He opened it further, looked both directions, and then they were moving Victoria in her stocking feet. Silent on the hard floor, Darius beside her, his tool bag over one shoulder. The torque wrench back in the side pocket but not zipped. Floor 18, he said under his breath. There's a service corridor that runs along the mechanical spine of the building.
Access behind the kitchen on the north side. It connects to the secondary stairwell that comes out on the roof level. I I didn't know there was a secondary stairwell. Most people don't. She glanced at him sideways as they moved.
"You've been in these walls for 8 months. Somebody has to know where the bones are. " They reached the center stairwell door, and he pressed Z ear against it for three full seconds before he pushed it open. The stairwell above them was silent. Below, from somewhere on floor 14 or 15, he could hear the distant echo of movement. Someone methodical and unhurried working their way back up.
They went up two floors fast, quiet. At floor 18, he eased the stairwell door open, and they slipped through into a corridor that that smelled like industrial cleaning supplies, and the particular staleness of a floor that was used for storage rather than people. The overhead emergency strips here were dimmer than on 16 older installation. Lower priority for the backup circuit and the light had a reddish cast that made everything look vaguely like the inside of a dark room. Kitchen is at the end of the north corridor, Victoria said and he realized she had oriented herself immediately was already moving in the right direction.
11 years in this building. She knew it differently than he did the executive way, the front of house way, but she knew it. They moved together. The kitchen was a catering prep space used for the executive dining room on floor 19. It was dark and cold and full of the shapes of commercial equipment under dust covers.
Darius moved through it without turning on his work light. The windows on this floor faced the street and any light from inside would be visible to anyone watching the building from the ground. He found the service corridor access door behind the industrial refrigerator units. Exactly where the building schematics he'd memorized months ago showed it. A narrow door, metal with a simple push lever instead of a key card reader because it was infrastructure access, not office access.
He pushed through and they were inside the mechanical spine of the building, a concrete corridor barely wide enough for two people side by side, running the full north south length of the floor with pipes and conduit bundled along the ceiling and the secondary stairwell access at the far end. Victoria looked up at the pipes running overhead. I've never been back here. Nobody has. That's the point.
She looked at him. Is that where you live? In the parts of things nobody else sees. He didn't answer immediately because it was a more accurate question than she probably meant it to be. Maya's mom left when Maya was 8.
He said it came out of nowhere or it felt that way, but it didn't feel wrong to say it here. In the dark in the concrete corridor with a storm outside and someone below them who wanted to make sure they stayed quiet permanently, she didn't leave bad. She just left. Different life than she thought she was signing up for. He kept moving as he talked.