"Meera."
"Anand." He looked at his monitor. "How far have you gotten?"
"Floor ten," she said. "And the database."
His expression did something that took a moment to identify. It was not surprise. It was the specific emotion of someone who has been carrying a weight alone for a long time and has just been offered someone else's hands. Relief, but relief that doesn't know yet whether to fully arrive because it has been disappointed before.
"The database," he said. "How did you get to the database?"
"Vikram."
"Vikram knows."
"Vikram manages the arrangement. He's not happy about it. He'll help us."
The word us sat in the conversation. Anand looked at it — metaphorically, the way you look at a word that changes the size of something.
"What are we trying to do?" he said.
"Get everyone at Stage 4 and 5 out of the building and not come back," she said. "Before what happened to Divya happens to one of us."
"Divya," he said. He had known her. She could see it.
"Yes," she said. "Before anyone else."
She went to Preethi the same night. Preethi's response was faster — barely a moment of assessment before: "When?"
"I don't know yet. I need to understand something first." She paused. "In the database — the awareness stages. What triggers Stage 5? And what happens at Stage 5 that's different from Stage 4?"
Nobody knew. Rajan was at Stage 5 and was still here, unchanged, after six years. His daughter had been at Stage 5 and had gone to floor ten and not returned as herself. The pattern was not consistent.
She went back to the Interface that night and looked at the Stage 5 entry more carefully. Rajan's entry at Stage 5 had a flag she hadn't noticed before — a marker in the status field. She translated the marker through the system's own key, which Vikram had helped her decode.
The marker said: Retained. Value: Ongoing.
Retained. He was retained at Stage 5 because he had ongoing value. His continued presence in the building, in his current state of awareness, was worth more to the tenants than the transition to whatever Stage 5 completion meant.
His daughter had not been flagged as Retained. She had been at Stage 5 without the flag, and she had transitioned.
