"How many steps?" he said.
She went completely still for a moment. "What?"
"To the pantry. How many steps going, coming back?"
She looked at him. "How did you know I was counting?"
"Everyone counts on the second night," he said. Not unkindly. "Usually the pantry, or the corridor to the bathroom, or the lift lobby. Something they pass regularly. The discrepancy bothers them and they count." He was not looking at her now — he was looking at his monitor, the call queue indicator. "Then they count again. Then they try to explain it."
"Can you explain it?"
A long pause. Long enough that she thought he wasn't going to answer, and then: "The building changes after midnight. Not dramatically. But it changes. The floor gets longer. Sometimes shorter, but usually longer. The corridors do things." He paused. "There is also a floor that is not on the building directory."
She stared at him.
"Floor ten," he said. "The directory goes up to nine. Vikram told you nine is the top floor — technical operations, management offices. That's true. It is the top floor — during the day, during normal business hours, floor nine is the top floor and the roof access is above it." He turned and looked at her directly. "After one AM, there is a button in the lift for floor ten."
She thought about this for a moment. "I don't believe you," she said. Not aggressively. It was simply the accurate statement.
"I know," he said. "Don't go there. That's also important."
His call indicator lit up. He pressed accept and became a professional named "Roger" handling a software licensing query, and his voice changed completely — the flat tiredness went out of it and a practiced warmth came in, the customer-facing voice that all of them had, the voice that lived slightly in front of the real voice the way an accent lives in front of a native language.
Meera did not press him further that night. She worked. She took calls. At one-fifteen AM, during a break, she walked to the lift lobby at the far end of floor seven.
The lift had four buttons: G, M, 6, 7, 8, 9. No floor ten.
She pressed seven. The lift came. She got in. She looked at the panel. Four buttons. She pressed eight — she had not been to floor eight, Vikram had said she didn't need to go there, but no one had said she was prohibited from pressing the button. The lift went to eight. She stepped out briefly. Floor eight looked like floor seven — cubicles, workstations, quieter, a smaller number of people working, some sort of key account team. She got back in the lift. She pressed nine. The lift went to nine. She stepped out into a corridor with frosted glass doors marked Technical Operations — Authorised Personnel Only.
