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That got a small smile from Carter. “I’m not not happy. Graphic design is almost art sometimes, when they let you be creative about it. It’s happened once or twice. Anyway, that’s my work done. You guys can take it from here.”

Greer placed a hand on Carter’s arm, her face soft in gratitude without saying a thing. Dale gave him a small salute no one else could see. Jack, for his part, offered a hand that Carter took in a reluctant but firm shake. And as quickly as the group had reassembled, it dissolved again. The three newfound strangers left, pseudo-blueprints in hand, a cool breath from the sigh of lost years settling into steady rhythm between them. Jack found himself wondering, not for the first time, if he could still be Jack McCoy without the people who made him feel most like himself.

• • •

Margaret’s cubicle, along with the rest of the Murder department, was situated on the first floor of the S.C.Y.T.H.E. offices, near its break room. It meant Jack would need a good excuse to use the one on the floor above him. Thankfully, Jack was always full of excuses.

When he’d first taken over Margaret, he’d made a promise to himself, and to the part of her he could still feel hanging out in there beside him, that he’d take care of her things. He’d mostly lived up to that promise, but cleaning out the fridge was something he’d hated doing in life and wasn’t keen to spend even a moment doing in his afterlife. He could chalk that up to laziness, or hedonism, but just now he decided it was because he somehow knew he’d eventually have a use for rancid yogurt. It meant sacrificing one of Margaret’s designer tote bags, but smuggling the dairy stink bomb into the office incurred far less scrutiny than when he’d attempted a similar feat in an effort to get out of an eighth-grade math test. By ten a.m., the main-floor break room was officially out of commission, forcing a mass lunchtime exodus to the second floor and giving Jack a reason to linger up there without raising too many questions.

Lunch hour eventually came to an end and agents from both the first and second floors slowly trickled out of the break room and back to work. Jack had made a show of blowing on each individual noodle from his microwave chicken penne until no steam or sauce remained, chewing each bite no less than forty-five times and taking a long sip of juice in between. When his last coworker had wrapped the crusts of her ham sandwich back in their tinfoil, he still had a quarter of his meal remaining. He returned the woman’s smile as she left the room and then promptly threw the last of the freezer-burned pasta into the trash. Then he shut the door and set to work.

There had been no door in the hallway, which meant that, if it still existed at all, the entrance to the Room of Records had to be in here. Jack had spent the morning trying to imagine what a bunch of corporate Victorians would have dreamed up for a secret door, but given what little he knew about the era, all he could think was that it wouldn’t involve sex or smiling in photographs. He’d hoped for one of those bricks you pushed that made all the other bricks around it open up into a doorway, but despite the somewhat mystical nature of this job, he didn’t think S.C.Y.T.H.E. operated under cartoon logic.

Jack pulled open every cabinet along the far wall, shifting mugs and cartons of tea in case there was something helpful behind them. In the end, the cabinets turned out to be cabinets, the mugs just mugs, and the tea heavily apple-forward but otherwise unsuspicious. He slid the trash bin away from the wall, crawled under the table, felt around every floor tile. Nothing.

He was still on his hands and knees when the break room door opened. Jack’s head whipped up. In the doorway stood the exclamation point of a woman from the archives. She looked down at Jack. Jack looked up at her. They held each other’s gaze for longer than was comfortable. Jack’s arthritic knees were cramping. His borrowed boobs grazed the floor. He needed to think fast before his whole body remembered how old it was and completely gave up on him. Maybe he could say he dropped his glasses? But Margaret didn’t wear any, and that would be pretty evident around the office by now. He could say he was hiding from someone, but who? And why? Every excuse he could think of was something Jack would do, not Margaret. What would bring an eighty-year-old woman to her knees under a break room table? Only absolute filth rose up to answer that question.

Something clicked on somewhere deep down, below Jack’s essence, where Margaret still resided.

“Yoga,” he said. It felt like a burp. Like something he didn’t mean to release but that needed to come out and so it pushed its way into the world. “Under-table yoga. It’s supposed to be really good for staying limber. And keeping your floors clean.”

The woman narrowed her sharp eyes but didn’t ask any follow-up questions. Instead she went to a cabinet and popped an apple-cinnamon tea bag into a mug. Jack wobbled stiffly to his feet. He’d looked everywhere at this point. Where the hell was this entryway? Then he spotted it. The fridge. The only object in the room he hadn’t looked behind. But there was no way he could move that thing by himself in this body. He looked over at the woman from the archives, who was currently microwaving her tea in a way that made Margaret squirm from deep down inside their shared shell. The archives woman didn’t have much meat on her angular bones, but she also probably didn’t suffer from loss of bone density.

“The first-floor break room’s pretty gnarly, huh?” said Jack.

The woman took a sip of her tea. “They forgot to warn me.”

“Yeah, some asshole—some rascal left an open yogurt in there. It’s basically a dairy stink bomb. Someone said it exploded.”

The woman scrunched her face, lowering her mug mid-sip.

“Don’t think we’ll be back in there for a while,” Jack continued. “Unfortunately, someone dropped their yogurt behind this fridge today, can you believe it?”

“Has maintenance been informed?”

“Yeah, but—you’re new here, right? You wouldn’t know this, but our janitor has this policy about fridges. He won’t move them. They’d let him go, but he’s married to one of the manager’s sisters, it’s a whole thing.”

“Nepotism gone mad,” said the woman.

Jack hmm-ed his agreement. “We could always move it, I guess. Save this break room from going the way of the first floor. You definitely don’t want to have to use the one on four. They’re crazy up there. Not enough sunlight or something.”

The woman sucked her teeth. “I suppose we could.”

“I’ll pull if you push.”

A few moments later and they were two bread slices in a fridge sandwich. The woman was unexpectedly strong and so, to Jack’s great surprise, was Margaret. Maybe there was something to this under-table yoga thing. Within a handful of minutes, the fridge was shifted from its home, a rectangle of grime surrounding the patch of floor on which it had stood like a chalk outline at a crime scene.

“Where’s the yogurt?” the woman asked, but Jack wasn’t listening. He was too busy staring at a faint etching in the wall behind where the fridge had been.

13

Alone in the break room again, Jack traced his fingers along the brick wall behind the fridge. A crack extended down, up, and across in straight lines: the faint outline of a door. Jack’s heart rate picked up as he felt the cool air seeping through from whatever lay on the other side. He hadn’t felt this rush of adrenaline since long before he’d died, and part of him had believed he never would again. This wasn’t just his standard heist, either: a casual convenience store robbery or restaurant till theft. This was some Indiana Jones shit.

He pushed against the hidden door, but nothing happened. There had to be a way in. He scanned the bricks again, running over each one with his eyes and fingertips until he spotted a tiny, almost imperceptible symbol etched into a brick toward the middle left of the door. A scythe crossed with an arrow pointing upward—S.C.Y.T.H.E.’s logo. Steadying his hand, Jack pressed the brick. Maybe the company really did operate under cartoon logic. Something rumbled from the other side of the wall. Jack held his breath. The bricks didn’t magically gape open for him, but the one that he pressed spun away from him and into the inner side of the wall, revealing a brass doorknob circled with a dainty filigree on the other side. Jack tossed a cautious glance behind him, then grabbed the handle and gave a twist.

The door creaked open with an exhale of cold, stale air. The world beyond sat in a heavy sort of darkness that seemed almost annoyed at the disturbance. Jack pulled his phone from his purse and switched on the flashlight, illuminating more bricks that stacked into a narrow passageway surrounding the top of a winding iron staircase. He chanced one more look into the break room, the fluorescent light beyond the dark passageway like the sun during an eclipse. The room remained still and empty. Nothing had changed anywhere except in his perception of this place, which had been relatively bland up until roughly twenty seconds ago. He eased the door closed behind himself and started down the stairs. The steps clanked beneath his heels, the staircase itself trembling slightly at the affront of being used. Jack decided it must be safe all the same. Someone was using it to store and retrieve the Master List every month, after all.

He wound down deeper into the belly of the building. He must have passed the first floor by now. And maybe even the archives. And yet the staircase continued, round and round, down and down, until it came to an abrupt stop on a roughly carved stone floor. The walls around him were of similar stone, jagged and mismatched and yet somehow unmistakably, artfully sturdy. On the wall across from him hung a whiteboard with markers of various colors Velcroed to it. The phrase “Dream it, believe it, achieve it” ran along the top in bubble letters. The main text consisted of dates next to initials scribbled beside them in different hands. Countless colors stained the surface of the whiteboard from years, maybe decades, of use.