They planned it over three nights.
Not the pressing of the button — that was the easy part, the thing that took one second. The planning was for everything else: what to bring, how to record it, how to communicate what they found to someone outside the building, how to maintain an anchor to the normal world of floor seven while one of them went up.
They decided that Meera would go. Rajan would stay on seven — he would keep his line open, he would have her phone in his ear connected by audio so he could hear everything, and he would have a timer, and if she was not back in twenty minutes he would call the building's security desk and create a situation that would require a response. A fire alarm, a medical emergency — something that would bring people and light and normality into the building at a level that might disrupt whatever was on floor ten.
"Twenty minutes," he said. "Not one second more."
"Understood."
"And if anything feels — wrong. If the lift doesn't behave correctly, if the doors open onto something you don't understand, you press seven immediately. You come back."
"Yes."
