Meera looked at the Ganesha figure on Divya's desk. "She didn't go to floor ten," she said. "She never saw the button."
"No," Rajan said. "But she was close to you, and you were investigating, and — I think the situation is escalating. I think what's happening in this building is in a different phase than it was a year ago. The calls are more direct. The questions are more specific. The building—" He looked down the corridor. "The discrepancy is larger. I measured it every night for a year. For a long time it was consistent. In the last month it has been getting larger."
"Getting closer to what?" she said.
"Getting closer to something," he said. "I don't know what. But larger discrepancies mean the two states of the building — the day state and the night state — are becoming more different from each other. The boundary is getting wider." He looked at her. "Meera. I think you need to decide something."
"What?"
"Whether to leave. To quit, to walk out tonight, to not come back. Take another job. Tell them a personal reason. Leave." He was watching her very carefully. "I think that is still an option for you right now. I'm not certain how long it will remain one."
"Did Suresh have the option?"
"I don't know when he lost it. I know he was still investigating when he pressed the button on floor ten, and after that—"
"And Divya?"
He was quiet. "I think Divya may have been a message," he said. "A demonstration of what happens to people who are close to the investigation without being the investigator."
Meera absorbed this. She looked at her notebook. Eleven nights of data. The call patterns, the floor measurements, the recordings that didn't match. The empty desk to her left.
"You said you'd tell me why you're still here when I needed to know it," she said.
He looked at her. His face did the thing it did sometimes — the tiredness parting slightly to show what was under it, which was not more tiredness but something that had once been something else and had spent a long time being covered.
"My daughter was here," he said. "Twelve years ago. Before Zenith, when another company occupied this building. She was twenty. She was a call centre agent. She went to floor ten." He was very still. "I joined Zenith six years ago to find out what happened to her." A pause. "I haven't found out. But I haven't stopped."
