Chapter 13 — 3:17 AM.

The night shift ends at 7 AM.Some of the people who go home at 7 AM are the same people who arrived at 11 PM.Some of them are not.The floor discrepancy on night nineteen was seventeen additional steps. The following night it was fourteen. The night after that, twelve. It has been declining for four months. Nobody inside the building knows why.Nobody outside the building knows either.The Anchor does not explain itself. It attends, and catalogues, and waits, with the patience of something for which waiting is not a condition but a quality — the texture of existence for something that has been present in one form or another since before the city around it existed, since before the concept of a building existed, since before the particular kind of creature that built buildings and staffed them with night shift workers and called it an industry had been anything other than a possibility in the long arithmetic of the world.It has been noticed before. It has been investigated before.It is always still here in the morning.