The Nightmare Architect

Floor Thirteen

"Cole. Get up here. Now."

Marcus's voice cracked through my radio, thin in a way I hadn't heard from him before.

I set my coffee down on the security desk. "Which floor."

"Thirteen."

I almost laughed. "There's no thirteen. The panel skips it. Every tower in this city does."

"Then somebody reprogrammed the elevator, because I'm staring at the display right now. It says thirteen. Car's been parked there six minutes. Doors won't open."

I grabbed my flashlight off the charger and headed for the east bank of elevators, boots echoing through the empty lobby. The Meridian looked different at midnight. Fifty-two stories of glass and steel, quiet as a held breath, every light in the atrium timed to shut off at eleven sharp except the ones over the front desk. Marble floors polished so clean they threw my own reflection back at me, distorted and pale under the exit signs. Somewhere above me an HVAC unit clicked on and off, the only sound in a building that housed four hundred sleeping people. I used to design buildings like this one. Now I patrolled them with a flashlight and a radio clipped to a rental uniform two sizes too big.

Marcus met me at the elevator bank, arms crossed, staring at the number thirteen glowing red above the doors like it had personally offended him. He was a big guy, built like he'd played linebacker somewhere back in high school, but right now he looked smaller than usual, shoulders pulled in tight, weight rocking heel to toe the way people do when they want to be somewhere else.

"You sure this isn't a glitch," I said.

"I've worked this building four years. I know every quirk it's got. This isn't one of them."

"Could be the software update they pushed last week."

"Could be." He didn't sound like he believed it either. "Panel's supposed to skip straight from twelve to fourteen. That's how it's been since the day this place opened. Now all of a sudden it's showing a floor that doesn't exist and it won't let go of it."

The doors opened before I could answer. Empty car, lights flickering, a smell coming off it like wet stone and something underneath that. Copper, maybe. Old pennies. The kind of smell you get standing too close to a butcher's counter at closing time.

"Tell me you smell that too," Marcus said.

"I smell it."

Neither of us stepped in. I'd read the blueprints for this tower before Preston Vale stole them out from under me and put his name on the plaque in the lobby. I knew where every floor should land. Thirteen wasn't supposed to exist. The building went twelve, then fourteen, same superstition every American high rise carries since 1900. But I also remembered something from the original drawings, the ones I drafted myself before he cut me out. A gap in the structural plans. A floor with no stated purpose, sealed off, load bearing walls twice the thickness they needed to be.

I'd assumed it was a mechanical floor. Standard stuff. HVAC, elevator machinery, nothing worth a second look. I'd walked past that gap in the drawings a hundred times without asking a single question about it, too busy chasing deadlines and chasing Vale's approval to care what sat behind it.

Now I wasn't so sure that was an accident either.

"You're the one who used to build these things," Marcus said. "This normal to you?"

"Nothing about this building is normal, and you know it. Three deaths in eighteen months. Tenants breaking leases early. Vale's own PR team can't spin it anymore." I stepped closer to the open car, careful not to cross the threshold. "You ever ask yourself why a five-star architecture firm can't keep occupancy above sixty percent in a building this nice."

"I ask myself why you took a job here instead of literally anywhere else in the city."

Fair question. I could've told him the truth, that no firm in Atlanta would touch my name after the bribery charges, that a wrongful conviction doesn't un-ruin a resume just because a judge eventually tosses it out on appeal. I could've told him I slept in my car for two months before my brother Eli talked his manager into getting me this job. I could've told him about the calls I made to twenty-two firms in one week, the same polite refusal every time, the way a career can vanish in the time it takes someone to read a headline.

Instead I said, "Somebody's got to watch the building Vale built on my design."

Marcus didn't push it further. He knew enough of my story from six months of overnight shifts together, the kind of story that comes out in pieces at three in the morning when there's nothing else to do but talk. He knew about the bribery charge that gutted my license. He knew Vale used to be my partner before he became my enemy. What Marcus didn't know, what I'd never told anyone, was that I still had a set of the original Meridian blueprints saved on a hard drive Vale never found, and that I'd been quietly checking them against the real building for weeks, floor by floor, on nights exactly like this one.

The numbers never lined up. Every floor from fourteen to fifty-two matched. Every floor except the one that supposedly didn't exist.

"You ever hear anything weird up here before tonight," I asked him.

Marcus rubbed the back of his neck. "Couple times. Cleaning crew swears the stairwell on twelve gets cold for no reason. I figured it was the vents. One of the day guys quit last spring, wouldn't say why, just said he wasn't setting foot back in this lobby."

The elevator doors started to close on their own.

I threw my arm out and caught them, more instinct than decision. They shuddered and held there, groaning, fighting me like something on the other end had its own idea about who got to decide. Marcus stepped back.

"Cole, don't."

"I need thirty seconds."

"You need to call this in and let facilities handle it in the morning. This is way above what they pay us for."

"Facilities isn't going to find anything. I need to see it myself."

The doors kept trying to close against my arm, mechanical strength that shouldn't have been possible for a standard hydraulic system. I forced myself between them and hit the button for thirteen before I could talk myself out of it.

The panel lit red. The doors sealed shut behind me.

Marcus's voice came through the radio, distorted, cutting in and out. "Cole. Cole, the display just changed."

"To what."

Static ate half his answer. I caught the last four words clean, and they were enough to put ice straight down my spine.

"It says your name."