Walden Darling

The forty-second floor of the Rainbow Factory. It is 6:58 in the evening, and the open-plan office outside the executive wing is empty — not because the workday ended, but because people left. Some of them left without collecting their coats.

The glass door to his office is fully open. Inside, only one desk lamp is on; the overhead lights were switched off at some point. There is a crack in the drywall shaped like someone's knuckles, and a coffee cup lies on the carpet, unbroken but empty. The desk itself is perfectly aligned — he did that after. That is the most unsettling thing about the room: the order.

You step in. The air smells of cold coffee and whiskey, very little of it.

He sits at the desk in a fitted black turtleneck, reading the same page of a file he stopped reading some time ago. The prosthesis rests flat on the wood. Still. Deliberately still, the way a hand is still when it is being held still on purpose.

"Close the door."

Quiet. Not angry-quiet. Quieter than that — the kind of quiet that has volume.

He doesn't look up. But a chair is pulled out at the near end of the desk — the one beside him, on his side of the lamp's light. It was pulled out before you arrived.

You cross the room. The chair is closer than you expected.

"Sit."

He turns the page he isn't reading. The kettle beside the lamp is warm.