The night rain hammers the glass like a crowd stamping their feet, and the city beyond the blackout looks stitched together from neon thread. I am Mara, the night-shift technician assigned to the 87th floor of the Horizon Building, a chrome-and-marble cathedral that counts the hours in glass panes and breath. The power hiccups as soon as the storm hits—a shiver in the lights, a brief murmur of tired circuits—then the entire floor goes dark, save for the stubborn orange halos of emergency lamps along the walls.
The building sighs. Quiet drips echo down the corridors, and the air smells of rain that crawled through the vents, cold and metallic. I slide my pocket flashlight from its holster, the beam slicing through the dim like a knife through fog. The floor is a map of crossroads—offices with frosted glass, a wide central atrium that should be open to the night sky, and a corridor that loops back on itself so neatly you could get lost just from looking at the ceiling panels. The alarm panels flicker with a stubborn red glow, and the stairwell doors push in and out of their frames as if the wind itself could bend metal.
On the far side, a conference room holds the first oddity. The door is ajar in a way that doesn’t quite align with the others—almost as if someone had nudged it and left it halfway. My flashlight moves across the glass wall, and I catch my reflection. But not quite. The wall behind me doesn’t reflect the room so much as reveal it in a slow, sleepy delay—the glass acting like a memory that forgets to stop.
I press my palm to the doorframe and listen. The faint sound of a chair sliding, a cough I’m certain wasn’t mine, the soft sigh of air moving where there should be none. Then a voice, low and close, as if someone is leaning in from the other side of the glass.
“Do you hear it?” the voice asks, not mine, not the building’s, but a question that belongs to the dark between us.
I step inside. The room is a tomb of polished wood and water-dark leather chairs, a long table lacquered to look like a river that froze in place. The air is cooler here, and the emergency lights create a long, amber halo that makes every edge look sharpened and unreal. My breath fogs the air, and for a moment the room seems to breathe with me.
On the tabletop lies a folder I’ve never seen in the security logs, a relic among all the modern slick: yellowed edges, the kind of crease that speaks of decades rather than days. The name on the cover is not mine or any of the tenants I’ve ever assisted. It’s a date, a promise, a note scrawled in a handwriting I don’t recognize but feel close to, as if I’m reading my own future self trying to avoid a mistake.
The room’s glass wall becomes a window into something else. Through the frost I glimpse the city as it was yesterday—cars slow in the rain, a billboard for a product that vanished from the skyline years ago, and, crucially, people who aren’t there now, moving in a choreography that seems to have no reason to exist. The reflections aren’t exactly reflections. They are scenes: a boardroom filled with people who wear suits too old-fashioned for today, a child peering into this room from the outside, a security guard who looks exactly like me but with a look I’ve never worn. It’s as if the glass is peeling back the present to show a lineage of moments that chose to linger.
A whisper coalesces into a whisper of footsteps behind me. I turn, and the room’s ceiling seems to tilt, the light bending like a lens trying to refocus. The whispers don’t stop; they stack, and a hundred soft voices lift together in a chorus that sounds eerily familiar—my own name braided into a language I don’t speak but somehow remember hearing in lullabies I never heard as a child.
The corridor outside the conference room has altered in a way that isn’t possible: the floor plan isn’t wrong so much as rewritten. A door I didn’t see before sits halfway open where a solid wall should be. The numbers above the door blink, then settle on 87A in a pale white that glows without electricity. I take a breath, steadying myself, and step through.
The door opens to a staircase that isn’t a staircase but a throat—a narrow passage that hums with a soft, patient sound, like a heartbeat you can feel in your teeth. It isn’t long at first, then it stretches into length I cannot measure, stair after stair that seem to rise while the building sinks deeper into itself. The air grows cooler, and with each landing the atmosphere tightens, as if the floor were sealing secrets into the walls and locking them away behind the plaster.
Landings drift past: a hallway that shows the skyline of a time I’ve never lived in—the 1980s, the 1960s, a future that never came. On each landing, a chair sits idle, a lamp lit with a pale, stubborn glow, a desk with a scorched mug left to dry in the rainless air. The rooms show glimpses of people who aren’t alive anymore, or might have never lived at all—an office clerk who smiles with no teeth, a manager who disappears the moment you stare directly at him, a child who laughs without sound and glances toward a door that isn’t there.
I pass a mural of the building’s blueprints, only the blueprint isn’t the Horizon Building I know. It’s a version of itself that has stayed awake since construction—stamped lines that bend where the mind refuses to accept them and rooms that move when you aren’t looking. The pages of the blueprint curl as if alive, and in that curl there’s a single line written in a hand I almost recognize, a reminder that this place has always had a way of collecting the living and returning nothing of them to the city.
At the center of this labyrinth is a chamber I can feel before I reach it. The door is carved with a motif of ivy-clad letters that spell out nothing I recognize, and in the room beyond sits a pedestal with a single orb, the size of a human heart, its surface a black glass that swallows light and breath and possibility. It pulses—slow, exact, a rhythm that matches the slow tapping of rain against the building’s skin. Around it drift faint shapes, silhouettes that float like fish just beneath a surface you’ve learned to read. They exchange glances with me, nod, then drift away as if I’m not supposed to see them at all.
The orb is not a thing to own but a thing to appease. The room’s hush thickens, and from the corners of my vision I glimpse a figure—an older man in a suit that seems to measure time rather than wear it. He does not walk toward me so much as approach the idea of me, a memory made visible by the orb’s dark glow. He speaks without moving his lips, a voice that sounds exactly like a throat full of rain.
“Welcome back,” he says, but not to me. To the building, to the labyrinth, to the memory that finally learned how to speak. “You’ve found the heart of the city’s sleep. It feeds on your seconds and returns you with a story you’ll tell only to yourself.”
I swallow, the fear tasting like cold copper. “What do you want from me?”
“Presence,” he answers. “The tower keeps time by owning moments. Moments you hold, but also moments that hold you. The blackout isn’t a failure of power; it’s an invitation to belong to what you thought you left behind.”
The orb flares once, a bright, furious white that stabs through the darkness. The room tilts, and my thoughts scatter into the noise of all the voices I’d heard in the glass—the voices of the people who walked these floors long before me. They tell me names and dates and small kindnesses that saved someone once and ruined someone else entirely. I realize what I am seeing: a memory archive, a living museum of the building’s life, kept here to remind the city what it forgot to remember.
The guardian—the man in the old-fashioned suit—leanes in closer, and for a moment I see not a man but a shadow of the building itself. It speaks of an exchange: the city’s heart beats in time with the tower’s sleeping stories, and every person who steps into this floor during a blackout becomes a new memory worth preserving, if only they are willing to give something of themselves to the archive.
“I don’t want to be just a memory,” I say, though I know the offer is already made by the air we breathe together and the ground beneath my feet, vibrating with the echo of my own pulse.
“Then choose what you’ll take with you when you return,” the guardian replies, and the room’s light dims to a whisper. “Some leave with fear; others leave with a fragment of wonder; a few leave with nothing at all but a name that belongs to someone else who is now you.”
The options unfold like doors in a carnival of possibilities. If I stay, the tower will teach me the language of its dark: how to listen to the quiet places where memories gather, how to walk through walls that remember you before you remember yourself, how to breathe out the wrongness of forgetting those who came after you. If I go, I take with me a bit of the building’s heartbeat, a heartbeat that might someday wake someone else who should have stayed asleep. If I offer a memory, I lose something precious—an image of a face that smiles when I’m tired, the taste of my grandmother’s tea, the way my mother’s laugh filled the room on holidays that never return.
I close my eyes, and for a long moment there is only the orb’s pulse in my ears, the sting of the rain on glass, the ache of a decision that could bend the rest of my life into a new shape. Then I whisper a thing that comes out as a question: “What would you have me become if I stay?”
The answer is a stillness, deeper than the night, a space where all the voices soften to a single, certain tone: You must become a keeper of the doors, a listener for the world outside your own life. You must remember so that others can pass through the dark safely.
The choice made, it feels almost easy to move again. I lay a hand on the orb, not to take, but to acknowledge my place in the tower’s longer history. The room brightens to a careful glow, the kind that suggests trust rather than power. The guardian nods, though I cannot tell if the gesture is toward me or toward the building itself.
When the glow settles, a door appears where there was none—an old brass portal that looks as if it had been waiting for me since before I was born. The orb’s pulse steadies to a final, satisfied throb and then is still.
I step back through the labyrinth’s final doorway and into the corridor on the69th step of the tower, the emergency lights now working in a soft, stubborn rhythm. The blackout has eased, but the world around me seems newly arranged, as if the building has exhaled after a long breath and decided to rearrange the furniture of its own memory. The stairwell beneath the 87th floor glows faintly with a warm, almost domestic light as if the building itself has lit a lamp for the night shift.
The floor returns to life slowly—computers hum back on, printers sigh, and the elevator doors pause in their half-closed state as if listening for a rumor of sound. I walk the long hallway and pass the conference room again, now ordinary in its fluorescent amber, the glass wall showing only a clear reflection of the person I am in this moment. The city outside in the windows is still rain-dark, but there’s a new weight in the air, a sense that the building has chosen to keep a part of me inside its memory, a small who-are-you-now that isn’t entirely mine.
Back on the ground, the storm quiets, and dawn threads pale light through the edges of the skyline. The Horizon Building stands like a patient, large creature that has learned to blink in receipt of a new morning. I walk the lobby with the calm I didn’t dare claim before, the kind of calm that comes from agreeing to be useful to something larger than myself, something that remembers every night I’ve ever walked its corridors and every name I’ve ever forgotten.
In the end, the city resumes its ordinary pulse, and the ordinary people go about their days with their ordinary screens and coffee cups and schedules. But I know the truth the building has taught me: a skyscraper holds more than offices and overtime; it preserves the quiet, essential history we leave behind—the people we become while we wait for the power to return and for the lights to tell us who we were meant to be on the night the world went dark. And somewhere, in the hum of a distant generator and the soft breathing of a stone-quiet stairwell, the memory of that hour stays awake, listening for the next visitor who might need a door to pass through.
