She counted the Stage 4 entries associated with floor seven: five. Her own, which had recently updated to 4. Rajan's, at 5. Three others — she spent two nights working out which workstations they corresponded to and found that two of them were people who had been at Zenith for over a year: a quiet, systematic man named Anand who sat in row three and who, when she started paying attention to him, turned out to be doing what she had been doing — counting steps, making notes, asking very slightly off-script questions of Vikram. The third was a woman named Preethi who had been there for fourteen months and who, Meera now noticed, took a different route to the pantry every time — varying her path through the floor in a way that was not random but was the systematic exploration of a person mapping a space.
They had all been arriving at the same place independently. The building had four people actively investigating it at the same time, and none of them had known about the others.
She went to Anand first. He was at his desk during a slow period, pretending to work on documentation, actually doing something on his personal phone that he closed when she approached. She sat in the visitor chair at the empty station beside him.
"You count the steps too," she said.
He looked at her for a moment. "Row seven. You're the new one."
