"I need you to commit to that. Not 'I'll try.' The moment something doesn't match expectations, you come back."
"I commit to it," she said. And she meant it, with the same precision with which she committed to everything — completely, verifiably, with the understanding that she would be held to it and would hold herself to it.
At two-fourteen AM on night thirteen, she walked to the lift lobby. The floor was at its night-length — the pantry door further than it should be, the corridor walls slightly different in the quality of light they returned, the overhead fluorescents casting something that was technically the same light and practically slightly wrong, the specific wrongness of a copy rather than an original. She had learned to walk through this without letting it affect her pace.
She pressed the call button. The lift arrived. She got in. The panel: G, M, 6, 7, 8, 9, and below nine the unnumbered button. She pressed it.
The lift went up.
This was the first surprise: the lift went up, which meant floor ten was above floor nine, which meant the building had a physical floor above its listed top floor. It was not a metaphysical floor — the lift traveled upward in the way lifts do, physically, with the slight pressure change and the familiar mechanical sound. A real floor, physically real, above the roof of the building as it existed on any floor plan or structural drawing.
The doors opened.
