Episode 7: The Vault on Sixty-Two

The Sixty-First Floor, with Ines Calder

Previously: Ines pulled Hatch aside instead of the whole team and told her whose hand had written the note in the blueprint’s margin: Alden Voss, a man she had once worked for and whose signature she had spent four years learning to forge well enough to fool his own lawyers. Hatch did not ask why Ines knew that so precisely, which was itself a kind of answer.

The stairwell past the sixty-first floor was not on any blueprint the city had ever stamped, and it ran up instead of down, concrete steps with no handrail on one side. Dov counted two flights and called it the sixty-second floor before anyone had seen a door, going by nothing but the ache in his knees and a habit he had picked up counting floors since Episode 2. Buttress took the stairs without complaint this time, which worried Leland more than the stairs themselves did.

The door at the top had no knob, only a keypad gone dark and a hand-lettered sign that read TALLY OFFICE RECORDS in the same blue ink as the margin note. Hatch put her shoulder into it once out of habit before trying the handle instead, and the door opened on a room lined floor to ceiling with gray steel drawers, each one labeled with a name and nothing else. The air smelled like cold metal and the inside of a filing cabinet that had never once been aired out.

Ines walked the aisles the way she used to walk a job site before the demolition crew arrived, counting exits before she counted anything else. Dov found the drawer first, two-thirds of the way down the third aisle, and he said her last name out loud before he fully understood he was reading it off a label. CALDER, it said, nothing else, no first name, no file number, the kind of label a man writes when he already knows exactly whose it is.

The drawer slid open without resistance, oiled recently by somebody who still cared whether it worked. Inside lay a single folder, thinner than Ines had expected and heavier than it looked, tied shut with the same kind of string the Tally Office used on its satchels. Someone had written a date on the tab in Voss’s hand, a date Ines recognized immediately because it was the day she had quit working for him.

“That’s yours,” Hatch said, and did not reach for it.

Ines stood with the folder in both hands and the rest of the team watching her the way they had not watched her since the elevator doors first closed on the sixty-first floor, waiting to see what she would do with something that was, for once, actually hers.

The Vote

Does Ines read the folder here or take it?

Vote in the LinkedIn poll, and Episode 8 gets written from whatever wins.

Read it right here: She unties the string in the vault, in front of everyone.

Take it, read later: She pockets it and leaves the vault before answering any questions.

Hand it to Dov: She has Dov read it first and tell her what it says.

Leave it behind: She closes the drawer and walks out without it.