Chapter 6

The door stood open just enough for the draft blowing in from the street to rock it lazily, monotonously, back and forth.

A creak. A pause of a couple of seconds. A creak.

I knew that sound. Five years of renting the place — long enough to learn everything: which floorboard creaks on the third step from the landing, how the radiator pipe rattles at the first frost, exactly how this door behaves when the winter wind finds the gap between the jamb and the warped wood. But there was something new in the creak now. Almost mocking. The door swung back and forth, as if inviting me in.

I stood on the opposite side of the street, chin tucked into the collar of my coat.

London has thousands of doors. Every day someone in a hurry forgets to lock one of them. But this door was mine. And I remembered last night far too well. Two turns of the key. A tug on the handle. A shove with my shoulder. Check it once more.

It was an old habit, born about three years ago when some vagrant had spent the night in the warmth of my office and walked off with two monitors, mistaking them for something valuable. Since then I never left without making sure the lock had caught for good. Sometimes I'd catch myself replaying the ritual in my head while already lying in bed — two turns, tug, shoulder — as if my body needed the confirmation before it would let me fall asleep.

The phone in my pocket buzzed briefly again. No new messages had come in — I'd just reread the last one, from Helen:

Don't go back to the office. Whatever you do.

Good, sound advice. Too bad it was late. Because less than twenty steps of wet asphalt stood between me and the door.

I looked around, hunted. A courier in an acid-green jacket chatted cheerfully on the phone, hopping over a puddle with the ease of someone who does it twenty times a day. A woman with a pram, coffee cup clamped between her teeth, fought fiercely with a broken umbrella. At the bus stop, two teenagers argued loudly about last night's football match — their voices, bright and carefree, grated on my ears with their sheer, absolute normalcy. The world around me kept living its lazy, familiar life, as if nothing had happened at all.

That was always the thing about serious trouble that irritated me. It happens only to you. Exclusively. For everyone else, the universe stays exactly the same — with its buses, its takeaway coffee, its arguments about last night's match.

I took a deep breath and crossed the street.

The heavy wooden door gave way under my palm almost silently — too easily, for a door I'd believed was locked tight. Inside it smelled the way it always did — old dry wood, decades of dust, damp worked into the plaster by generations of London winters. And something else. Fresh, just-brewed coffee.

I froze on the first step. That smell was very recent — too distinct, too alive against the usual mustiness, its trail not yet dissolved in the draft of the stairwell.

The staircase was empty. Every board creaked quietly under my soles — I knew those sounds by heart, could have named the step number by tone alone, blindfolded. Second floor. The corridor lit in the grey, joyless light of the single grimy window at the end. My door. Also ajar — just a finger's width. As if whoever had come out of it had been in a hurry, but hadn't wanted to draw attention with a loud slam.

Slowly, with just my fingertips, I pushed the door open.

The hinges, which I'd meant to oil for months and never gotten around to, were silent today.

The office met me with a dead, ringing silence. The first thing my eyes fixed on was my desk chair. Sitting in exactly the position I'd left it. The monitors dark, black rectangles reflecting the grey rectangle of the window. On the whiteboard — yesterday's diagrams, arrows and route structures, now looking like the absurd hieroglyphs of some long-dead language.

But something in the room had shifted, imperceptibly. The geometry of the space had turned foreign — the way it does when you come back to your own flat after a long trip away and for a split second don't recognize the arrangement of the furniture, even though objectively nothing has moved.

I didn't understand what it was right away, not until my eyes caught on the edge of the desk.

My mug. White, with the old chip by the handle — the one that had appeared back in the first year of the lease, when I'd dropped it in a hurry and made do with instant from the machine in the hall for a week afterward. Right now, in the cool office air, a thin, thread-like wisp of steam was rising from it, curling and fading a few centimeters above the rim.

I stepped closer, barely breathing. Touched the rough ceramic with my fingers.

Hot. Hot enough that my fingers jerked back almost on instinct.

Someone had been drinking coffee out of it just minutes ago.

I spun around. The office was completely empty. Not behind the cabinet, not in the dark corner by the door. I lunged for the window — the street below lay open like the palm of a hand, wet, gleaming, full of people under umbrellas. No one was running. No one was looking around. The stranger had simply dissolved into the air, along with the steam over the mug.

I turned back to the desk. A little dark liquid still sat at the bottom of the mug. A tiny coffee bubble floated lazily on its glossy surface. It hadn't even popped yet — a detail so small and absurd that, somehow, it frightened me more than anything else.

I set the mug back down and only now noticed the second strange thing.

My laptop's keyboard had been shifted slightly to the left. A couple of centimeters, literally. An ordinary person would never have noticed. But I'd worked at this desk almost every day for the last five years. Always set the laptop dead center on the suede mat. Always. Now it sat at a barely perceptible angle — as if someone had pushed it aside to make room for their elbows, then put it back without quite enough care.

I flipped the lid open sharply. The screen filled with cold white light without even asking for a password. I was rock-solid certain I'd fully locked the system last night — the gesture had long since become as automatic as breathing.

The desktop looked ordinary. Almost. In the bottom right corner, a small system notification blinked — a tiny white rectangle. One new text file. I hadn't created it.

Filename: 0821.txt

I stared at those digits for a few seconds, feeling a dull, clinging dread building inside me. Then double-clicked.

Inside, only one line was typed:

You've finally started checking what you see. Now try checking what you remember.

No signature. No date inside the file.

My fingers moved across the trackpad on their own — I pulled up the file properties. Date created: 08:21. Today.

I slowly moved my eyes to the wall clock — a plain mechanical one, its second hand always a little behind, which I'd never bothered to replace. The hands read 08:42.

Twenty-one minutes. Whoever had left this message on my locked computer had walked out of the office twenty-one minutes ago. While I was standing across the street watching the door swing, he'd still been here. Maybe he'd seen me from this window. Maybe he'd been coming down the stairs while I was going up.

I lunged back to the window, nearly knocking over the chair. Down on the street, dozens of perfectly ordinary people bustled, hurried, jostled shoulders. Jackets, umbrellas, coats, hoods — a grey, rain-blurred mass in which it was impossible to pick out a single specific face.

And for the first time in this entire insane morning, I clearly understood one very unpleasant thing.

I had no idea which one of them I was even supposed to be looking for.