The Floor Between Floors

The Halloran Building had forty-two floors, a lobby that smelled permanently of orchids and floor polish, and — according to every blueprint Naomi Reyes had pulled in the last six months — no ninth floor at all.

The elevator disagreed.

She'd been chasing the disappearance of Adrian Kell for eleven weeks, ever since his sister walked into the newsroom with a folder of financial records and a face that had stopped hoping for good news. Kell had been an auditor at Halloran Dynamics. He'd sent his sister one text at 11:47 p.m. on a Tuesday — found something, don't call, call security if I don't check in by Friday — and then nothing. No body. No resignation letter. No badge swipe out of the building, ever, according to the logs Naomi had bribed a security guard eight hundred dollars to let her see.

Only a badge swipe in.

She was standing in the elevator at 9:58 p.m., three days after the guard's shift ended and took her eight hundred dollars with him, holding Kell's actual keycard — stolen from evidence, a fact she was not proud of — and watching the numbers climb. 6. 7. 8.

The elevator slowed.

The display did not show a 9. It showed nothing at all, a small dark gap where a number should be, and then the doors opened onto a hallway lit by the wrong kind of light — the flat, sourceless white of a place that had never seen a window.

Naomi did not move for a long moment.

Then, because eleven weeks was too long to walk away with nothing, she stepped out, and the doors closed behind her with a sound too final for an elevator that, officially, had never stopped there at all.