R-07 was Rajan's station. She had memorised the station numbers. R-07 was Rajan.
She photographed it. She kept moving. She was at eight minutes.
The far end of the floor was different. The workstations gave way to something else — an open area, no furniture, the floor a different material. Not corporate carpet. Something that was technically a floor but that her eyes kept sliding off of, the way eyes slide off of things that are not meant to be seen directly. Like trying to look at the sun — not because it was bright but because it was the wrong kind of thing for looking.
She stopped at the boundary of the different material. She looked at it without trying to see it directly, using peripheral vision the way you use it for stars — the thing too faint or too wrong to be seen head-on.
There was something in the open area. Not a shape she could describe. Not light or dark, not solid or transparent. A presence in the space, the way a low sound is a presence — felt more than seen, registered by something other than the visual system.
It was looking at her.
She knew this with the same certainty with which she knew the floor discrepancy or the call patterns — not a feeling, a data point. The presence in the open area had registered her and was attending to her with the quality of attention of something very old that did not often receive visits.
Her phone said: fourteen minutes.
"Coming back," she said, for Rajan's audio. She walked to the lift. She pressed seven. She did not run. Running would have been appropriate but running would also have been losing, and she was not ready to lose anything she had not already lost.
The lift returned her to floor seven. She walked to her desk. She sat down. She looked at R-07, Rajan's station, where he was sitting with his eyes closed and his face the colour of someone who had been holding his breath for fourteen minutes and was now releasing it.
"I'm okay," she said.
"What's up there?" he said.
"An office," she said. "And something that is not an office. And—" She paused. "Rajan. Your station. R-07. In their database — you're at Awareness Stage 5."
He opened his eyes. He looked at her. He said: "What does Stage 5 mean?"
"I don't know. But most entries are at 2 or 3. I'm probably at 4 now. You're the only 5."
He was very still for a long time. Then he said: "Six years. I've been aware of this for six years. They've been cataloguing my awareness of them." He looked at the ceiling. "Of course they have."
