"Jobs," Preethi said. Not a complaint. A practical consideration.
"Jobs can be found," Meera said. "They can't be found if you're—" She gestured at where Divya had sat. Nobody needed the gesture completed.
Vikram said: "I can access the floor six panel. I have the maintenance key for the mechanical spaces — part of the facility management duties that come with my role." He looked at his hands. "I'll do it."
"No," Meera said. "We all go to the lobby first. We go down to the ground floor, we have our bags, we're ready to leave. Then you go to floor six, you trip the breakers, and you come immediately to the lobby. We leave together."
"And if it doesn't work?" Rajan said. "If the Anchor doesn't lose connection with a power outage?"
"Then we leave anyway," she said. "Because the worst outcome of this plan is that we resign from Zenith Solutions and find other jobs. The worst outcome of staying is—"
"Yes," Rajan said. "All right."
The preparation took two nights. They did not change their behaviour on the floor — they worked their shifts, took their calls, counted their steps, flagged the anomalous questions in the call queue, did everything exactly as they had done it. The change was invisible: bags lightened, personal items from desks quietly removed over successive nights in small quantities so that no single night showed a departure. Phone contacts backed up. Important documents photographed. The things that mattered moved out of the building in increments.
Meera left one thing at her desk on the final night: her notebook. Eleven nights of data — floor measurements, call patterns, the cross-references and the analysis. She photographed every page. The notebook itself she left on the desk.
She was not sure why, exactly. Maybe because the data had a right to stay in the place where it had been gathered. Maybe because she wanted the tenants — who could presumably read whatever they chose to read in this building — to know that she had understood. That she had seen the mechanism and named its parts and was not leaving in ignorance.
She left the notebook open to the last page, where she had written, that final night, a single line: We know what you are. We know what you're doing. We are leaving. We will tell.
The we was deliberate. Singular people could be catalogued. Could be transitioned. Could be marked Retained and kept for ongoing value. We was harder to contain.
