The elevator was already open when I stood up.
Not behind the mirror. Behind me, where the wall had been. The mirror was dark glass and the elevator was lit and I walked in because the building had said I was ready and the elevator always knew what came next.
It went down.
Longer than any ride before. I felt the descent in my stomach and my knees and it kept going, deeper than the building had ever taken me, and I stood with my hand on the rail and the warmth on my left shoulder riding down with me. Closer than it had been on any floor. Pressed almost against my back.
I let it.
The ride lasted long enough for my legs to go stiff from standing and my hand to cramp around the rail. Long enough for the pressure in my ears to shift and settle and shift again. When the elevator finally slowed I felt it in my teeth and my feet and then the doors opened on marble.
The lobby. Glass doors along the far wall, security desk empty. Through the glass, a street with cars and sky and a traffic light turning green for nobody.
I didn’t run.
The last time I’d stood in this lobby I’d sprinted through those doors five times and looped five times and knelt on the marble with my palms flat and my lungs burning. The building had folded me into the beginning and sealed it shut.
I walked. Slow. My shoes on the marble sounded different than they had the first time, louder maybe, or I was listening harder. The glass doors were ahead of me and I could see the sidewalk through them and a car parked at the curb and a streetlight and all of it looked real but Floor 6 had looked real too.
The glass door was cold under my hand. I pushed it open and October came through, sharp and bright, and I stepped onto the sidewalk and waited for the loop.
For the street to dissolve and the marble to appear under my feet and the receptionist to say the words. I waited and the cold found the gap between my collar and my neck and slid in and my whole body tightened against it because this cold had weather in it. Wind and wet leaves and exhaust and the particular nothing-smell of a city before the restaurants open.
The lobby didn’t take me back.
A bus passed. A woman on the far sidewalk pulled her coat tighter. A taxi honked two blocks over and the sound was sharp and ordinary and I stood there with my hands at my sides and nothing folded and nothing looped and I was outside.
My knees went soft. Not buckling. The thing that had been holding them rigid finally letting go, all at once, and I put my hand on the glass door to steady myself and breathed and the air was cold and real and I could taste it.
I turned around. The building was there. Glass and concrete. A building on a street you’d walk past without looking twice.
I walked away from it.
One block. Two. My legs kept waiting for pavement to become carpet, for sky to become ceiling.
It held.
The city was loud and I flinched from it. Cars and voices and a jackhammer somewhere and the wind pushing a paper cup along the gutter, all of it hitting me at once after days of controlled silence and fluorescent hum and the building’s steady patient drone.
A woman coming out of a coffee shop held the door. Not propped it. Held it and looked at me and waited.
“After you,” she said.
I stood in the doorway too long. Her face shifted from friendly to concerned.
“You okay?”
“Fine,” I said, and walked through.
I ordered at the counter. The barista looked at me.
“Name?”
“Elaine.”
“Elaine.” She wrote it on the cup. Spelled right. Said it back once, casually, already reaching for the next cup.
My throat went tight and I took my coffee to a table by the window and sat down and held it with both hands. The heat came through the paper cup into my palms and I didn’t drink it for a long time because holding it was enough.
People walked past the glass. A man with a folded newspaper, a woman adjusting her scarf, a kid bouncing at the crosswalk.
I sat in the window and watched and the coffee warmed my hands and the chair was solid underneath me and nothing about the room shifted or shrank or cycled into a different room.
I tucked my hair behind my left ear.
My fingers brushed something. Raised. Small. Curved, about an inch long, just below the hairline.
I sat very still.
Robin’s. Sandra’s. Derek’s. The same curved mark behind every left ear on the welcome floor.
I ran my fingertip along it. The skin was smooth and new and faintly warm. The warmth on my left shoulder pulsed once when I touched it. Brief.
I sat with my coffee and the scar and the window and the world outside it for a long time. The coffee went cold in my hands and I held it anyway and the scar hummed faintly behind my ear and the people outside walked past and none of them had this mark and none of them knew what was inside the building three blocks south.
I put the cup down. Left a tip. Walked back out into the cold.
People saw me as I passed. A man nodded. A woman stepped aside on the sidewalk.
A man on the corner glanced up from checking his watch and said “excuse me” and moved out of my path. Two words from a stranger. My eyes burned.
Three blocks from the building I stopped. Not because anything was wrong. Because I was standing in October and people could see me and I wanted to stand still for a moment and feel that without a desk in front of me and a building around me and work waiting for my hands.
The cold pressed against my face. The warmth pressed against my left shoulder. The scar hummed behind my ear.
I watched people walk past and none of them felt me watching.
I kept walking. The warmth kept pace.
I passed a storefront and caught my reflection in the glass and my legs stopped.
The reflection didn’t.
It kept walking. One step past where I’d frozen, maybe two, before it stopped and turned and looked at me through the window with my face. A half-second ahead. Same as the mirror room.
The building was three blocks behind me. Whatever it had put inside me was not.