Speaker 1: Hello, I'm welcomed stories all the time. Glad you are here.
Let's get into it. It was two twenty three, eight
a m. But I would have guessed later. Time loses
its outlines at night, specially on the highest floor of
the Sylphin Tower, where each corridor seems to float above
the city like a forgotten attic. I leaned against my
mock Hart hands brace on the yellow handle, catching my breath.
The hum of the floor buffer faded behind me as
I swaped tools, settling into the gentle rhythm of another round.
The lights up here were always over bright, spilling an
official day laid long copped a holes lined with motivational
posters from five Corporate were Branziger, but the real world
beyond the sealed glass remained black and a noble. He
had to learn the difference, especially working nights that could
keep you from going strange. I'd just finished entering a
recycling bin in a conference enclave known for its endless
key card meetings, and had started my window check. Not
a job requirement, exactly, I just made a habit. At
each stop, I rested a hand in the glass and
took a on look out. After a while, he get
tuned into these tiny rituals. Most nights, the only thing
out there would be the cheap orange glow from the
parking lot, may be a shimmer of till lets along
the bypass, But sometimes you'd catch something else out of
the corner over eye, a pigeon fluttering on a ledge,
or a distant blink of a traffic signal. To night though,
a metallic clint surfaced on the glass of crisp isolated
flicker just above head level. At first I thought it
was a relic left over from a sunset i'd worked
straight through, or maybe the reflection from my ring of
worn bresquees. But then it pulsed, not a one off,
a slow, deliberate shimmer signal almost from the tent floor
in the window of the small boardroom. Every instinct argued
that I should ignore it. I'd learned caution in this job,
but the movement didn't look like an accident or a
trick of the light. I paused with one hand, still
holding them up, feeling the echo of blood behind my ears.
I rolled my cock closer, feet moving without quite deciding.
When I reached the end of the corridor and glanced
down toward that glass. I saw it again, the glint
fainter naw but accompanied by shape, a shifting out lined
human height, slender withing, just passed the spot where the
window frosting ended. All meetings were larved by the iyre.
But nothing ran this late, not on this floor. I
strained my hearing for a voice, laughter, the clink of
a mug, Nothing except the hut behind the walls and
the fluorescent lights that always ran just a little too
loud at night. I stood a moment, gripping the handle
of my cot before turning toward the door. The key
slid into the conference room lock, with the familiar metallic
report inside. I breathed in the cold conditioned air and
saw out the head of the table a bone white
mug with a swirl of steam, next to a notebook
flipped open, no other sign of life. I felt pinned
in place by something behind the glass, by my own reflexion,
or maybe by the city lights blinking beneath me like
distant most coat. I checked by the coat rack and
under the table, all clear. My shoes made too much
noise in the carpet. But I crossed to the mug
and touched it, still hot, I tapped the notebook open
another inch, expecting the usual scribbles from an after Iro's report. Instead,
page after page ram with tight lines of numbers, somewhere
ranged into grids, others scattered, marked with leaping ciphers, iurrs,
and strange symbol clusters. Some handwriting looks bitery, careful. Another
hand was urgent, as if the numbers themselves were chasing
their author. Across the page. Just in front of the window,
a print gracemear drew my attention, half way erased to
the edge of the glass, A partial fingerprint truncated at
the swell glossy where the light hit it. I glanced
behind myself, sensing the prickling at the base of my scalp.
The silence deepened, stretching until the only thing I heard
was the dull, irregular click and tick of my cart
wheel spinning out friction. A shadow flickered on the wall,
maybe a bulb struggling with its ballast. I moved to
the door and listened, heart thudding. The floor was empty,
I was sure of it, but the room seemed full
of someone else's breath. The note trembled slightly in my hand.
The numbers called cross the ruined paper like a coat
sent from the wrong world, a language that wanted not
to be learned. I wanted to put it down and leave,
but couldn't, not yet, not until I tried to make
sense of it, or at least checked each corner again
for whatever might have left that half finished coffee, that mark,
and the peculiar shiver up my spine. What I didn't
know then was how much further the unknees would burrow
in ways I thought I'd trained myself as night worker,
never to feel. I started cleaning this building seven years earlier,
two months after my old Genian contract lapsed, and I
finally surrendered the hope of a job among day people.
Night works suited me. Solitary, systematic work in between empty
meeting tables and humming printers, no reminders of birth days
or retirements, no one calling my name to ask for
a favor. Each evening. A commute up the traffic choke
tail made the city seem possibly large, but everything felt
smaller once the lobby door swallowed me. The world contracted
to bad swipes, keyrings, and elevator chimes. My routine started
at the lowest floor, three room accounting annex staled with
monitored silence, then up floor by floor legal HR operations.
Each area had its signature. Human Resources was a blur
of color of sticky notes, family photos, desktops half bare
of understacks of on boarding kits. By contrast, the compliance
wing had a strictness you could feel in your shoes,
not a pen out of alignment. There were patterns everywhere,
if you had the patience to notice. That's what night
work is. A life spent among patterns. Take the security guard,
for instance, Jose, a grizzled man with a jar of
minton and a so spade pinned inside his jacket lapel.
His entire philosophy was covered by three nods, once for hello,
once for sea anything, once always with a note of accountability.
For nothing to see. We rarely talked. I'd shuffle my
way to the end of the lobby, find him in
his office with the bank of Agian monitors playing out
slower fees, of nobody ever doing anything wrong, except for
once three winters back, when someone naturally tried to steal
a printer. Even that, stories seemed to have faded around
the edges until it was a punchline. He'd tell if
the old coffee pot ever overflowed. But mainly he watched
his greens, and I made my rands, each of us
bracing the night for the other, but never closer. As
for the staff still present during those hours, there were
only a handful business analysts determined to work through expensive
audits or genius from legal fighting to meet some nebulous deadline.
They signed out on the big white love book at
front desk, and each one left before eleven, regular as clockwork.
I could have called out the potting footsteps from memory alone.
The deeper you worked into these ires, the more the
building itself seemed to breathe. Old heating pipes ticked, ducktwork
said like a throat, clear the halls. The ones with
gray green industrial carpet had a way of viaging your footsteps.
When you passed a line of glass walled offices, you
call the stutter of yourself in the reflection, tired anonymous.
Over time, I gave into my own little inventory of changes.
I knew when a stapler was out of place, when
a chuckle some one's laughter had left a trace in
the air, when a photo had been swapped on a
mid manager's shelf, new baby vacation, somewhere warm, A dog
in a red scarf I noticed and cataloged. Though I
never said a word, these patents helped the building makes
sense and kept me grand it in a way, one
manned effort, perhaps to answer the question of where the
buildings forgot you as soon as you left. Then there
were the rules. Don't disturb personal items, don't open closed
offices for those you hoover carefully around the threshold, and
leave no mark. If you must move something out of
the way to sweep, put it back exactly. This was
how you stayed invisible, how you finished a shift without
complaints or the shame of overstepping your station. But now
holding the notebook, hot still spike from the near miss
of a presence in the room, I realized one of
those self written rules had already been breached. I had
touched some one's things, And unlike the odd half eaten
sand which were the rough forgotten bag, this coffee was
too fresh, the evidence too deliberate. Some one was here
intentionally moving just beyond record, leaving things barely out of place,
as if to conjure an audience. The next week, every
instinct I trained in myself pined ressless on certain each
time I entered the tower. At first I tried to
go back to the method ignore what didn't concern me.
But late Wednesday into Thursday I spotted the same jittery uncertainty.
It started at a desk on the nine floor, remarkable,
a finance pot with seven identical work stations, each with
a cheek keyboard, a mug at, a paper calendar. The
first thing was a jacket navy blue, folded inside out
and draped across the back of a chair by it
self trivill. But the next morning, on my return sweet
it was up and hanging on the coat rack, sleeves
newly aligned, as if a tailor had adjusted it. Elsewhere.
A bullpunt pen midnight blue always and Captain laid diadonly
across an open ledger suddenly clicked shut and set vertically
as if measuring time. On the legal floor, a favorite
mugg at one with the chip at the handle had
been swapped out for something identical except for a faded
sticker at the bottom. Nothing egregious, just small, careful edits,
like someone had gone through writing the set. Soon I
saw computers left flickering with open files, the screens even
never engaging, sometimes only for moments, sometimes for the stretch
of an entire sweep. It didn't match the after IROs
patterns of the regulars, but I assumed at first I'd
simply missed a late staying associate. Only the programme's open
wint resembling any normal spreadsheet or report. Instead windows full
of numbers in scattered formats. Not the neat columns of payrolls,
but rag of EVROS symbols and side cells strings of
four or five numbers separated by unfamiliar delimiters. A few
times when I passed on my return sweep, the monitors
had gone dark on their own, as if he ever
left them open, was watching my route, tying the black
out to the sound of my approaching cart. I asked
the cleaning supervisor casually if anything odd had come up
on the schedule. He grunted, scanning his clipboard. Bash records
went weird last night, figures in and out after midnight,
then backtracked system glitch. They say he hadn't lost a
moment's sleep. It was only after I found the same
string of numbers I'd seen in the conference notebook. Hastily
scribbled and black marker onto a whiteboard in a supposedly
locked legal office, one with the separate security badge reader,
no sign of forced entry. That I started to write
things down myself, not for the supervisor, not for any manager,
just for my own sanity. I bought a cheap pocket
notebook and began recording desk numbers, dates, and minor discrepants
of someone's trash can swapped out for another, a new
scratch on a disc clap the way a plastic paper
clip holders seemed to have been rotated by a precise
angle in the night. The connection, though, between all these
strange edit was elusive. I'd notice a number to touoed
onto a sticky note then lost to the shredder by morning,
a file left open come before the next shift. It
all felt deliberate, but designed to deny me certainty. That weekend,
the regular Friday crue cleared out of the expected eyre.
Only Saturday morning I find clatter on three out of
the seven suspect ESSK coffee cups, left at odd angles,
paper shuffled, or in one case, an entry entirely reversed.
At first, I thought it was just Lack's habits, text
running laid, but over time the circle of altered desks
grew a calculated expansion, something searching for eyes or systematically
avoiding them. By the end of that shift, I was
sure of something. Whoever had left the coffee, whoever had
written those numbers, hadn't left. They were in my building.
They might have been watching me. As I watched the
smallest details they'd abandoned behind. It felt vaguely but unmistakably
like a game. It grew harder after those first two weeks.
To ignore the growing weight of strangeness. I held out
from talking to Hossey. I figured he'd wave it off,
say it was above at pay grade, and wore me
not to get mixed up with other people's secrets. In
the end, necessity overpowered all that. One Thursday, I changed
my path. Instead of starting at the ground floor and
working up, I mixed up the order, resolving to loop
back around the legal suite to second time, just ahead
of my normal schedule. The elevators responded with their usual
sluggish anxiety, and when I hit floor six, it was
drenched in silence. A meeting had dividently run late, which
I was half pulled out from the table, remnants of
half eaten pastries lingering on a plate, the air still
carrying the memory of cologne. From the end of the row,
I heard something, an unmistakable shuffle of vapor, the faint,
decisive kind of a fow drawer being pulled open. I
moved in quietly, sticking to the corridor. Through the glass,
I saw what looked like the edge of a coat.
A shadow steeped lo out of falcabinet, rifling through the folders.
I raised my phone, meaning to snap a quick photo
habit not intention But by the time I pressed the button,
the figure had slipped away, as if they'd sensed me.
No way they could have, not with the silence. But
when I went in, only the faint heat of a
handprin hovered on the locker, fresh but fading. Fifteen minutes later,
I reversed back to cleaning the lobby of distraction, trying
to make it all seem routine. I glanced into the
security monitoring room, hoping for reassurance. Instead, I found the
night guard stirring too intently at his feed. When I
asked for a reaply from about twenty minutes prior, he
cleared his throat maintenance and the system. He muttered, I
was not quite meeting mine. The feat showed a twenty
minute segment only pidentical pixel for pixel, sterile as a
washing machine cycle. You only saw that when well, when
some one had doctored the tape. I exited, shaken and
focused on the little things. Under a recycling bin and
an unusual pen, I found an edge of paper smood
folded carelessly, tucked away as if meant to be discovered.
It read, in hurried caps, window of opportunity. That was all. Later,
another scrap, torn along the margin and left half submerged
in a dying fern pot showed the same phrase, but
in looping cursive it a closed office an hour after midnight,
beneath a stapleer the same message, this time encoded within
a column of numbers W nine point twenteen I twelve
point fourteen, IN fourteen point twenty, D three point five,
fifteen point seventeen, W nine point twenty. There was a
rhythm to it, as if the word itself was a schedule,
an interval, a ritual, a call sign. I copied each
strange detail into my note book, realizing as it did
that there was no way to continue pretending this was
some one else's problem. Still habits die hard. I kept
a careful distance from anything that felt like direct witness
until the U S B drive. It was a plain
black stick, almost buried under half an inch of shredded
receipts in the recycling bin for office supplies. I shouldn't
have taken it, but a part of me felt watch,
as if obeying rules was only drawing attention. That night,
while running a cloth over the keyboard in an unused office,
I plugged it in. It spun up incently. No encryption prompt,
at least not at the menu level. Three files, all
with generic, corperate sounding names. One was a spreadsheet, but
jumbled with wild sums, decimal points, mis aligned references to
window an code read. The second was a folder of
dummy versus lists of obscure into national vendors and amounts,
each roughly the same, with dates clustered in the shadow irs.
The third was a text file full of apparent gibberish cells,
swarming with peculiar transaction codes and odd memos. Doubly, while initiated,
a window held open close before dawn, standing there, screen
light flickering, I heard a soft echo in the corridor.
I froze for a moment. I was certain it was
nothing but the building's old bones, but a part of me,
the deeper, quite a voice was served for things that matter,
knew better. I shut down the machine, pocketed the USB,
and rolled up my cleaning cot. The sensation of being
followed dogged me through the rest of the shift. The
elevators seemed to stutter between floors, and every mirrored section
of window glass became another eye. The following evening, the
unees ratcheted up another turn. The cleaning supervisor complained at
roll call, too many logs gone weed last night. Badge
is gone in at two, out at three, then backtracked
to before midnight. H L says, system glitches. But how
if I know? That night the building felt stranger than
ever usually, even at its most vacant, Sylvin how felt stable,
a monument of toold steel and class, but the emptiness
seemed charged, now electrified. Even the vending machines seemed to
wear and blink with nervous purpose. Each mob struck felt dangerous,
as though inking a line across a forbidden map. The
places were a prison's lingered to the echo of a
shoe on the wrong floor, the tab on an empty
trash bag, tight and unfamiliar, not seen to refraft back
at me, your being watched. A few days later, the
mood broke sharply before my shift began. I wandered into
the lobby to find a cluster of staff and characteristically
animated h r in hamovsuit was gesticulating urgently to two managers.
The security guard was there, lipped tight, tapping at a clipboard.
I have heard casually close ears open. He never arrived home.
I caught one of the manager's whispering voice tenses piano wire,
not even a text, as partner called nothing since midnight.
The subject was Ragish, a finance analyst ut routinely seen
as one of the late stays, always logged out by eleven,
always leaving his jacket in precisely the same spot. Shoe
swapped trainers for the walk home. I froze, peezing back
his desk. Strange details, how just the previous night it
had seemed even more older than ever. The bullpened a
line at a perfect right angle, the entry emptied. Now
his work space was a blanket clean sweep, as if
he had never existed, no photos, no jacket, a crack
of adhesive on the Desquare's badge. At hum I swept
the rest of the floor, listening for gossip, but I
was stonewolled by management. H R repeated with mechanical finality,
personal leave as of this morning, confidential, no further comment.
The night card when I pressed, demurred he probably just
needed some time off. Josse offer, but his eyes wouldn't
meet mine. That Chief sulviintaw felt transformed. Each light flickered
with new anxiety. Elevators ground their way between stops, as
though reluctant to open for me. Even the air grew
heavier thick with the end st After midnight, in a
stall of the men's room on floor eleven, I found
a fahe hastily wiped down, hidden at the bottom of
a bin. It was password looked, but when I pressed
the power button, a single text notification flashed up before
the screen turned out to night. After the window closes
don't be seen how simple it were been to latago,
but the array of closed, the cryptic numbers, the rearranged objects,
the darupted badge records, and Ragish's abrupt disappearance had built
a momentum none of my old rules could account for.
I wasn't a detective, but I was caught up and
somewhere some one intended that I be seen, or else
not seen and never spoken of again. The difference between
the two, I realized, was narrowing with every ira I worked.
I spent the rest of that shift in a fog,
caught between duty, in the chilling sense that I was
crossing an invisible threshold. The slap and squeak of them
mop on tile echoed weirdly back at me as I
cleaned the already spotless kitchenettes. At times I kept my
own reflection in a glass partition, startled by how hollow
my eyes looked. My hands moved through the steps of
my work, but my mind was reviewing everything I'd seen,
looking for some order in the chaos. At every corner,
paranoia bloomed, a shadow at the crook of a doorway,
a tiny change in the alignment of office chairs, the
peculiar hum of a vending machine starting up by itself.
At two forty seven a m. When I reached the
final floor, I paused at side the small light tea
office one of the rare places that always seemed immane
to the oddrey arrangements to night. Though the door stood
ajar and a cone of light shone softly from within.
I hesitated before pushing it open, feeling nerves bike in
my wrists. Inside, all the desks were a manned A
screen glowed from a standing terminal on a coroner cycling
through a spreadsheet whose head of red simply window proceeders.
I inch closer, pulse beating in my neck, and scanned
two columns, first dates and times, costed always at night,
second cryptic remarks a w amended three at a transfer
confirmed a clear s. The pattern was undeniable now though
the meaning stage just out of reach. What made me
back out wasn't the screen, but the sound is stifled
rapid click clack of feet somewhere overhead. I wa was
some one above on the roof, or just frayed wiring
plain tricks. I left the room as I found it
and tried not to run. As I pulled my cotaway
on the maintenance staile. Landing, I stopped to steady my
breath and review the notebook that started running. My thumb
over the rag of paper. The details felt heavy with
ever shift to littany of the strange that had come
to overlay the familiar. Every check door, every sweat corridor
had begun to take on another more secret dimension. Back
in supply, I rinsed the mop in the bucket, letting
the cold water numb my hands. The metal shelves with
spare light, bult gloves and garbage backs seen suddenly precarious,
as if the whole edifice of my nightly rich were
stood on weaker legs than I had known. I considered
simply erasing it all from the numbers I'd written to
the USB stick in my pocket, just throwing it away
and pretending I was just a janitor again, not a witness.
But as I stepped into the elevator from my last
circuit of the evening, a memory flash two weeks earlier,
passing ragius and exchanging knots in a lamplet silence. An
ordinary moment, but now freighted with meaning. Had he known
he was being watched? Had he wanted to be? I
wrote to the ground floor, uneasy, the elevator's mirrors reflecting
me and end its receding pairs. The lobby was deserted
except for the security desk, where Josey sat with his
headphones on one iro on the monitors. I considered asking
about Ragees really pressing this time, but something in his
posture made me pause. Instead, I signed out like all ways,
the pen scraping on the cheap paper, and nodded in
his direction. He nodded back three times. On the sidewalk outside,
dawn was just a blue rumor at the edges of
the sky. I trudged home, past the bustipot, the notebook
burning against my hip. I told myself that by nightfall
I'd have decided what to do, maybe even morked up
the enough to show someone in the USB. But that
resolve whethered under the ordinary weight of day, when new
work nights, sleep can erase worry as easily as it
erases time. The following evening, the weather had changed hot
or suddenly, thunderheads massing far beyond the city's lights. My
entry badge clicked green at the lobby turnstile, but the
interior of the building felt alterward, like the air inside
had thickened. I moved through the familiar start of shift procedures,
but it was as if I was floating inside each
gesture at the key checks, the supply closet run, the
loading of the mot bucket and waistbags. Foset wasn't at
his desk, just a thermas of coffee where he usually sat.
For reasons I couldn't a got that absence made everything
more ominous. Even the elevators seemed off longer between stops,
slight jolts before each floor. The sequence of sounds had changed.
I'd memorized the harmonics of doors and panels across these years,
so the out of patents dotter sat my nose on
edge on the sixth floor. The legal suite still carried
the faint smell of printer toner. As I dusted the
glass conference table, I noticed that the chests didn't line
up perfectly at the edges of the way the des
crew left them. They formed the shallow co of now,
as though people had gathered urgently in haste. Papers left
behind displayed nothing special except for a single sticky note
which had apparently magrated from one side of the glass
to the other. Since my last sweep scribbled in purple
ink was a time two forty five, a few minutes
before my usual pass. Nothing else, just the time underlinedwise.
I stood there, staring, struggling to pass the meaning. Was
it a rendezvous occurred? Or had it only ever been
in inname reminder? And I was reading too much in it.
Second guessing became its own waking dream around my route
but hardly remembered, clearing waste baskets, over filling toilet rolls,
every motion shadowed by the nagging certainty that I was
being observed not just by eyes in the building, but
by the building itself. On the eighth floor, the hous week,
cluttered and half traumatized from the latest round of layoffs,
was silent, safe for an insistent mechanical click from one
of the desk fans. I lingered longer than needed, watching
for more out of place details. Sure enough, the display
screen on the supervisor's Desko digital picture frame showed for
a split second a glitch. A string of numbers and
characters flashed across the screen before resuming its loop of
vacation photos. I jotted the numbers down fourteen point ten
two w I N nine three point fifty two. It
matched to fragment I just scribbed from the white board
days before, so it stuck the shirt to my back
as I rode the elevator up to the top floor,
unable to shake the idea I was walking towards something
rather than away. The door to the ten floor boardroom
where the metallic lint at first drawn me in, was
closed to night, and when I tried the handle it
was locked, for the first time since it started. I checked,
sirptitious for any signs of forced entry or tampering, but
there was nothing except the blank mirrored veneer. My own
anxious face multiplied back by three a M and a
pres of stillness straight the upper floor was punctuated only
by the faint electronic beap of badge readers. As I
made my interest. While emptying a trash bin outside the
et he helped usk cubicle, I caught sight of unusual
papers sticking out from beneath the cold phone, called a
torn piece of official looking at ahead, with only the
phrase w BO clear third windows scribbled in the margin.
No signature, no date, just that curious message. Clearing out
the debris, I spotted a flash of pastic a visitor's
badge half melted as I scorched. I didn't touch it,
just nudged it with my brute and pushed it deeper
under the trash, and surer whether to leave evidence alone
or remove it as quietly as it appeared. The rest
of the night passed with the peculiar quickness of fear.
I realized how tuned I'd become to every tick of
the structure, the hydraulic breadth of door closers, the momentary
dimming of lights in the corridor before they came back.
Painfully bright objects held new meaning. A staple, a left
open became a question. A blank space on a bulletin
board felt like a warning. The next day, Jose was
at his pale and shrunken eyes room red. We hadn't
exchanged real words and weeks, but as I signed in,
he spoke low, quick, compulsively, not meeting my gaze. He
seen the badge locks, He asked for scratching at the
edge of a whisper. Don't trust him, glitches, some things
meant not to show, I answered, with a non committal shrug.
My voice wouldn't work properly. We both let the silence settle,
mutually and willing to admit that the building's hierarch as
had shifted, putting us each janitor and garb in separate
lock boxes of the same unspoken threat. Later that night,
while rolling my cut through the odd, echoing hush of
the compliance department, where even the a smell processed, I
caught sight of movement through the narrow window of the
Prince storage cause. It a flock of shadow, sharp and certain,
the rustle of fabric, the briefest slip of a slouett
against the low light. I stopped in the hall, waiting,
hot banging in my ribs, but saw nothing. When I
peered in. Still a metallic tang, almost a burnt smell,
or the sharpest of cold coins lingered in the air.
It occurred to me then, how much of what I
had noticed relied on absence rather than presents. Things missing
from the ordinary empty spaces were familiar faces for or
even objects used to be The rhythms I trusted could
no longer be counted on desk arrangements changed subtly between shifts,
file folders magraded between cabinets, growing heavier with secrets. Even
my notebook filled up with cross reference times, dates, fragments
of code, and anxious little drawings. A cluster of stick
figures via window, A cuban circle with errors of for
PUE with inserved markings. That Friday, after another sleepless day,
I decided I had to make a move, if only
to prove to myself I wasn't just sliding into delusion.
I waited until the building was at its most deserted,
double check every hallway, then found the nearest free computer,
a legal TEMP station on the seventh floor, and plugged
in the USB drive once more, this time knowing what
I was searching for. A trolled deeper. I checked the metadator,
searching for author names and found trace user accounts that
didn't match any posted staff list the Damian versus reference
shipping companies with no digital footprint. There, beneath a layer
of spreadsheet tabs, I found the hidden tab labeled access logs,
manual edits, and pieced together the badged numbers of at
least three workers I'd barely ever seen in daylight, along
with timestown soul clustered in the two zero to three
thirty a m window with cross references to a window, open,
slash close events and arcane codes like a job B
forty two initiated A vender ten ninety seven cleared they
were acting systematically exploited a gap most likely and intentional
loophole where oversight failed and records could be white, rewritten,
or simply ghosted from the system. I nearly jumped out
of my skin when a cleaning supervisor came down the corridor.
I yanked the USB, shoved it in my pocket, and
feigned emptying the recycling. He didn't stop, disgrunted, and kept moving.
Once he was gone, adrenaline surged. All the confirmations I'd
collected clustered like a true pattern. Now feeling reckless, I
tried the door to the server room, but it needed
a second level badge. Only as I pressed the knob,
I spotted out the baseboat, an old cleaning tack faded
to a legibility. I picked it up, pocketed it, then
moved on pulse, still skipping in my chest. When the
shift ended, I found myself sitting in herse's break room
with a bank of old security monitors still flickered with
pale blue feats. He was pretending to watch, but his
focus was elsewhere, somewhere deep inside himself. I sat for
a long time, stare ring at a canter feed of
the loading dock while he nursed his coffee in both hands. Finally,
he spoke so quiet I nearly missed it. Some nights,
this building leaves a mark, he said, don't let it.
What was I supposed to do? Go to the police.
Of the pile of pat and pens and password protected
spreadsheets quote at hr, the same chart that had perched
all mention of radish, raised the anomaly from the roll call,
regurgitated the word confidentiality whenever anyone pressed. I left the
Knight's kit in the locker and walked home through the
blue gray dawn, the streets empty except for the first
sprinters to the CrossFit gym and alone Cabby nodding behind
the wheel. My apartments, stale but safe, felt like a
different country. I laid out my notebook in the USB
and the counter and sat for a long time with
the windows closes, trying to bring the threads together. There
was a pattern and a plan, and whatever it was,
it wasn't just about stolen mugs or badge clutches. It
was more powerful, more purposeful. The next day I slept late,
walk upsweading, the details of my dreams already fading. A
phone buzz near my pillow. The building automateds scheduling line
text terse and I personal night chief confirmed. Arrived by
nine deero PM to night routine maintenance. Upper floors restricted
post midnight, no explanation. I arrived from my shift on edge.
The sense of foreboding was now total. The security staff
two new faces, both with crisp unreadable as stood by
the lobby turnstiles. Jose was nowhere to be seen. I
tried to keep my head down, signed in as always,
and started my rounds. The elevators, for what it was worth,
worked again, but carried a hitch at the ten floor,
as if pausing to consider my presence. The top floor
boardroom's door was locked, but that was no longer unusual.
Desk changes had slowed a little, as if the building
itself were catching its breath. But on the seventh floor
I found a blue fold a lying perfectly squared at
the junction of the corridors, a spot nobody would have
picked unless intentional. Inside were dated four plans printed on
security paper, each annotated in the margin with the same
looping phrase window opens two zero three thirty proceed quiet,
No signature, just that severe handwriting. That night, as I
returned to the supply closet near the sixth floor. I
heard voices raised in argument some way or above. Hush, insistent, unintelligible,
but the urgency was clear. I held my breath, pressed
my ear to the cold metal door, but couldn't catch more.
When the voices faded, I merged to find the corridor
empty except for the faintest trace of cologne and a
candy wrap, a crush flat on the floor of badge
numbers gold on the back, and panic black ink. Returning
to my cart, I caught my own gaze in the
glass and almost didn't recognize myself, face, drawn eyes, frantic,
my hands usually so steady, jittered around the notebook and pen.
I considered leaving the building right then, just walking out,
but another false curiosity or dredda kept me rooted down
sirs again. I tried to act normal, but the atmosphere
was so thick now that every small sound and elevated ding,
the trumpeting sigh of an event, even the water cooler gurgle,
seemed freighted. With consequence, I realized I hadn't eaten and
I was, and tried to summon the ease of routine,
but nothing taste of ride, and each bite stuck in
my throat. In the empty lobby, I noticed the Janet's cart,
identical to mine, but new, gleaming under the hard light,
standing aband a near reception. I hesitated glancing around, but
nobody seemed to be nearby. Something about it made my
heat stand and I gave it a wide berth as
I rolled my own cart out to the hallway. But
as I turned on to the main concourse, I saw
with cold certainty a faint reflection moving in the glass
panels twenty feet ahead of shape. No one else should
have been able to cast. By the time I reached
the spot, the corridor was empty, but an elevator pined
up to ten, and the doors closed quietly, as if
someone was already inside. That night, I slept badly, if
at all, feeling like I had failed some crucial tests
by investigating, by watching, or maybe bus surviving. When my
alarm woked me for the next night's shift, fetique led
the boundary between sleep. I'm waking, But the strangeness of Sylvantow,
the way it pushed back against scrutiny, the way its
stores blinked in and out with each missing employer, had
become impossible to disregard. If there was a window for secrets,
it was closing one normal, exhausted janitor's shift at a time.
The changes began at the margins, small enough that quite
a person might have ridden them off the main entrances.
Glass doors, so often scuffed by traffic, were polished to
polish that threw back. My face was startling clardy. The
overhead bulbs in the lobby now hummed, louder tuned a
half step. Two sharl security presents doubled. Two younger guards
and tailored windbreakers flight the badge desk, Their eyes great
restless followed every motion, making a show of a tenderness
with ever word. Josey's theramist, its battle bled smear with
sticker residue, was there, but its owner had vanished. I
greeted the silence as if it owed me something on
my way in the creak of my shoes against the
newly waxed tile carried out into the echoing atrium. No music,
no radio playing from the guard post. Even the coffee
machines stayed dark, as though it too had been cautioned
into a kind of waiting. Most at said lyneval hand
lettered fliers on two of the elevators warning of scheduled
maintenance above the six four. Never a good sign in
this building, and an unlikely coincidence, given the pattern of
closed circusicracy had already witnessed. A network engineer, sometimes passed
by Nina, always with her head froms clamped on, walked
briskly out of the elevators with a box of cables
and a determined frown. She didn't look my way. Down
the hallway, a cleaning cot moved, but the man behind
it was new, older than me, his posture still army, straight,
looking anywhere but at me. A subtle shuffle and routines.
I moved around him, giving as wide a berth as
he'd given me. Inside the narrow staff corridor, unlocked my
supply closet. Some one had relocated the first EVE kit
and replaced it with a stack of untouched blue rags.
The inventory sheet was gone. On one wall. A sign
read all incidents to be reported immediately to Building admon
at ex ten twenty two. That number I knew was
not the usual number for ADMIN, a warning that was
meant for me. Perhaps the building's mood was brutal by
my second circuit, I'd already had to just my normal
cleaning path twice to accommodate restricted floor access. Flour Or
eight bore the strongest warning in bold red maintenance shut
uno entry after eleven fifteen p m. Judging by the
scattered dust outside the door frame, the work inside was
less about eachtrac repair than privacy on the doors to
legal another yellow Flier schedule update. Apartment relocation begins immediately.
Just yesterday, this wing had housed three dozen staff thereaftermuth
present in the usual debris of human occupation to night,
it was hollow, with only the memory of voices clinging
to the corners. I found myself drifting whenever the holes emptied,
glancing over my shoulder at the new guard's pacing the lobby.
It was impossible to say whether I was being watched
or simply watched myself. But when my cart wheel squeaked
a little too loudil near the main stairwell, one of
the new guards leaned and to examine a panel in
the wall. Listening of surveilling, I couldn't be sure. There
hadn't been a word from a char since Ragish disappeared.
No sign of his badge number on any checklists, no
whispered updates from the morning staff. What passed for normalcy
was as fragile as old glass upstairs. The stranger's change
was the atmosphere itself, Every corridor more pressurize, every shadow
more abbrusive. When I finished a circuit and returned to
restop my supplies, I found a siled cardboard box, unexpected
and a marked on the floor by my closet. I
opened it to find nothing more that a packet of
their filters, stacked in nervous symmetry, and a scrawled note
routine maintained visibility, no name, just those words. It wasn't
my handwriting. Later, after the supervisor finished lecturing the other
cleaners about strict deterrence to assignment, I checked the lower
conference rooms that had always felt safe, always predictable, But
they'd taken on the qualities of a news props. Too correct,
too clean, Each chair back firmed into place, lights glaring
and harsh, no mugs, no pens, no indication of any
human that day or evening. The setting was drained of personality.
On the upper floors, budge readers now blinked unpercolor. I
hadn't seen before, and a little light above the ten
floor boardroom blinked twice whenever I approached, as if considering me,
then disregarding. I reached for my master key and found
it had been replaced on my ring by another identical
in shape, but it testated in the lock catching at
a subtle point, as though a new tumbling had been installed.
Deep in the supply closet, I sat atop a box
of cleaning rags, the USB drive in my hand. With
my thumb, I clicked and unclicked the covering to bidding
my next move. Every instinct said to wait, to observe more,
but a new counterforce, anxiety maybe, or in emerging sense
that time itself was narrow and refused to let me
stand still. Just past midnight, I stirred my cart, made
my way to the idy bullpen, and docked under a
ceiling cam I had long ago realized didn't record anything useful.
After two in the morning, a terminal, I hooked the
US be in and began the slow, careful troll again.
This time I navigated deeper the mass SPREADSHEETABS when just
dummy data, they were reference points connectable to the badged
numbers I had cataloged in my pocket notebook. Reviewing the
digital bread combs, a rhythm emerged columns of numbers, names
of employees, each followed by two time stamps in a
three letter code. The gaps told the story as clearly
as the data one window for access two zero a m.
To three thirty a m. Almost every Thursday and Sunday night,
with log at its matching credentials for upper management badged
numbers alongside those recently disappeared from staff rosters. My stomach rowled.
The transfers appended to transaction memos w I N nine
point three DOOEP forty two close before dawn, had references
to international accounts, shadow vendors, and phrases misticably lifted from
the window of opportunities grabs i'd found cross referencing. I
recognized names at the top of the digital hierarchy. Directors
of finance VP, even the legal supervisor, everyone placed higher
than the night workers, everyone with access to the part
of the network nobody mentioned at regular meetings. I became
conscious as I scrolled of the building, settling around me,
each mechanical breath of the eight track, each click from
a distant door now sounded measure like a clock winding
down to some necessary event. I noted badged numbers, matched
them to offices I had found alder the same small group,
night after night, each linked by invisible threats. As the
morn its glow faded, I saw also how close I
had come to being one of those missing my own idea,
my route a dupakeki. They thought themselves invisible, but they
hadn't counted on the quiet tentionin papery someone below the radar.
For the first time in weeks, I felt the group
of certainty, a map not of hope, but of the
inevitable I'd left there. He bulpin in automatic motion, potful,
and pulse shot behind my ribs. When the elevator of
Chandon settled on nine, doors opening far too gently, the
interior was empty, save for a thin dusting of carpet fibers.
Some one had swept the cab in recently, or hidden evidence.
I stepped in from the button for ten and found
myself holding my breath through the short, slow ride. On ten.
Nothing moved. The whole was each bit as voided as ever,
save for the low mutter of a vending machine. In
the break area, and the faintest drift of what smelled
like burn coffee, the last token of someone working hard
to cover up a restless night. But as I turned
toward the frosted glass panel outside the conference room, a
set of shadows shifted behind the glass, quick and sure,
the faint scrape of a rolling chair. I ducked backward,
flattening myself into the elcho for the janitor's closet. My
hand slid into my pocket, feeling for the notebook. My
fingers shook. A whisper rose from inside the room of
voice I recognized as belonging to one of the senior managers,
speaking and clipped phrases with that warm window was set
clear entry check the logs again. I could not make
out the response, only the clatter of a keyboard, the
dry cough of papers being shuffled. My vantage point afforded
me only the outline of those inside, four maybe five,
all familiar silhouettes. I forced myself to move, taking the
stairs down one flight, then back up, circling past the
dead elevator bank to reach my preferred vantage of maintenance closet.
Why with a silent security panel from the gap between
the door and jam. I watched the conference room through
layers of glass, in the blue globe of monitors, figures,
hunt Schover's greens, passing envelopes and hard disks, muttering in low,
urgent voices. A flash of a foreign bank logo on
a boldging envelope, the rednick passage of cash counted and divided,
packed with the efficiency of practiced hands, one tall figure
bolding narrow shoulder to type, fiercely costurcking screens with the novostick.
I fished out my phone, tolding it to the thinnest angle,
hoping to snag in, and blowed photo without risking a flash.
My gaze flicked from the edge of the window, tracking
each face to the reflection, until my own eyes multiplied,
stared back. Someone inside saw me in the flicker of
a laptop screen. They hesitated, A warning word was hiss.
All heads turned swift as bods Panick drove me back
from the door, stumbling toward the silver stairs, heard hammering
a flourry of motion behind me, she is tharting. The
hiss of a startled voice forced me into fly, careening
down darken corridors. I'd cleaned a thousand times but suddenly
found sinister and foreign. They knew I'd pushed too far.
I darted into a shadowed alcove, pressed my shoulders to cold,
drywal fought to still my ragged breathing down the hall
fist up. Sneered slow, now measured, searching predatory in their confidence.
Desperate for escape, I doubled back and found tucked behind
an unused conferent suite, an arrow side passage concealed by
rolling potition. It led past electrical cabinets and hidden stacks
of cardboard ship in boxes, farther than I had ever
known the floor to go. Half way down, I spotted
a door, unmarked except for a ristue shadow, where a
room namply it used to be my master key, sweating
in my palm, turned with a reluctant click. Inside, the
air was different, close, stale, with the chemical burn of
old paper. Insolvent fluorescent tubes flickered overhead, illuminating a space
crowned with bags of shredded documents, boxes marked with years
now long passed. In one corner, the batter desk board,
the weight of what appeared to be a pile of
plastic id badges, a drift several inches deep, all names
and faces, a decades worth gun missing on the nearest one.
I recognized Ragish's picture, cracked and dirty. His eyes in
the photo seemed to follow mine. At the center of
this hidden room, a single lamp burned atop a stack
of papers, dozens of invisses, each signed and stamped with
foreign insignias, corded with the now familiar directional arrows and
cryptic window references. Here was the ledger of disappearances and movement,
left half complete. A click of a tongue behind me,
a sound I couldn't dread. I turned and was not
startled to see the night Gud standing in the door frame.
OSE's shirt was still rumpled, but a new badge hung
around his neck, one that read Operations Supervisor, a roll
he'd never mentioned. Holding his voice quite but commanding, caught me.
You shouldn't be here, he murmured, you really shouldn't. I
stared at the display of badges and shredded paper, unable
to summon even a whisper. He studied my reaction, then added,
nothing good comes to those who ask too many questions. Here,
most just disappear proof no one keeps looking. I managed,
rageous the others. What do they do with them? They
had just taken out of the pattern. That's all you need.
His look wasn't quite threatening, almost pitting. You want to
get home to night, walk away, forget what you saw,
Leave the key. He never saw me. His hand tightened
subtily at his side, but he didn't bar the door.
In other rounds about to start, he continued softer. The
window closes and opens, always another janitor, another night. My
mind flashed from the badges to my own, the notebook
in my pocket, the USB stick, a record of everything,
but a record others might never see. I stepped backward,
edging past Jose, barely believing he let me go. I
found myself pouring through the labyrinth of corridors, stair walls
and side howles, mind spinning through implications. Escape became a
matter of instinct. The clarity I had felt earlier replaced
now with a primal urgency, get out, get away, before
whatever fade awaited. Those who saw too much could catch
up with me as well. I emerged in the bleak
silence of the receiving dark, the mechanical arms of the
recycling chutess humming as though ushering me out. I slipped
my badge off my shirt, tucked it into my coat pocket,
and shuffled into the night. Air windows high overhead reflected
nothing but city fog and a jittering grid of office
lamp Late an hour or later, having circled the block
three times to make sure I wasn't followed, I stood
outside Silvian Tower, stirring at its blank facade. The bees
whipped around my ears, biting at the remains of my resolve,
my hand closed out in the u s b feeling
its angles dig into my skin. I was alive for now,
but the knowledge I carried separated me, made even the
air itself feel like glass between myself and the world.
No sirens sounded, no rescue came. The only evidence the
night left was a stray scrap of torn badge linearuts
stuck to my butte fredbare, anonymous, disposable. The threat was
never spoken, but it was all around stay out or
vanish as easily as those whose names were never mentioned again.
The next morning, my phone blaired with texts from the
cleaning company shift change. New supervisor were poor for de
crew induction at one zero p m. No reason given,
no invitation to ask, had words spread or was it
just a sudden convenience for those in charge? The question
ham unanswerable. As I washed out the bitter taste of
office air from my math at my new station, daylight
and bustle, florescented without the bite, I found myself shadowed
on training by yet another stranger, A brisk woman with
a budge reading tempadman. She washed me closely, her clipboard
near still eyes, cool inascessing. Keep to your assigned areer,
don't swap tasks, she said quietly, as she led me
through my paces. Building policy non negotiable hand of very
strictly monitored staff. Numbers onswered, and floors were altered. Fewer people,
new faces, brighter uniforms. Desks that had played a part
in my prior night's obsessions had been emptied, their contents
sealed and cowdboard collected. No mention of ragiush, no talk
of anyone's absence, no sign that those spaces were ever personal.
The windows in the upper floors now shimmered with a
strange film added for privacy, whatever that meant. More signs
warned about alert levels at its rights, strict monitoring. A
polite but sharp eyed security officer supervised every shift change,
now jotting notes into a thiche red notebook, even the
smallest deviation from protocultrig good questions the building wants only
a place to white, clean, to set right, have become
a system for rendering whole people invisible. I finished out
that first day shift adrift, each task to connor knew
provisial quality, to linger anywhere, felt risky to speak with
any worker for too long a breach. When my relief arrived,
showing me out just as the afternoon light cut away
from the facade, I found myself more fitted thanat or
any night. Spend awake on the city bus home. As
towers slid past in a haze of even light, I
realized I'd never feel peace in the presence of blank
glass again. The face is I'd seen play acting loyalty
by day, complicit by night, would haunt every hallway, every corridor,
every flick of reflex. Even with the USB still cold
in my coat and the notebook now hidden beneath my mattress,
the pattern had already consumed its witness, me joining the
ranks of those change. If not a for I vanished,
a weak blurred by silence replaced the talk that once
hovered at the outer rings of office gossip, absences, rules,
changed routines, new hires. The odd joke about the window
had faded, supplanted by stride in tone less like camaraderie,
more like caution. No one mentioned missing faces, but you
could see the alertness in their eyes, fear of stepping
on in a building where the edges ran in. Then
one afternoon, as I left, a manager from h R
stopped me, smiling too broadly. Thank you for your service,
she said, but to morrow please report to the down
town site. There is a new opportunity to better fitting
your experience. All requested materials will be transferred. What choice
did I have? None? They'd dokstrated the handoff, not out
of petty vengeance, but because machinery run by secrets can't
risk a single attentive bastender. The building would schurn out
another janitor, another set of silent rituals, and the cycle
would continue. My own replacement already linger at the edge
of vision, cleaning rags over his arm, face as hard
to remember as my own reflection in those haunted mirrord holes.
At night, I found myself for tracing my road of memory,
each desk, door and corridor mapped in a lattice work
of dread. When sleep finally came, they was pierced by
false alarms, figures in class in crooked patterns, the dull
repeated tap of keys, typing messages. I could never decode
my hands. It's for evidence, but Clarty had always belonged
to some one else. On my last pass out of
the building, a dusk as hot and badly lit as
any night previous, I paused brief in the lobby, feeling
watched by the new security. My final badge swag came
harder than intended, the plastic flexing of protest. The silence
roared in my ears as I crossed the threshold, leaving
behind surfaces white clean, and all stores scrub tash. That night,
unable to sleep, I wandered past silver in towers based
neck crane to the upper stores. The windows glared back
blank and infinite, but in one pulsey glinches at the
meeting of darkness and Foressen speckoned the city, thrumbed and
attentive to a janitor's anxiety. I waited, as if for
a sign, the building looming over at Saiwa Kingdom and
burdened the memory of a thousand quiet hands. A passing
bus blared its exhaust into the blue black dark. In
that instant, the ten floor conference room when a flickered
a court, maybe by the arc of a passing car's headlight,
or maybe it was something else, a signal to those
watching from within. I stepped closer, squinting up against the glare,
and for a split second saw a face press pail
to the glass, amoving almost luminous features blurred beyond recognition.
Something in the posture suggested not a guard on duty,
nor relaid worker, but someone waiting to be seen. The
moment broke as a truck rumbled by reflections sliding across
the facade. A sharp then sound echoed behind me from
the building's atrium. I glanced through the doors and noticed
the new janitor's cut gleaming pristine, very much at a
place abandoned in the low be where no one lingered
the ire. When I reached from my phone, my hand
brushed against my jacket pocket, where something light and unfamiliar waited.
I fished out a slip of folded paper, smaller than
a business car, textured as if handled by many others
before me. It read in neat block letters, you were seen.
The window is never truly closed. A breeze snapped at
the paper. I let it fall to the sidewalk, stepping
away from the tower head, lower the whole edifice behind me,
humming with secrets that would never surface again. As my
footsteps faded on the empty street, I realized I would
never walk past glass in darkness without wondering who or
what was watching from the other side. As my footsteps
faded on the empty street, I realized I would never
walk past glass in darkness without wondering who or what
was watching from the other side. A day later, I
returned from my new assignment. The city's morning light streaking
in through my apartment window lent Sylvie entarror, false innocence
that felt insulting. After everything had seen, washing up, dressing,
packing my simple kit for the daytime work, I performed
each at with care, as though preparing for a test.
No one would grade, half expecting my successor on the
night shift would furanish as quietly as the last guilt
and gratitude nagged at my insides. I had survived, kept
my data points and doubts, but could not rid myself
of the conviction that survival was a kind of complicity.
At the new office of bright Glass heavy complex in
the commerce district, everything was visible and carefully documented. Signing
logs were digital cleaning schedules. Webb shared new highest peruss
with the pointed formality. My supervisor, a heavy set man
with thick wrists, never left his station in the main office.
He checked everything twice, logging, even in scheduled bathroom brakes.
There was none of the hush, none of the invisible
burdens of silver in tower. I missed the quiet, but
not the secrets. A week dissolved in restless routine. Once
I saw the same brand of cleaning caloth those blue
plastic bins. Those racks were tiny brushes popped in the
loading dark. For a fleeting moment, I tense, half expecting
a fragment of shirt of plastic or stray badge to
fall out. Nothing did. My own badge replaced twice in
six days, now sported a red stripe and a series
of numbers, lays of oversight, little more than camouflage. Everywhere
I went was watch counted. Evening found me restless. The
urge to walk pulled me across the city toward the
tower's gleaming silhouette. From a distance, the building looked to
nerve the kind of neutral present security planner's dream about.
But I knew too much. Pedestrians passed by, self absorbed,
everyone looking into their devices or at the patterns of
the street lights. As day bled into evening. Across the
road directly opposite the white glass doors, I stopped beside
a cafee busting with after work business, and watched the
lobby through flares of sunlight on glass. The new janter, tall,
gray haired, pushed his cot with brisk efficiency. I fixing
the floors for an instant, his gaze lifted toward me, unflinching.
I felt exposed, a ghost haunting my own former routes.
My phone chimed a message from the cleaning contractor. Cut
no return to press, sight, assets removed, end of rooker.
I deleted it without answer, No more invitations, no apology,
not even a polite warning. Inside my back, the old
usbe rattled against my note book. I thought more than
once of dropping it down a steel grate or crushing
it under my heel. Both times I hesitated not because
I believed it could clear anything up, but because its
existence anchored memory. That night in the secret room, rose
of badges and shred swept into the pale light, the
hush of the god's warning. I kept that silence, but
it had marked me. Late that Friday, I heard from Nina,
the network engineer, by Emil A. Blant's subject line, a
single line in the body. Send any keys or tags
he still have shreuding scheduled Monday. A line break, then,
don't use your name in responses. My hands tingled as
I replied with a foul photo of the janitorial close
at tag faded. It is curled. No further answer came.
The days ahead blurred, filled in by the silt of
habitual caution. I skirted busy lobbies, tied my commutes to
avoid the rush. If the city felt less like home,
it was because every mirrored elevator, every glass walled lobby
was suspect. Whatever habits I brought with me, I kept
my eyes down, my voice low, never speaking. Sylver in
towers named to anyone who might still be listening. A
fortnight passed, one afternoon were drifted through the cleaning staff,
and another attempt missing from a downtown law firm staff shuffle.
Some one said a paper economally, some one else, No
one pressed. The union's muttered, then quieted. The pattern at
her remove was always the same. Back at Sylvin Tower,
the stores dried up. No more odd bad swipes, no
more rumors of people on floors they shouldn't have access to.
One manager I remembered fondly, with a knack of stained
tie and friendly nods in the corridor was replaced by
a stranger who's introductions were clipped and whose eyes tracked
every badge scanned. Time thickened. I ran through routines, mob
about the kitchenette dust. The vending machines scribbed the same
hamprint smudges from the glass. The city went on as
it always had. Yet the building loomed over the evening
tram rides, its surface blank, impossible to read. I found
myself on humid nights, drifting and consciously toward its base,
studying the high lightless windows for a sign, glint of
a monitor, hince, queak, any sign. The old pattern lingered
each time I saw only the indifferent geometry of illuminated glass,
the shadows inside moving just out of reach. It is
strange what the mind will do to keep a secret
it never asked for. I absorbed irritations like a sponge.
My apartment felt smaller, The towel weighed more on the
sky line each morning. Sometimes in tether dreams, I found
myself in those empty offices, following as may on the window.
My reflection never quite lined with my own face. Once
I passed rageous, pognised vacant in a supermarket aisle, focused
on cans of soup, as if reading a code. I
almost oak, almost confessed. But what would I say? That
the missing person had simply left a gap in the cemetery,
not a story, not an answer. My silence rendered the
encounter as another red file and a folder. It was
early Jeane. When passing the tower in a thunder storm,
I noticed an entire row of light snap on late
at night, up of floors, but familiar block of conference rooms.
The top window flickered reflexively. I slowed my steps. The
city around me was washed clean, soundless. Beneath the rain,
A part of me still believed wild itself, to believe
that some breach had opened again. The next day, cycling past,
all was calm and dane. Press releases talked about a
reinvestment and modernization, new compliance standards, embracing transparency, as if
the city's oldest secrets could be paved over with metrics
and glass. Days became weeks with no further word, no
further sign. Yet, some evenings, in the hush of my
new cleaning route, I'd catch a send of burn coffee,
glimpse of reflection moving against patten in the long core
door's glass. My hands would close tight around my keys,
hot beating with the muscle memory of flight, of secrecy.
The old notebook dough Jered Warren remained buried under sweaters
at the back of my closet. I never opened it,
though sometimes and in even light, I felt its gravity
pulling at me. The USB lay in a drawer, weightless
now but not discarded. Its secrets, I suspected were engineered
to remain secrets. Every shridder in the tower proof that
erasure was the preferred end to any story. In the
months that followed, rumors flickered on the city's message board,
Strange badge swipes in another tower, files over written late
at night, junk conference room monitors left flickering lawn after midnight.
I read them with care, as if any pattern could
unlock the anxiety. I still lived with no one ever
named Silvan Tower, but the questions echoed in the shape
of the stores. That autumn. To staff dinner, I found
myself seated with another former knight, Janitor Boulder, with a
tremor in his hands and an aversion to eye contact.
He asked, suddenly, and with no preamble, whether I'd ever
worked high rises at night. I met his gaze, and
for a moment we shared a pale smile and not
spoken affirmation. Neither of us rose so unpack. There are
some stores only understood, but quietly initiated. A final shift
came near the year's end, a replacement or a shuffle
the administrative handishing new keys, blank leanards, all old routines
erased and reassigned. I carried my new kit with the
resignation of experience, feigning calm as a briefed my success
or another face in the long pattern, another worker who
would learn quiet, careful habits. When I turned in the
last of my old badges, I caught a glimpse on
the bottom of the return pile of an id from
the prior year, grainy image marred by ink. I wondered
if any one would ever tirely how many were truly lost,
how many simply slipped through the cracks of routine. There
were no memorials, no loss reports, just a hollowed space
where memory should have been. The pattern was perfect, and
self sustaining absence was the only proof. After my last
exit from the familiar glass attrium, my shoes clicking louder
than before, the guard on g delocked the badge box
without acknowledgment. The building exhaled. As I left, I had
a sense for the first time in months that this
chapter had ended, not by my intention, but because the
pattern closed itself around the wound. In the years that followed,
I learned to avoid windows at night to cross street.
When I saw the shimmer of hot towers above. My
vigilance receded, not because I had less to fear, but
because that fear had become ordinary and another rhythm in
the metropolis on sleeping Heart still, though, when knights went
under Rattle's glass, where a flush of blue white light
cuts through an empty office floor, when I feel the
old pattern pulsing through the city's veins, I know I
am not alone in that knowing. Walking home along the
rain polished sidewalk, I pause as the bustrundles passed, headlights,
momentarily revealing the thin story face of Sylvan Tower. There
in the high pane of the conference room's glass, something
glints for a single impossible moment, A face stares out,
not of the shift or of the last, but of
some one gone, waiting to be recognized. My hands close
automatically on invisible keys. I stepped back from the glare.
The window above blinks from light to shadow. At my feet,
the breeze stirs, something like a slip of paper snagged
against my boot. I stoop. You were seen. The window
is never truly closed. I watched the wind take it
and let the building keep its secrets, knowing the city
will always hold more windows than answers. And that is
the end. Thank you for listening, and I will see
you in the next one.