Three in the morning. The call volume at its lowest. Floor seven at its quietest — twelve people working, most of them absorbed in documentation and callbacks, nobody paying close attention to anybody else.
Meera shut down her workstation. She stood up. She picked up her bag — smaller than it had been on night one, everything non-essential removed. She looked at the empty cubicle to her left, the Ganesha figure still on Divya's desk, the hand cream.
She picked up the Ganesha figure and put it in her bag. Divya's family could have it back.
She went to Rajan's cubicle. He was already standing. His bag was on his shoulder. They did not speak. They walked together to the lift lobby. The corridor was seventeen additional steps long tonight — she counted from habit, the habit by now fully automatic, the number filed: seventeen additional steps, night nineteen, 3:02 AM.
Anand was at the lift lobby. Preethi was at the lift lobby. They were a group of four people with bags who looked exactly like four night shift employees going home early, because sometimes people went home early and nobody tracked it carefully at three AM.
"Vikram?" Rajan said.
