Once inside the records, Darius discovered a pattern that unsettled him more with every page he turned. The ventilation system had been serviced far more frequently than any comparable floor in the building. Several maintenance logs from the past year had been deleted entirely, and the security cameras covering the mechanical room had lost signal on multiple separate occasions that never appeared in any incident report. A subcontractor who had handled the systems installation years earlier had been abruptly replaced without explanation just before Celeste symptoms began. Every time Celeste had suffered one of her worst episodes, Darius found some undocumented change had occurred in that mechanical room within days.
He told her plainly that her symptoms followed a pattern, and when she asked what pattern he meant, he answered that it was her building. Celeste laughed once, sharp and disbelieving, unwilling to accept that the source of three years of suffering could be something as ordinary as air. Darius did not press the point with argument. Instead, he proposed something simple, that she leave the building entirely for 48 hours and see what happened to her body when she was away from it. Celeste resisted at first, citing a schedule too full to abandon, but exhaustion and desperation eventually won out over pride, and she agreed.
Away from the tower, staying in a rented lakehouse 2 hours outside the city, Celeste noticed the change almost immediately. Her headaches, which had rarely given her more than a day's peace in years, eased within hours. The tremor in her hands settled to nothing by the second morning. She did not black out once, and for the first time in longer than she could remember, she slept through an entire night without waking in confusion. By the time the 48 hours ended, Celeste had gone from disbelief to something closer to fear.
She called Darius and asked with none of her usual composure whether he believed the building itself was making her sick. He told her no that he believed someone inside the building was. That answer sent Darius back into the mechanical infrastructure with a different kind of urgency. Tracing conduit and duct work that had no place on any official blueprint. He found a secondary system wired discreetly into the executive floor's climate controls, a network entirely absent from the building's registered schematics.