The restricted archive room sat two floors below where Mia was supposed to be, accessible only by a keycard she didn't have and a door she'd watched a maintenance worker prop open with a supply cart three days running, always around the same hour, always for the same ten careless minutes. She'd clocked the pattern the way she'd clocked everything else in this building since her first week — quietly, methodically, filing it away until it became useful.
She waited until the building had thinned to its night skeleton crew, told the security desk she'd forgotten something at her workstation, and slipped through the propped door before it swung shut. The corridor beyond smelled different from the rest of the building almost immediately — older, colder, the particular staleness of a room that e
