"He went down to six ten minutes ago," Meera said. "He's ready."
She pressed G. The lift arrived. They got in. She did not look at the panel to check for the unnumbered button. She looked at the doors. They closed.
The lift went down. G, M — it passed all the floors. It reached the ground floor. The doors opened onto the lobby, which at three AM had two security guards and the overnight reception desk and the soft lobby lighting and the completely normal smell of carpet and industrial cleaner and the specific nothing-smell of a space kept to a standard.
They walked out of the lift. Across the lobby toward the main entrance. One of the security guards looked up, the standard look of someone whose job includes awareness without engagement. Meera nodded. He nodded back. They reached the entrance.
Vikram was not there.
She stopped. Looked back at the lobby — the reception desk, the security guards, the lift bank. No Vikram. She checked her phone. No message from Vikram. She had expected him to be in the lobby before them, to have come down ahead, to be waiting.
"Give him two minutes," Rajan said.
They waited. One minute. The lobby was quiet. Floor numbers above the lift doors: G, 7, 8, 7, 7.
Then: a sound from above. Not a bang — a click, large and definitive, the sound of a breaker panel operating, multiplied through the building's structure. And then: the lights on the upper floors went out. She could see it through the glass facade of the building — the lit rectangles of floors seven through nine, all of them going dark simultaneously, the building's upper section going from lit to dark in a single clean transition.
The lobby lights stayed on. Lobby and ground floor on a separate circuit, as she had confirmed with Vikram.
The security guards were standing. One was already on his radio. The standard emergency response beginning — the calls to the facility manager, the checks, the protocol.
"Vikram," Preethi said.
The lift was moving. The floor indicator showed it descending: 6, 5, M. Then it stopped. M — the mezzanine floor. The doors did not open. The indicator stayed at M.
"The outage shouldn't have affected the lift — it's on the emergency circuit," Meera said. She was already moving to the lift. She pressed the call button. Nothing. She pressed it again. The indicator stayed at M, the doors stayed closed.
"Stairs," Rajan said. He was already at the stairwell door. "We go to the mezzanine on foot. Get Vikram."
