The young woman turned. Up close she looked even younger, and very tired in the way of somebody who has not slept properly because of the thing she is about to do. There was a small spot of toothpaste on the cuff of her hoodie. Her eyes went to the leather jacket and the sneakers, and then to Nadia's badge, and then back up to her face, and she seemed to decide something.
"It won't let me in," she said. "It says—" She looked at the screen. "It says 'access window begins 08:00.' I'm supposed to start today. I'm early. I wanted to be early. I didn't know it wouldn't work before eight."
"That's a setting," Nadia said. "New starters are set to eight by default. We've been meaning to change it. You're not the first person it's caught." She glanced at the badge in the young woman's hand. It had a photograph on it, a slightly startled one, taken against a white wall, and a name: JOANNA PIKE. Dispatch Planning. "Dispatch," she said. "You'll be on fourteen."
"Yes." Joanna looked at the badge as though it had betrayed her personally. "I've got an induction at nine. Someone called Dev. I just thought I'd be here early and find where everything was so I didn't look stupid."
"Dev will like that. He's always early. He'll probably be up there already, making tea and complaining about the planning system." Nadia turned toward the desk. Sal had got off the phone. He was already halfway round the side of the reception counter, unhurried, with the clipboard he used for escorts in one hand, the way the card said he should be, and the way six weeks ago he would not have been.
"New starter, Sal," Nadia said. "Access window's set to eight. She's dispatch, she's early. I'll escort her up if you log it."
"No problem." Sal took the badge from Joanna, looked at it, looked at her, and smiled. "Nice photo," he said. "Did I take that?"
"Last week," Joanna said. "When I came in for the paperwork. You told me to lift my chin."
"Good. It worked." He wrote on the clipboard. "Pike. Fourteen. Escorted by," he glanced at Nadia, and Nadia could see him decide, in the fraction of a second it took, not to say her title, "Nadia. Seven twenty-four." He handed the badge back. "I'll put a note in for Marcus about the time window. That's the third this month."
"Thanks, Sal."
Sal went back behind the desk. Nadia held her own badge to the reader of the right-hand gate. It chirped and the glass panels slid apart. She stepped through and turned and held her hand over the sensor so it stayed open, and Joanna came through after her, quickly, as if she still half expected an alarm.
They walked toward the lifts. Joanna's trainers squeaked a little on the tile, wet still, and she winced at the sound and then seemed to decide not to care.
"Thanks," she said. "Sorry. I didn't mean to be a problem."
"You weren't a problem. The gate was a problem." Nadia pressed the call button. "That's different. Remember that, on fourteen. Half of what goes wrong in this building is a setting somebody didn't change. Don't apologise for those. Tell somebody."
Joanna nodded. The lift was coming down from eleven; they watched the numbers. She hitched her rucksack higher on her shoulder.
"Do you work in dispatch too?"
"I spend a lot of time there," Nadia said, which was true.
"I'm Jo," the young woman said, and then, remembering, "Joanna. Jo."
"Nadia."
They shook hands. Jo's hand was cold and slightly damp and her grip was firmer than Nadia had expected. Nadia liked her for it.
The lift arrived. The doors opened onto mirrored walls and the smell of carpet cleaner. Jo stepped in and turned, and her eyes went to the panel of buttons, and Nadia reached past her and pressed fourteen.
"You're not coming?"
"In a minute," Nadia said. "I want to look at something."
"Okay." Jo hesitated. Then she said, in a rush, as the doors began to close, "Is it a good place? To work? I've only been to the interviews."
The doors were halfway shut. Nadia put her hand on the edge of one and it bounced back open, patiently.
"It's getting better," she said. "Ask Dev to show you the spreadsheet. He'll pretend he doesn't know what you mean. He does."
Jo laughed, a short surprised laugh, and the doors closed on it, and the numbers above them began to climb.
Nadia stood for a moment in the quiet. Then she walked back across the lobby, past the gates, to where the matting ended and the tiles began, and stopped near the place she had stood seven weeks ago. She had not meant to come to this spot. She had come to it anyway. It was just a place on a floor. There was nothing on the tiles to mark it, no scuff, no stain, only the long rectangles of reflected light from the ceiling and her own blurred reflection standing in one of them.
To her right the grey sofa sat along the window wall, its cushions square and smooth. Somebody had left a newspaper folded on one end. Beyond the glass the street was beginning to fill: a woman with a pushchair, two men in hi-vis jackets carrying coffee, a cyclist with a plastic bag over his saddle. The light was coming up slowly, white and thin, the kind of December light that never quite gets going. A taxi pulled in at the kerb and nobody got out of it for a while.
She looked at the sofa for a long moment. She didn't feel anything dramatic about it. It was a sofa. Someone would sit there at lunchtime and eat a sandwich and scroll through their phone and never know that anything had happened on it, and that seemed right to her, the way it was right that roads got resurfaced and yards got repainted and the places where things went wrong eventually became just places again. What was left of that morning was not here. It was in a patch on a turnstile controller and a webcam on a printer, in a card behind a badge that said see four, in a forty-one page binder and a robin on a stamp and a guard who had learned to lift people's chins for their photographs. It was in a young woman going up to fourteen who would never hear the story at all, or would hear the wrong version first and then, if she was lucky, from somebody like Owen, the right one.
Above the doors, the red EXIT sign glowed steadily, the letters bright against the grey of the morning outside. The air conditioning hummed. At the desk Sal was on the phone again, nodding, writing something down.
Nadia took hold of the lapels of her jacket and gave them a small tug, not hard, the way you straighten a thing out of habit before you start work. The leather was still cold from the ride. Her badge sat straight on her chest.
Then she turned and walked back to the gates, and held her card to the reader, and it chirped, and let her through, and she went up.