Meera had built a file. Not on the Zenith systems — on her personal phone, on a notes app, backed up to a cloud she had created specifically for this purpose with an email account that was not connected to anything else she owned. Eight nights of observations, each one dated and timed, as precise as she could make them.
The floor discrepancy: consistent after midnight, averaging fourteen additional steps on the return trip. She had learned to not let it bother her — the number was what it was, and knowing the number was more useful than being disturbed by it.
The calls: she had now received seven calls that she classified as anomalous. Three had asked questions about the physical layout of the floor. Two had asked questions about the number of people working on the floor at specific hours. One had asked whether she had ever been to floor nine. One had been the call that knew she knew.
She had reviewed the call recordings for all seven. On the official Zenith recording system, the calls appeared completely normal. The questions were not there. The recordings showed the correct billing query or software support call from beginning to end, with her correct responses, no anomalous questions. The calls she had experienced were not the calls the recording system had captured.
