Chapter 12: What Luke Actually Wants

The badge number came back at 6:14 the next morning.

I was already at my workstation. I had been there since 5:50, which was not a choice I made consciously so much as a fact I discovered when the elevator deposited me on floor twelve before I had fully decided to get on it. The building was doing that thing it sometimes did before the rest of the staff arrived — settling into something older than itself, the mineral smell sharper, the hum in the walls carrying a frequency that seemed to come from below the subbasement rather than the trading floor.

Griffin's message arrived through the rotating burner thread. Seven digits, then a name.