Chapter 20: Athena's Parallel Investigation

The strategy corridor on floor nineteen has no windows.

I had noticed this on my first pass through it, the day Athena stopped me in the hall and asked her single question about Neptune's non-fungibility exemption. The corridor runs between two solid walls — no glass offices, no borrowed light from conference rooms, just recessed panels at intervals that produce illumination without visible source. Like everything about this building, it looks like a design choice until you understand it's a condition. Something in here doesn't need windows because something in here has never needed to see out.

I walked it at 9:17 PM with my legal pad under one arm and my jacket still on from Luke's exit and the fold of entry sixty-eight in my chest pocket. The building had thinned to its nighttime skeleton — cleaning staff on the lower floors, a few analysts on fourteen burning through something that had a deadline, the ambient hum of servers on twenty-six that never fully stopped. The kind of quiet that isn't actually quiet. The kind that means the building is listening differently.