"The people," she said.
"They catalogue the people. The awareness stages. People at higher stages of awareness — of understanding what's happening — are more useful to them somehow. The data they can draw from a person who fully understands the situation is different from what they can draw from someone who is unaware."
"Draw," she said. "What does that mean?"
"I don't entirely know. The arrangement — the management's agreement — was that they could operate within the building, use the infrastructure, have access to the people in the building in the sense that the people would be present and the tenants could interact with them through the call system. The management's understanding was that this was harmless. An information exchange. The tenants gathered data, the company got cheap rent and infrastructure and the tenants occasionally — facilitated things. Business went better after the arrangement. Unusual coincidences. Contract renewals that shouldn't have happened."
"And Divya?" she said. "And Suresh before her?"
Vikram looked at his desk. "The management's understanding may have been wrong about the harmlessness part," he said, very quietly. "Or the terms changed over time. Or the terms were never what we thought they were."
"Where are they, Vikram?"
He was quiet for a long time. "I don't know," he said. "I genuinely don't know what Stage 5 means for the tenants. I know Stage 5 people go to floor ten and don't come back as the same people. What happens to them there — what they become or where they go — I don't know."
"Your management made a deal with something they didn't understand," she said. "And people are paying for it."
"Yes." No defense. No qualification. Just the flat, exhausted acknowledgment of someone who has been living with a moral failure for long enough to have run out of ways to soften it.
"I'm going to get everyone out," she said. "Everyone at Stage 4 or 5. I'm going to figure out how and I'm going to do it. If you get in my way I will make what's happening here public in a way that your management cannot contain. If you help me—"
"I'll help you," he said. He said it before she had finished the sentence. "I've been waiting for someone to be the one to make that sentence," he said. "For eight years."
