the wagon's back panel open with both paws. Inside, mounted to the wagon bed, sits a door made of blue-violet thread woven into concentric rings. White light glows at its center. Her door. The one she built to escape the gap. Except she left that door behind when she crawled through it. Someone else found it. Someone else brought it here. The resonance spikes and the door's rings begin to separate. Waffle slams her paw against the center and floods it with the same compressed feeling she used to build it — the weight of being alone in a space that shouldn't exist. The rings lock back into place. The hum stops. She pulls her paw away and her pad burns cold. The door holds. But now she knows: someone didn't just harvest portal thread. They harvested her escape route. And that means they know exactly where she's been.

Waffle pulls her paw back from the door and shakes it once. The cold burn fades but the weight stays in her chest. Someone carried this door out of the gap. Someone knew where to look. She scans the market stalls, searching for movement that doesn't match the crowd's rhythm. She finds it behind a stack of wooden crates thirty paces across the market. A figure leans against the top crate, one hand resting on a device made of dark metal and brass. The device glows faint blue through its cracked surface. Its screen shows concentric rings — the same pattern as her door. The figure's other hand holds a compact scanner covered in layered metal plates. The scanner's holographic display flickers with fragmented data. Waffle recognizes the readout. Portal thread signatures. Her portal thread signatures. The figure looks up and meets her eyes. They don't look surprised. Waffle crosses the market in four strides. She stops in front of the crates and sits back on her haunches. The trader doesn't move. Waffle flicks her tail once. "You pulled my door out of the gap," she says. It's not a question. The trader taps the brass device and the screen shifts to show a map of collapsed portals. Red markers cluster where Waffle fell through. "You left it there," the trader says. "I catalog what gets left behind." Waffle's claws dig into the dirt. The trader tilts the compact scanner toward her. The holographic display shows three more doors like hers, all constructed from compressed thread and emotion. All found in gaps between failed portals. "You're not the only one who builds escape routes," the trader says. "But you're the only one who stabilizes them after." Waffle stares at the scanner's display. Three other doors. Three other regulators who fell through gaps and had to build their way out. She's been cataloging worlds, mapping routes, logging portals — all while thinking she was the only one handling the collapse alone. The trader closes the scanner and slides it into their coat. "The portals are failing faster now," they say. "Your catalog won't be complete if you keep working solo." Waffle's ears flatten. She didn't come here to find help. She came to confront whoever was tracking her. But the trader isn't tracking her. They're documenting the same crisis from a different angle. Waffle picks up her catalog from where she dropped it near the wagon. The violet star map still shows half the routes pulsing amber. She looks back at the trader. "Show me where you found the other doors," she says. The trader nods and pulls the brass device from the crate. The map expands to show coordinates Waffle hasn't logged yet. She adds them to her catalog without hesitation. She's still working alone. But now she knows the shape of what she's actually mapping.