Turn 4 of 11

Go find Marguerite now, before she leaves the building

You push your chair back. The casters squeak against the carpet tile — a sound you have never noticed in eleven years of sitting at this desk, and tonight it is very loud. Ellis does not look up, but his typing pauses for a beat, which is his way of noting your departure without making it a thing.

"Back in a bit," you say.

"Mm. If she's gone home, try the supply cupboard. She keeps the logbook in the cabinet by the door."

You take the keyboard with you. Not because you need it for the conversation — you need it the way you need to hold a letter you are about to deliver, the physical fact of it in your hands making the errand real. It is lighter than it looks. The unlabelled key is under your thumb now, not pressed, just resting there, and the warmth of it is steady and unremarkable, like a stone that has been sitting in the sun.

The floor is dim and blue-grey as you cross it. Emergency lighting pools at intervals along the corridor, amber squares on the carpet that mark where the floor transitions from one department's territory to another. Past the break room — dark, the coffee machine's standby light blinking green — and past the row of glass-walled meeting rooms that reflect your passage back at you, a woman with a keyboard walking with more purpose than the hour warrants. Your footsteps are the only sound until you reach the stairwell at the far end, where the building's bones are exposed: concrete, steel, the raw ductwork that the drop ceiling hides on the main floors.

Marguerite's office is on the ground floor, tucked behind Facilities in a suite of rooms that smell of carpet cleaner and printer toner. The door is closed but light leaks from under it — warm, yellowish, the light of a desk lamp rather than the overheads. You knock twice, and from inside there is the scrape of a chair, and then Marguerite's voice, clear and unsurprised, says: "It's open."

She is at her desk, which is exactly as you have never seen it, because you have never been in this room after hours. The desk is organised with a precision that borders on architectural: stacked trays, labelled folders, a mug of peppermint tea giving off its clean, minty steam. A cleaning roster is pinned to the wall behind her, Thursday names highlighted in yellow. She looks up at you, then at the keyboard in your hands, and her expression does something careful and deliberate — not surprise, not recognition, something between the two that she smooths flat before it can settle.

"Dara," she says. "You're here late."

"So are you."

"Thursdays." She gestures at the roster without looking at it.

"Someone has to sign off on the cleaning log. Sit down, if you like."

There is a chair. You do not sit. You are holding the keyboard the way someone holds an object they are still deciding about, and Marguerite is looking at it — not at you, at it — with the quiet attention of someone who has seen this object in someone else's hands before.