Everything he said was correct. The sequence was plausible. His voice was his voice. His face was his face. The thing that was wrong was subtle enough that she could not point to it directly — could only perceive it peripherally, the way you perceive the thing on floor ten, the thing that was too wrong to be seen head-on.
Rajan was looking at Vikram. She looked at Rajan. He made a very small movement — a slight change in his posture, the kind of signal you developed with people you had spent months noticing. The signal said: yes. I see it too.
"Yes," she said to Vikram. "We're leaving. Let's go."
They went down the stairwell. Through the lobby. Out the entrance of Technomark Pinnacle into the Bangalore night — three-fifteen AM, the ring road audible, the construction somewhere, the city in its never-quite-asleep state.
She had left the notebook on her desk. In the dark of floor seven, in a building with no power above the mezzanine, her notebook sat open to the last page.
Above the building, floor ten existed without needing the lights on. It had never needed the lights.
