Chapter 15 Rooms Not on the Plan

Dez did not tell her the whole of it that night. He told her the shape of it, which was enough to work with, and the shape was that the study had a floor beneath it that was not on the fire plan, and that the fire plan was on the wall by the lift, and that the fire plan was the only map of the building a participant was ever given, and that this was, when you thought about it, the whole problem with the building. The fire plan showed the fifth floor as a ring: the common room, the corridors, five berths, the drying room, the Gallery, the staff office, the lift. Cleo had walked that ring a hundred times in the weeks and knew every door on it, and none of the doors opened onto a stair going down, and the lift went to four and to six and never stopped at five again on the way back, which she had always put down to the lift being old. On the twenty-third night she counted the loop of the corridor with her body instead of her eyes. She walked it at the blue hour, with the tap of her own step as a metronome, and she counted the doors, and she came to twenty-one doors, and then she walked the ring again and counted twenty-two. The twenty-second door was at the place where the corridor made its last turn before coming back to the berths, and it was painted the same colour as the wall and had no handle, and when she pressed it, at the place where a handle would be, it moved. Beyond it were stairs going down, narrow and unlit, with a rail worn shiny at the height of a hand. She went down, because she had already found it and there is no version of a person like Cleo who finds a stair and goes back up, and at the bottom was a floor laid out like the fifth floor but older, the same ring of corridors with the same turn, the berths painted over and their numbers still faintly visible under the paint, and at the end of the ring, where the Gallery was on her own floor, a room with a sign that said *observation* and a window that had been painted on the inside. She looked through the window with her sleeve. The room beyond was a berth, not a control room: a bed, a desk, a terminal, a speaker grille set into the wall at the height of a collarbone. It had been used recently. The bed had the shallow dent of a body that had lain in it a long time, and on the door there was a nameplate, and the nameplate had not been scraped. It was grey with years of dust except in the middle, where it had been wiped, as if someone had stood in front of it and read it with a thumb, and the reading had left a clean rectangle in the grime, and in the clean rectangle was a name she had seen every morning on her own forms. It said *C-14*. Behind her, on the stair, a door closed. Cleo did not turn around, because she had learned by now that turning around in this building was how you ended up in a file you had not signed, and instead she read the nameplate once more, and then she walked the lower ring with her hand flat on the wall, all the way around, counting the berths under the paint, and she got to five, and gave each one a number of her own, and when she reached the end she had counted six. Six berths on the floor below. Five on the floor above. And a study, according to the schedule on the common-room wall, that had only ever had five members in cohort C. There was a stack of paper on the lower floor, on a desk at the end of the ring where the staff office was on her own floor, and Cleo took the top sheet off the stack because a stack of paper in an unmarked room is a stack of paper that has been left where it fell, and the sheet was a Recall Sheet R-1, and the sheet was blank, and the box at the top for the study number had been filled in, in her handwriting, with C-14. A blank Recall Sheet is not evidence of anything. That was what she told herself on the walk back up, in the voice she had been using all week for the sentences she did not want to keep. It was a form. The building had hundreds of forms. A form with her number on it could have been put there by any of the people who had copied her number off a sheet at any point in the last twenty-two nights, and the hand that had filled in the number was a hand that could be copied, and she had already decided, in the ninth day, that a forger who could copy her *g* and her *t* did not need her to have signed anything. But a stack of blank forms with her number on the top is a stack of forms that are waiting for someone, and the someone is the number, and the rooms on the lower floor were berths with the numbers painted over and there were six of them, and the fire plan on the wall by the lift showed five. She stopped at the turn where the twenty-second door was and looked at the wall, and the door had been painted over again, in the last day, in a slightly different shade, and the paint was still soft at the edge when she put her thumb on it, which meant that whoever had closed the stair behind her had done it in the last few hours, and had done it by hand, and had been careful enough to repaint the door but not careful enough to match the colour. She stood in the corridor with a thumbprint of wet paint on her thumb and understood that the building was being adjusted around her, live, by people who were watching the records and were not watching her, and that the only reason she was still finding things was that nobody in the building believed a participant would count doors. She found one more thing on the lower floor, and it was the thing that stayed with her afterwards, because it was the smallest object she had seen in the whole building and it did not belong to her. There was a berth at the far end of the ring with its door standing open, and the room inside had been occupied recently enough that the air still smelled of a person, and on the shelf above the desk there were three objects arranged the way a person arranges the last of her things when she is about to be moved: a plastic brush, a paperback with a cracked spine, and a library card. Cleo stood in the doorway and looked at the three objects for a while. The brush was not hers. The paperback was not a book she had read. But the library card was from the branch on Larkmoor Road, the one near the stationer where she had bought the notebook, and the name printed on it in the small grey font of the city system was not the name of anyone she had ever met, and it was also not quite a name at all, because the last three letters had been worn away by a thumb and the rest of it was too common to search for. She stood in that doorway longer than she should have, because a room that has just been emptied tells you more about what is happening to a person than a room that has just been filled, and what it told her was that the lower floor was not a storage floor and not an archive and not a room with a chair in it, and that the word on the sign, *observation*, was not a description of the equipment but a description of the job. Somebody was observed down here. Somebody sat in that berth and was watched through a window painted on the inside, and then one day the berth was empty and the objects were still on the shelf, and nobody had come back for the brush, and Cleo walked back up the worn rail with her hand at the height of a hand and did not look at the nameplate again on the way past. In the morning the fire plan by the lift had been replaced with a new one, and the new one had a twenty-second door. ---