Chapter 18: The Thing Between Them, Named at Last

The debrief was scheduled for 2100 hours and ran until the building forgot about them.

Carol noticed it happen in increments — the way the ventilation cycle shifted to its lower overnight setting, the corridor lights outside the glass panel dimming to maintenance level, the ambient hum of the facility settling into the particular frequency it adopted when most of its occupants had gone home or gone to sleep. She had run enough late operations to recognize the sound of institutional forgetting. The building was no longer accounting for them, which meant no one was watching the clock on their behalf, which meant the clock had stopped mattering somewhere around the third time they'd circled back to the same operational question from a different angle and neither of them had noticed.

She noticed now.