What do the stages lead to?" she said.
He did not answer. She thought he was going to not answer. Then: "My daughter was at Stage 5 when she went to floor ten and didn't come back," he said. "I've been at Stage 5 for a long time. And I'm still here." He paused. "Which means either Stage 5 doesn't mean what I thought, or I'm an exception, or — they have a different plan for me."
They sat in the night-length of floor seven and above their heads, eleven floors that the building directory said were ten, something catalogued their awareness with the systematic patience of something for whom patience was not a virtue but a basic condition of existence.
