Chapter 3

The lock stuck on the second turn — I'd meant to replace it since the day I rented the place, and never had. I forced the key round a third time and shouldered the heavy door open.

"After you," I said, and immediately felt like an idiot — there was nothing behind the gesture, just ingrained politeness that had no business surviving a night like this.

Helen stepped in without a word. I flipped the switch.

The yellow light of a single incandescent bulb fell unevenly across the room, leaving the corners in half-shadow. Dust, old books, dry machine oil. Helen stopped at the threshold, took in the massive oak table buried under blueprints, scraps of hardware, stacks of printouts — and said nothing. Didn't ask what it was. Wasn't surprised.

That put me slightly on edge.

"There's no network here," I said. "None at all. No phone line either. This one" — I nodded at the old ThinkPad in the middle of the table — "I bought at a flea market for twenty pounds. The Wi-Fi and Bluetooth chips are physically desoldered. It hasn't seen the internet in over ten years."

"Understood," Helen said. She'd already taken off her gloves and was unbuttoning her coat — businesslike, not looking at me, like someone who'd come to work.

I switched the ThinkPad on. The machine answered with the strained, rasping hum of an old fan — the exact same sound as ten years ago. Some things don't change. While it booted, I pushed the second chair over to Helen — wobbly, with a cracked crossbar — and spread part of the printouts from the grey folder across the table.

For a few minutes we worked in silence.

I wrote out dates in two columns: the official liquidation date of the archive file on the left, the actual closure date of the linked bank account on the right. In a third of the cases, they matched to the day. In the rest, they were off by anywhere from a few hours to two days. The bank date was almost always earlier than the archive date. As if someone — or something — closed the financial loop first, and only afterward, with a delay, synchronized the rest.

Helen worked differently. She didn't write anything down — she looked. Picked up a sheet, tilted it toward the lamp, set it down. Picked up the next one. Her fingers moved methodically, almost mechanically, like someone who'd done the same thing for years.

"This doesn't look like a hack," I said, not looking up from my column. "A hack is an intrusion — an entry point, a trace. This looks more like a procedure."

"A bureaucratic purge," she said. "Yes."

I looked up. She wasn't looking at me — she was looking at the sheet in her hands. Then, very carefully, she set it face-down on the table.

The pause was brief, but I caught it.

"What is it?" I asked.

"Nothing," Helen said. "Keep going."

I kept going. The pencil scratched across the paper. The ThinkPad hummed on, steady and monotonous. Somewhere outside, at ceiling level, tires hissed over wet asphalt — and then silence again.

About twenty minutes later I reached for the next sheet in the stack and caught, from the corner of my eye, that Helen had stopped moving.

She was sitting very straight. Both hands flat on the table. In front of her, a single sheet she'd been reading for longer than a moment now. Reading it without turning it over.

"Helen."

She didn't answer right away. Then she slowly raised her head. Her expression was the kind people get when they've received the answer to a question they were afraid to ask.

"Show me," I said.

She looked at me for a few seconds. Then she turned the sheet over and set it in front of me.

A standard ledger sheet. Two columns, eighteen rows. Left — identification numbers. Right — name fields, most of them blank. Not deleted — blank, as if they'd never been filled in at all.

Row twelve. A number that, judging by its format, belonged to the internal-auditor category. Name field — blank. But beside it, in a notes column I hadn't noticed at first, someone had written in pencil: E.C. — close, technical error.

I looked at Helen.

"Is this your identification number?"

"Yes," she said evenly. "And that's my handwriting."

The silence in the basement changed — grew thick, like cotton wool.

"You wrote this note yourself," I said slowly.

"Five years ago. My manager said: close it as a technical artifact. I closed it." A pause. "I didn't check whose number it was. I had a mortgage and a probation period behind me, and it was one line in a ledger of a hundred and forty."

She took the sheet back, carefully squaring it against the edge of the table.

"I was on the list from the start," she said calmly. "I just didn't know it."

I couldn't find anything to say. She wasn't waiting for an answer anyway — she picked up the next sheet from the stack and kept working. Only her fingers moved a little slower now.

I went back to my columns.

Another half hour or so passed. I was tired — I didn't realize it right away, the lines simply stopped adding up to meaning at some point, and the pencil set itself down. I only meant to lean back in the chair for a second.

I came to because my shoulder had gone numb.

The chair across from me was pushed in under the table, neat to the centimeter. Perfect order. As if no one had ever sat in it.

On the edge of the table lay a sheet folded in half — torn out of my own notepad. A few lines in a quick, surprisingly neat hand:

I'm sorry. There was something I needed to check in person. If I come back, you'll understand why. If not… don't look for me on the network.

No signature. She knew she didn't need one.

I stared at the even ink for a few seconds — and only then noticed what I'd written on the sheet above it, before I'd blacked out: I need to make a note in the local file. The first half of a sentence, cut off in the middle.

I looked over at the ThinkPad's screen.

In the bottom right corner, on the old grey taskbar, a small digital clock was blinking.

I stared at it for a few seconds, refusing to believe my own eyes. Then slowly moved my gaze to my mechanical wristwatch — old, scratched glass, bought at the Portobello flea market back before smartwatches became the norm. Then back to the screen.

On the old IBM, physically connected to no network on earth, the clock showed perfect, absolutely precise time.

22:12

And the date. Today's date. Monday.

My breath caught. The internal clocks of old computers always drift, fast or slow, without network sync. The motherboard battery in this laptop should have died five years ago. On boot, the machine should have thrown a standard BIOS error and reset the time to some default — somewhere back in the nineties.

I forced myself to think like an engineer. The RTC battery could have turned out unexpectedly resilient — rare, but it happens. Someone could have come in here without me and set the time by hand — the lock was old, unlikely, but not impossible. I lined the theories up by probability. None of them felt convincing.

This machine knows today's date. It has no way of knowing that.

From above, from the street side, came a dull, shuffling sound — someone had walked up to the basement window, barred with thick iron grating. I killed the lamp instantly.

Through the narrow horizontal window near the ceiling, the pale light of a streetlamp fell in. There, on the pavement, right by the grating, stood a man. A very old man in a worn wool coat and a flat cap, thin grey hair escaping from under it. In his hand he gripped a battered umbrella-cane, leaning on it heavily with both hands, bent slightly forward. The umbrella was closed — it wasn't raining — but he held it like a support. The way people hold themselves who find it hard to stand, but stand anyway.

For several long seconds he didn't move. Then he slowly turned his gaze along the street — not at me specifically, more as if checking against something only he could see. Maybe he'd just stopped to catch his breath. London is full of old men who walk in the evenings in any weather, because all that waits for them at home is silence.

But he didn't move on.

Something about the way he stood — not his face, not his gaze, but exactly this stillness at the grating of a stranger's basement — made me believe he wasn't just resting.

I didn't know him. But it seemed he knew the way here better than I did.

The old man never moved. He stood in the mist, leaning on his cane, with that particular calm of a man who has nowhere left to rush to — and who might have been waiting for this evening far longer than I could have guessed.