"Perfect," she said.
They went up the stairwell together, two flights of grey concrete steps with yellow nosing and a smell of disinfectant. Priya talked as they climbed, in the way people talk when they are trying to be helpful and are also slightly frightened of you. The all-hands was in the big room on seventeen. Gerald would introduce her at ten. He had asked that she not go up to fourteen or fifteen before then, because people would recognise her from the announcement email, which was going out at nine-thirty with her photo.
"So I've got about fifty minutes where nobody knows who I am," Nadia said.
"About that. Gerald thought you might want to just. See things."
"Gerald was right."
At the top of the stairs Priya pushed open a heavy door and they came out into the ground floor of Calder Point through a side corridor behind the reception desk. The sound changed at once. Down in the garage it had been close and damp and full of small echoes. Here it was big, hard, and bright, a long room of glass and pale tile and steady air-conditioned hum. The floor shone like wet porcelain. Nadia's sneakers squeaked on it with the first step, a short, rubbery chirp that seemed far too loud, and Priya's flats made almost no sound at all.
The turnstiles stood in a row across the middle of the lobby, five glass speed gates with brushed steel pedestals and little reader pads that glowed blue. Beyond them the elevator bank. To the left, the reception desk, a long curved counter of pale wood with a guard behind it. The guard was an older man with a grey moustache and a contractor's uniform jacket that did not quite close over his stomach, and he had a desk phone pressed to his ear and was saying, patiently, "No, sir. No, sir, the loading dock is round the back. Round the back. Yes."
Priya led the way to the nearest gate. She tapped her own badge, the gate slid open with a soft pneumatic sigh, and she walked through and turned round.
Nadia tapped the temp badge on the reader.
The pad blinked red. A short flat tone, like a quiz-show wrong answer. The glass panels stayed shut.
She tried again, holding it flatter. Red. The same tone.
"Oh, no," Priya said. "No, no. They said they'd do it."
"Maybe it takes a while to wake up."
"It doesn't take a while. It's a card." Priya came back through the gate the wrong way, which set off a different, more aggrieved beep, and looked at the temp badge as if it had personally betrayed her. "I'm so sorry. This is not the morning I wanted you to have."
"It's fine. I've had worse first days. On my first day at Saltmarsh a man drove a reach stacker into the canteen."
Priya stared at her.
"Nobody was hurt," Nadia said. "The canteen was closed. It was mostly a problem for the vending machine."
Priya's phone buzzed. She looked at it, and her shoulders dropped a fraction. "Okay. That's building management. The new one's printed. I'll have to go and pick it up, their office is in the annex round the corner, and they won't send it over, they never send anything over." She glanced at the guard, who was still on the phone, and then back at Nadia, and Nadia could see her deciding not to make a scene of getting him to buzz the new COO through by hand in front of anyone who might walk by. It was a good instinct. "Okay. Can you wait in the lobby five minutes? I'll grab coffee and fix it. There's a place right across the street, it's actually decent. How do you take it?"
"Black. Large. Whatever's strongest."
"Black, large, strongest." Priya was already backing towards the front doors. "Five minutes. Seriously. Don't go anywhere."
"Where would I go," Nadia said. "I can't get in."
Priya laughed, properly this time, and went out through the glass vestibule into the grey morning, pulling her coat closed against the wet. The outer door hissed shut behind her. Nadia watched her through the glass until she was across the street, dodging a cyclist, ducking under the striped awning of a café with steamed-up windows.
Then she was alone in the lobby of the building she now, in a manner of speaking, ran.
She stood where she was for a moment, the badge hanging against her chest, and simply looked. This was a thing she had done her whole working life and could not stop doing. You stand still in a place and let it tell you how it actually works, as opposed to how the people in charge of it think it works. At Saltmarsh she had spent her first week walking the quay at all hours with a notebook, saying almost nothing, and by the end of it she had known about the broken weighbridge, the supervisor who sold diesel out the back, and the gate clerk who had been quietly doing two people's jobs for three years without being paid for either. Nobody had told her any of it. She had just stood still.
The lobby was long and rectangular, the main entrance at the far end of the right side, set into a wall of floor-to-ceiling glass. The entrance was a deep vestibule, two sets of double glass doors with a little airlock of mat between them, and above the inner pair a red EXIT sign glowed, centred, the letters sharp and slightly too bright, the kind of red that stayed on your eyes when you looked away. Through the glass the street was the colour of wet newspaper. A bus went by, lit up inside, nearly empty. A man with a briefcase over his head ran past.
Along the whole of the right-hand wall, under the windows, was a run of grey modular furniture. Leather, or something trying to be leather, in a soft pewter grey. Armchairs with low square backs, and between them longer sofa sections pushed together to make one long bench with thick seat cushions, the kind that sighed when you sat in them. A couple of low tables in pale oak. A potted plant that was either very healthy or very good plastic. It was a lounge in the way airport lounges are lounges, made to be looked at more than used. Nobody was sitting there. She walked over slowly, the sneakers chirping, and stopped a few feet from the end of the long sofa, by the window, and looked back the way she had come.
From here she could see the whole room. The five gates, the blue lights on their readers, the red light on the one that had refused her. The reception desk, the guard still on the phone, now leaning back in his chair with his eyes shut, saying, "I understand that, sir." Above and behind him, mounted high on the wall where the ceiling met it, a black camera dome no bigger than a grapefruit, angled down to take in the whole width of the lobby. Wide-angle. She knew the model, roughly. No audio on those, usually. You got the picture and had to guess the rest.