She pressed seven. The lift returned her to floor seven.
Four buttons. Six, seven, eight, nine. Ground, mezzanine. No floor ten. No unmarked button. Nothing unusual about the panel. She returned to her desk and made a note: Lift panel normal as of 1:17 AM. Check again after 1 AM as Rajan specified.
At two-thirty AM she went back to the lift. The lobby was empty. She pressed the call button. The lift arrived. She got in.
The panel had five buttons. Six, seven, eight, nine, and below nine: a button without a number. Just a button, slightly different from the others — the same shape and material but a different colour. Not a floor number. Not a label. Just a presence.
She looked at it for a long time.
She pressed seven.
The lift returned her to floor seven and she went to her desk and sat down. Her hands were not shaking. She was proud of this. She was also, for the first time since the shift had started, genuinely, directly afraid — not the diffuse unease of miscounted steps but something with a specific location and a specific cause, which was that the building had a floor that did not exist during the day, and a man who had been here for six years had told her not to go there, and she believed him now.
She wrote in her notebook: He was right about floor ten. Do not go there. Figure out everything else first.
