The elevator opened on the same carpet smell and my stomach clenched.
Same hallway. Same door. I walked through it and nobody looked up and I crossed to my desk and the forms were restacked and the monitor was clear and a fresh sticky note on the screen said ELANE.
I touched my pocket. Both notes still there.
I sat down. The cursor blinked at the beginning of a field that wanted a name. I put my hands in my lap.
Minutes passed. The office moved around me, people typing, phones ringing softly in other rooms. The woman in the gray blazer walked over.
“Everything all right?”
“Fine.”
“The fields are labeled. You’ll figure it out.”
She stood there a beat too long. Something tightened behind the smile. Then she walked away.
The cursor blinked and my hands stayed in my lap and the fluorescents buzzed and the building hummed underneath me and I gave it nothing.
An hour passed and the woman two desks over coughed at 10:14. I’d known it was coming.
A sandwich appeared at noon. Turkey and swiss on cold bread. I didn’t eat it.
The bread went stale and the turkey curled at its edges and I watched that happen too.
—-
The first change came in the afternoon.
The fluorescents dropped pitch. Lower, sinking into something I felt in my back teeth. A frequency I knew. Gerald’s floor.
The cold pressed through my blouse into my shoulders. The light shifted bluer and the carpet darkened and the building was pulling another floor into the room.
Nobody reacted. The woman at her desk kept typing in colder light on darker carpet.
Then the sound dropped out. All of it, at once, keyboards and breathing and the fluorescent buzz gone and the ledger floor’s silence settled against my eardrums.
The walls tightened. Enough to feel in my ribs.
I sat still.
Warmth came fast. The cold broke and heat rushed in and laughter arrived from somewhere to my left and I could smell coffee and body heat and a blue mug appeared on my desk with my name glazed into the ceramic.
I didn’t touch it.
The mug vanished. Brown carpet spread from the edges of the room, gold-flecked, matted in the middle. The ceiling lowered and lemon cleaner and cooking oil filled my chest.
My mother’s house built itself around me and I sat at a desk where the kitchen table should have been and held my hands in my lap.
The building cycled faster. Concrete underfoot for a half-second, then marble, sounds cutting in and out, a phone ringing and the scratch of pens and Gil’s coffee and Robin’s hand on mine, there and gone.
Temperature swinging cold to warm to cold and light shifting blue to gold to white and every floor the building had playing around me while I sat in a chair that didn’t change.
The warmth on my left shoulder held steady through all of it.
It stopped.
—-
The room that settled was one I’d never seen.
Small. Walls close enough to touch. White, floor to ceiling.
The floor was hard under my shoes, something between tile and concrete, cold through the soles. A desk and a chair and a mirror on the wall. Nothing else.
I looked at the mirror and my legs stopped.
The reflection was sitting.
I was standing. She was in the chair, hands on the desk, looking at me through the glass with my face and my hair and the stain on my blouse from Gil’s floor.
I walked to the desk. Sat down.
By the time I settled into the chair the reflection’s hands had moved to her lap. By the time I put mine on the desk hers were reaching for something.
I raised my hand. Hers was already up.
I turned my head left. She’d already turned.
I leaned forward and she was leaning back. Every motion I made, she’d completed before I arrived at it.
I sat very still. She sat very still. But even in the stillness I could see it, a shift in her jaw, a settling in her shoulders, each micro-movement completing before mine began.
She was breathing ahead of me.
I stared at her. She was already looking away.
Her eyes dropped to the desk. In the mirror, the desk had something on it that mine didn’t. A phone. Black, standard-issue, sitting on the reflected surface where the real surface was bare.
The reflection reached for it. I watched my own hand lift a receiver that didn’t exist while my real hand stayed in my lap.
She brought the phone to her ear. Listened. Her mouth moved.
Two words. Shaped slowly, clearly, on lips I knew better than anyone’s.
You’re ready.
She set the phone down. Looked at me. And for the first time, we were synchronized.
Her eyes met mine at the exact same moment, no delay, no lead.
Something shifted in the building underneath me. A deep structural sound, felt in my feet and my spine and my teeth.
The mirror went dark.
The room hummed. The desk was empty in front of me and the mirror was black glass and somewhere behind it, or underneath it, or inside it, the elevator dinged.