She had been wrong to assume Divya was unaware.
Divya had said nothing in the first five nights — had been warmly collegial, had shared canteen food, had given Meera the password to the internal quality monitoring system as a shortcut, had been the kind of cubicle neighbor who made the night shift tolerable by the quality of small kindnesses. She had said nothing that indicated she knew anything beyond what a four-month employee normally knew.
On the sixth night, at two AM, Divya leaned across the partition between their cubicles and said, very quietly: "You've noticed."
Meera looked at her. "What have I noticed?"
"The floor. The calls." Divya's voice was not afraid — it had the specific quality of someone who had been afraid earlier and had moved through it to something else on the other side. "Rajan has been talking to you."
"A little."
"He talks to all the new ones," Divya said. "The ones who notice. Some people don't notice — they do the shift for months and go home and the miscounted steps don't register, or they register and they explain them and they move on. Those people are fine. They never see anything else." She paused. "But some people notice and can't stop noticing. And Rajan watches for them."
"Why?" Meera said.
