The Unplanned Variable

Her heels bit the polished stone like tiny metronomes set too fast. Elara Vance kept pace with the building’s tempo, letting the rhythm steady her even as her pulse ran ahead. Forty-seven minutes until the pitch. She could do the run-through twice more in her head before the elevator, again between the elevator and the conference room, and once silently while they poured water and made small talk that stole oxygen from actual content.

Atrium glass rose in sheets that cut the sky into a grid. She took it in, half for the satisfaction of recognizing structural ambition, half out of reflex. Load-bearing mullions spaced just enough to suggest risk without sacrificing safety—it was the exact kind of showmanship her clients liked to buy, slick and expensive, understated only in the way a diamond is understated in a white light. Her throat tightened around a swallow. This was the arena. She adjusted the fall of her blazer and swept a stray hair behind her ear, fingertips registering the cool edge of a diamond stud. Armor, she told herself. Minimal, efficient armor.

Her portfolio was pressed to her body, box leather warming against her ribs through the silk of her blouse. Inside, everything she needed: the renderings that had made her mentor murmur a single, rare “good,” the acoustics diagrams she’d double-checked with an obsessive grit that had kept her awake past one, the annotated budget that showed restraint where they’d expect extravagance and vice versa. Upper mezzanine seating with adjustable baffles—she could already hear them ask about cost. She framed the answer in her mind, words lining up like soldiers; she would say “investment,” not “expense.” She would say “legacy,” not “vanity.”

A man in an over-tailored suit glanced at her as they passed each other’s flight paths, and she smoothed her expression until it was the mask she’d practiced in reflective metal and elevator doors. Calm. Focused. Not desperate. A junior associate with a lanyard and too much coffee wobbled at the edge of her path, then darted aside. “Sorry,” he muttered. She didn’t break stride.

She wished fleetingly for coffee herself, then vetoed it. Her hands were steady now; caffeine would turn them unreliable. She took the stairs down to the mezzanine platform to avoid the cluster at the main bank, weaving through polished people and the buzz that clung to them. The building thrummed subtly, a body with a heart somewhere deep and mechanized. She pressed two fingers against her own wrist and felt the answering beat.

Elara checked her watch again. Forty-four minutes.

Her phone vibrated against her hip. She slid it out with a thumb and saw her mother’s name. A microsecond of temptation to answer—some old reflex, some ancient, childish hunger for approval—and then she declined the call. Not today. No space for comments disguised as questions. No time for, “Have you considered a more conservative approach to your opening pitch?” She put the phone back, the weight of it a distraction she didn’t need, and adjusted the strap of her portfolio again though it hadn’t shifted.

The ground floor reception opened up like a stage and she crossed it, not looking at herself in the mirrored columns though an older habit tried to tug her gaze. Her reflection didn’t matter. Her work mattered. She imagined the concert hall in her head, the way she’d explain the acoustical shell like a whisperer in a stall with a skittish horse—gentle, confident, certain. She would make them feel the warmth of wood and the clean line of sight, the way low frequencies would wrap the audience without muddying the strings. She kept it simple in her thoughts: you deserve a space where breath holds and releases at the same time. She’d leave out the poetry in the room and let it find them on its own.

The security gate recognized her badge with a soft beep. She moved past, eyes already on the express elevator bank. A wall display flashed the building’s name and a curated animation of stock-people networking in floaty half circles. Corporate aspiration, packaged. Her mouth twitched, small and private. They would get something better from her.

She passed a cluster of men in charcoal and navy, each with a messenger bag that looked identical. One of them said something about golf in a voice that assumed everyone valued the same currency. Another group, women in muted jewel tones and sharp shoes, glanced at her portfolio, eyes flicking with assessment and tiny calculations. Elara didn’t mind it. If anything, the threat of being underestimated sharpened her.

Her mind ran the pitch again. Start with the site constraints, front-load the challenges they think they’re throwing at her. Accept them. Reframe them as gifts. Show the model of how sound decays in current halls of similar size. Turn the screen to the plan that answers—splayed seating, non-parallel walls, hidden diffusion. Answer the question about line-item costs before it’s asked and then pause. Let them fill the silence with their own wanting.

She reached the elevator and pressed the call button, kept her finger there for a count of three and then took it away, knowing the extra pressure did nothing but feeling better for having done it. The brushed steel doors were cold as rainclouds. She caught the faintest outline of herself, ghosted in the reflection. She straightened the lapels of her blazer, then checked the thin line of her lipstick in the glass. Fine. Finished.

Her heart tripped once, a stumble like a record catching, and she pushed air through her nose in a careful, measured stream. Anxiety could ride shotgun. It did not get the wheel. She rolled her shoulders back, adjusted the drop of her blouse where it met the sober line of her skirt, and shifted her portfolio so that it sat like a shield between the world and the soft places she never, ever let the world see.

The elevator chimed nearby and a pair of analysts spilled out, talking about market volatility. She stepped closer to the far doors, angling herself to slide in quickly when they opened, to claim a corner where she could lean and run the words again, quiet as a prayer. The building’s climate control pushed a whisper of cold air down the back of her neck and she fought a shiver. It would be warmer on the upper floors, all the glass eating sun. She pictured the conference room: long table, wall of screens, water in sweating carafes, men with ties loosened to telegraph openness, women with iPads and tidy pens.

She thought of the first model she’d built at twenty-two, cutting basswood until her fingers ached, glue drying under her fingernails, her father watching her with a look she’d been too young to name. She does not let the thought linger. Even in private, she doesn’t touch the old stories long. They bleed.

Forty-one minutes. She could feel it under her skin, a humming that wasn’t quite fear. It was something like hunger, like standing at the edge of a high dive and choosing to jump because standing still would be worse. When the next elevator chimed and the doors slid open, she lifted her chin, tightened her hold on the portfolio, and stepped forward, every inch of her arranged and purposeful.

He was late by five minutes and exactly on time in the way that wasn’t about clocks. Jules adjusted the strap biting into his shoulder and let the worn cello case knock against his hip with each step. The case had deep scuffs that told its own biography—airport belts, bar back doors, narrow stages—and the handle was wrapped in black tape he kept meaning to replace and never did. A clean shirt had been stuffed into his backpack and pulled out and shrugged on in a bathroom two blocks back. The cuffbuttons didn’t match. They held.

Corporate marble had a way of stealing the sound of footsteps, flattening everything into hush. He padded across it anyway, sneakers squeaking faintly, the sound a small rebellion in a place that smelled like citrus cleaner and money. A woman in a sleek sheath dress glanced at his case with a tight smile that didn’t reach her eyes; he gave her a friendlier one back, easy and unbothered. He’d played in rooms with spilled beer soaking his shoes and rooms where the carpet cost more than he’d made all year. Music didn’t care.

“Croft?” the concierge at the far desk called, recognizing him not from his face but the booking sheet in front of him.

“Yeah,” he said, shifting the weight of the cello and lifting his free hand in a lazy salute. “Jules.” He didn’t say the last name if he could help it. He’d booked this one under it only because the event coordinator had insisted; big clients liked big names even when all they were getting was background music and a cartoon of culture.

The woman at the desk gestured for him to the express bank. “Forty-sixth. Event team is already up there.”

He nodded, grateful there wouldn’t be security hurdles this time. An email had smoothed it all before he’d even agreed. He had tried to say no. The fee had been too smooth to refuse. It would cover his rent for two months, stretch his sister’s tuition payment another week while he waited on a grant decision that would probably come back with polite regret.

He moved with a gait that was half-longing for a nap and half amusement at the theater around him. People moved like they were on invisible rails, all straight lines and clipped turns, heads bent to phones, jaws clenched. He let the elevator line pull him in and stopped a polite distance from the woman in the corner with the leather portfolio pressed to her ribs like a precious organ. She smelled like cool air and something faintly floral that didn’t try too hard. He clocked the quality of her clothes—expensive but sharp without fuss. He also clocked the tension in her jaw, the way her fingers pressed too hard at the spine of her case as if force could fuse her spine to it.

He rolled his shoulder to ease the cello strap. His left hand flexed, a habit born from hours of scales, muscle memory trying its leash. He could do the set in his sleep: Bach to lull, a standard to please the uncles in fitted suits, then the uneasy modern thing the coordinator had requested because someone had said the client liked “new.” He’d smoothed the edges of the piece until it would pass unnoticed under clinked glass and low conversation. He hated himself a little for that sanding. He’d put the splinters back in when he played alone.

He watched the reflections in the elevator doors without looking like he was watching. The woman’s face surfaced and sank in the steel sheen, composed, precise. He wondered, idle as a cat watching light move across a wall, what it took to make a mouth like that soften. Not his business. He was a hired hum today.

He reached into the small outer pocket of his gig bag and checked for the protein bar he never went anywhere without. It was there, along with folded sheet music, a pencil down to its last inch, and a rosin cake that had cracked and been glued back together enough times to look like amber with a fracture line. He ran his thumb over the rosin, liking the drag. He’d put new strings on last week; his A sang truer now, the wolf tone he’d been fighting on the G less obvious if he rolled the bow just so. He thought of the hall upstairs—glass and hard surfaces, probably. He’d have to take a little edge off with the bow, keep things warm so nobody winced. He could do warm with the Bach. He could make even a fishbowl sound like wood if he leaned in enough.

The elevator bank spat people and swallowed them. Two men in suits edged past, both looking pained about something they wouldn’t remember next month. A woman laughed too brightly at a joke that didn’t deserve it. He slid his phone out of his back pocket, saw two texts from Marlowe—You got this. Don’t let them make you wallpaper—and a third: Call me after. He typed back a quick promise and tucked the phone away.

“Long day?” a security guard asked, friendly boredom blessing the question.

“Just starting,” he said with a grin that made the man grin back, and which somehow made the sterile lobby feel less like a museum and more like a place humans used.

He glanced again at the woman with the portfolio. She didn’t glance back. The elevator chimed, and the doors sighed open. He adjusted the case, stepped in behind her, and took the back corner, claiming space like a temporary camp. He didn’t meet her eyes. He looked at the panel with its tall ladder of numbers, at the way the light painted them a cool blue. He thought about the set order and whether he dared slip in the piece he’d been sneaking into his fingers at night—unfinished, raw, too honest for background. He answered himself the way he always did at gigs like this. Not today.

Resignation sat in him like a stone at the bottom of a clear pond. Amusement skated over it. He imagined the faces he’d see upstairs: impressed eyebrows at the sight of a cello because it was a safe marker of taste. He’d hit the notes they wanted and pocket the check and go home and write the jagged thing that lived in his ribs. His mother would say he was lucky to have the choice. She wouldn’t be wrong.

He rolled his neck once more, let out a breath he hadn’t noticed he’d been holding, and felt the elevator settle around them, a box full of strangers heading up toward their different versions of the same performance. He didn’t know it yet, but this one wasn’t going to let him disappear. He just knew he was here, with his old case and his easy smile and the practiced shrug he put on for buildings like this, easing toward the ride with the kind of patience you learn when your life depends on strokes across strings and the count between breaths.

They stood opposite corners of the small mirrored box, the doors closing with a whisper that felt like a seal. The express car smoothed upward, a hum beneath their feet, and the first soft chime punctured the silence as 12 blinked to 24. Elara kept her eyes on the panel, counting in her head because numbers behaved. Her portfolio edge bit into her ribs in a way that grounded her. She adjusted it without looking at him, chin angled to telegraph that she was not available for conversation, not for anything but the trajectory she had mapped and memorized.

In the reflection she tried not to use, he was a slash of black case and long lines, too relaxed for a building like this. She narrowed her focus to the faint spidering of scratches on the brushed steel to her left and let her mouth flatten. The stale-citrus air was colder in the elevator; it always was. She could feel a bead of sweat slip down her spine anyway, uninvited.

Jules watched the numbers light up—28, 31, 34—and let the rhythm of the chime tick like a metronome. He saw her only through the periphery that musicians perfect: the way her fingers flexed and stilled around the leather handle, the press of her knees together beneath the fabric of a skirt that didn’t forgive wrinkles, the slight flutter in her throat when the car dipped and corrected with hydraulics you had to trust. She was tension wound tight in an elegant casing. He wondered if she ever breathed all the way out.

He didn’t fill silence reflexively. He liked the way it held shape, the way it revealed things if you let it. He adjusted his grip on the cello case without making noise, rolling the strap off the most tender part of his shoulder to sit on bone. He imagined the upstairs event team, their tidy smiles, their relief at him being a thing that could be placed and then ignored. He glanced at the woman’s shoes: practical, but new. He imagined she’d broken them in on carpet, testing the radius of her pace before letting them touch dirty city. He catalogued without judgment because cataloguing was a habit as natural as shifting his bow hold when the piece demanded a different weight.

Elara exhaled carefully, slower than her nerves wanted. The emergency light above the panel glowed a steady amber, comforting in its way. She could feel him without looking at him—the way people take up space, the way energy presses. He was too at ease, and that made her jaw tighten. She had never trusted ease. It felt like complacency in a suit.

Another chime. 38.

She checked the time on her phone without unlocking it, a swipe that didn’t leave evidence. Thirty-four minutes. She ran through the opening hook—introduce the concept via story, not stats—then the pivot into the acoustic modulation solution, the piece she knew would sell them if she landed it clean. Her throat felt dry. She swallowed and thought about water that would be waiting in sweating carafes upstairs. She would not drink too much. She would not need to excuse herself. She had learned that lesson years ago, marking her timeline back by the exact number of sips that kept her both hydrated and alert.

“Big day?” he asked in his head but didn’t say, watching the way the corners of her mouth were held, not in displeasure but in concentration so sharp it could cut. He had played for faces like hers—faces that were a problem to solve. He often wanted to remind them they had bodies.

The elevator gave a tiny sway as it sped through 40, that almost-imperceptible looseness like the skip in a record you only hear if you know the song. She steadied herself reflexively with a hand on the wall. The touch left a smear of fingerprint moisture she swiftly wiped with the side of her hand. She focused on her breath—four counts in, four counts out—and thought of stairwells and fire codes and the math that made buildings stand like prayers in the sky.

He let his gaze flick to the mirrored door and meet her eyes in the reflection for half a second, a silent test. She denied it, refusing the contact, focusing on the very small smear she had just erased as if there were a test there, too. He smiled without showing teeth, the expression one he used on stage when he wanted the audience to lean in without realizing they were.

The car felt smaller every floor. 42. Chime. 43. The number ladder lit ahead of them like an ascent they shared without sharing anything. He thought about saying something harmless to crack the air: nice building, weird weather, the elevator’s speed. He didn’t. She was projecting don’t like a wireless fence.

She shifted her weight from one heel to the other to let pins-and-needles drain from her toes. A strand of hair, traitorous and fine, freed itself and brushed the shell of her ear. She didn’t tuck it back. She didn’t give him that movement, that acknowledgment that someone else was in the box. Her mouth tasted like mint and steel. She kept her eyes away from his hands. Hands were dangerous; they told stories.

He watched her not tuck the hair and felt, inexplicably, a small pull under his ribs. Not attraction exactly, more like curiosity when you see a sealed instrument case and wonder what’s inside, which wood, which varnish, which scars. He imagined the voice she used upstairs, the cadence she’d adopt to make men nod. He had nod cadences too; he saved them for invoices.

The chime marked 45. There was a faint settling as the car trimmed speed. He shifted his foot a little wider, knee knocking softly against the base of his case to quiet the phantom rattle that happened when the car accelerated. He could feel the bow sliding in its clamp, secured but never fully still. It reminded him of the way she held herself, secured but vibrating just under the surface. He imagined the sound she’d make if she allowed that vibration to become voice. He didn’t allow the thought to finish.

She counted the last two floors like beads on a string, shoulders squared for the doors, the opening, the corridor, the meeting that had been living in her skull for weeks. She felt the words assemble behind her teeth, lines she had polished and practiced until they felt like bone. She didn’t see the way his chest expanded with the last quiet breath he took as if submerging, the small ritual of a man stepping into performance.

They stood like that, two separate worlds held in a metal box, as the soft, polite chime announced 46 and the doors prepared to open.

The shift was subtle at first, a tremor underfoot like a breath caught and held. Then the elevator jerked hard, a violent lurch that snapped Elara’s knees and slammed her shoulder into the cool steel. The lights above them flared too bright, then stuttered in a sick rhythm—white, dim, off—before dropping them into black so complete she could hear her own pulse in her ears. The hum that had been steady beneath everything died. In its place, the groan of metal stretched thin and angry, a low, stressed complaint that vibrated up through the soles of their shoes and into bone.

Elara’s breath hitched into a short, high gasp. The portfolio slid from her grip and thumped against her shin before falling to the floor in the dark. She reached blindly and hit the wall instead, fingertips skittering over cold paneling, searching for an anchor that didn’t exist. The box felt at once too small and endless, the air heavy and still, pressing down on her chest. She swallowed against the rise of panic, but her throat closed anyway, as if the darkness had thickness and weight.

“Hey,” Jules said, somewhere to her left, voice steady in the absence of light. Not loud, not a bark—just a line thrown out in a black sea. He stayed still for a heartbeat, listening as if the elevator might change its mind if he didn’t startle it. It didn’t. He shifted his case down as carefully as he could by feel, letting it rest against his shin, and held a palm out in front of him, uselessly testing the dark. “You okay?”

Her hand found the panel by muscle memory. She slapped at the buttons until her palm hit the raised circle that had to be the alarm and pressed hard. Nothing. She pressed again, with more force, as if she could push through to the machinery behind it. “No, no, no.” Her voice came out thin and clipped, the trained calm fractured at the edges. She dragged in air that felt too cold and not enough. “What—what happened?”

“We stopped,” he said, very simply. He let the absurdity of it sit for a second and then added, “Between floors.” He wasn’t joking, but there was a faint softness to the way he said it, like he was smoothing the sharpest parts without lying. He reached out, slow, open-handed, and found nothing but air. “Don’t move too fast. Let me—hold on. I’ve got my phone.”

The click of fabric and the slide of a zipper cut through the silence. Elara’s hands found the emergency button again and pressed, found the call button and held it down. The darkness didn’t change. No reassuring buzz, no tinny voice. Just her breath coming too fast and the sound of Jules rooting through his bag. She was aware of her heart like a fist on a door.

A soft rectangle of light bloomed weakly, blue-white and small, cupped in his hand. It wasn’t much, but it made them real again, made the space visible: steel, a scuffed floor, the edge of her portfolio splayed open, a scatter of papers like pale fish on dark water. His face was a suggestion—cheekbone, mouth, the bridge of his nose—more shape than detail.

He angled the light down and away, not into her eyes. “There we go,” he said, as if the phone’s glow mattered more than it did. He pointed it at the panel and stepped closer, careful to keep his feet shuffled so he didn’t stomp on anything important. “Can you see the emergency call?”

“It’s here.” Her finger pressed it again, then again. Her hands trembled so hard she missed and hit the floor button next to it. Useless. “It’s not—there’s nothing.” She swallowed, hard enough that it clicked. She forced her voice lower. “We were almost there.”

“Yeah.” He angled the light to her hands. “Breathe.” He didn’t say calm down. He didn’t tell her it was fine. He let the word be instruction and invitation both. “In. Slow.”

She dragged air into her lungs in a drag that hurt, counting because counting didn’t require sight. Four in. Hold. Four out. The numbers wobbled. She kept going. “I can’t miss this,” she said, too fast, as if the elevator could be argued with. She blinked, but the dark clung to the edges of his small light and made the space feel like it was leaning.

He crouched, setting the phone on its back by the base of the wall so it lit upward, freeing his hands. The cone of glow made the elevator look like a stage with bad footlights, their faces hollowed by shadows. He gathered her papers in quick, careful motions, not trying to read them, just making stacks and tapping them square. His hands were efficient, long fingers smoothing edges. “You won’t,” he said. Not a promise he could keep, just a sentence to hold onto. “Even if you do, you’re not missing everything.” He slid the papers back into the portfolio and stood, holding it out. “Here.”

She took it, the familiar weight grounding her by a small degree. Her palm brushed his knuckles. The contact was incidental and searing in the cold. The shock of his skin startled her enough to knock one of her breaths back into place. She lifted her chin toward the seam of the doors, now a thin, indifferent line. “We should—there’s an intercom.”

“Usually.” He traced along under the buttons, found the tiny grate where a speaker should live, and tapped it lightly. Silence answered. He tilted his head, as if he could hear more in the quiet. Nothing but the dead air and their bodies. “No signal,” he added after glancing at the phone’s corner. Zero bars. “Save your battery. Mine’s at forty.”

She made a small sound that could have been a laugh or a choke. “Of course.” Her voice steadied by degrees as the routine part of her brain started stacking steps: assess, plan, act. “There’s a service number somewhere.” She shifted closer, drawn by the need to do, not to feel. The phone’s light caught the edge of her face, and he saw she had gone pale beneath perfect makeup, pupils blown larger than the thin light warranted.

“We’ll find it.” He kept his tone practical because panic had teeth, and he didn’t want it to bite either of them. He tipped the phone to the small plaque with the inspection certificate, the type too tiny to do anything with now. He didn’t let on that reading it would require more light than they had. “First, we breathe.”

She heard the deliberate cadence and let herself follow it, matching his count without admitting she was following him. Her hand peeled away from the wall, fingers flexing to bring sensation back. “I don’t like small spaces,” she said, as if that choice had ever been on the table. The admission was quiet and irritated with herself.

“Me neither,” he lied, because she needed solidarity more than truth and because the dark pressed differently when you’d spent your life in practice rooms with doors that stuck. “But we’re here.” He turned the phone face-down for a second to conserve the screen, plunging them back into black. The sound of her breath caught. He flipped it back, low. “Sorry. I’m not going to leave you in the dark.”

She nodded once, remembering he couldn’t see nods, then said a clipped, “Thank you.” The words felt foreign in her mouth under stress. She shifted her weight, heels scraping faintly on the floor, anchoring herself in the geometry of the box: four walls, a ceiling, a floor. Finite. Measured. “They’ll fix it,” she said, not quite asking.

“They’ll fix it,” he said, answering anyway. His hand hovered, then settled on the wall near her shoulder, not touching her, just there. The machinery above them was quiet as a grave. The building, all that weight and maintenance and promise, didn’t care. In the small pool of light and the long stretch of dark, they stood with the knowledge of how quickly a ride becomes a room and how, sometimes, all you can do is stand still and decide who you’re going to be inside it.

A low buzz shivered through the ceiling. The darkness thinned to jaundiced light as the emergency bulbs stuttered on, washing everything in an ugly yellow that made the steel look sick and the edges too sharp. Elara flinched at the sudden illumination, blinking hard. She looked smaller in that color, her posture pulled tight enough to hum, the pale of her throat exposed where her blouse’s top button had come undone in the jolt.

She went for the panel again like it had offended her. Her thumb slammed the red emergency call and held, the bed of the button dipping under her insistence. She released, pressed again. Again. Her breaths sawed, high and shallow, fogging the air close to the metal. The plastic click-click-click was the only reply. She hit it with the heel of her hand, a dull smack that echoed in the confined space. “Come on,” she muttered, then louder, “Come on.” Her finger moved to the alarm symbol, pressed it hard enough to blanch the knuckle. Nothing.

Jules let the phone’s light dim to a sliver, then thumbed it off and slid it face-down into his pocket with a casualness that was deliberate. He didn’t step in to stop her; he just angled his body more square to hers so he could catch her if she spun or the elevator lurched again. “Hey,” he said, same steady tone, letting the word be a handhold. “Those lights mean the building’s backup kicked in. Someone somewhere knows something tripped.”

She pressed again. The nail of her index finger made a soft tap against the button’s rim. Sweat had started at her hairline and she swiped at it with the back of her wrist, then immediately went back to jabbing. “Then why isn’t anyone answering?” The edges of her voice were too sharp, the pitch rising like a warning she ignored. “There should be—” Another jab, harder. “A voice. There should be someone.”

“There should,” he agreed, because honesty was steadier than false comfort. “But if power just switched, the line might be dead for a minute.” He kept his hands visible, open. “Give it thirty seconds, then try again. Slow. Save your energy.”

She cut him a look, pupils still too wide, and realized his phone wasn’t casting that thin blue rectangle anymore. The sickly glow overhead flattened everything, made her shadow long and dark across the floor where her papers had skidded. “Don’t turn that off,” she said, and immediately sounded like she wished she hadn’t asked.

“I’ve got it,” he said. “Battery doesn’t love panic.” He tipped his chin toward the ceiling. “We’ve got this light now. It’s ugly, but it’s free.”

She stared at the panel as if will alone could make a voice crackle through it. Her thumb hovered over the red button, trembling minimally, a vibration you’d only notice if you were as close as he was. She pushed it again, counted under her breath, lips barely moving. Her count stuttered at three and she forced it to four, five. Nothing. Her breath hiccuped. She pressed the alarm again and winced when the same silence answered.

Jules shifted, scraped a sleeve against the wall to remind her he was there. “Elara.” He said her name carefully, tasting it first before giving it to the air, making sure it didn’t sound like a command. Her eyes flicked to his. He held that contact. “Look at me for a second.”

She did, which was something. The yellow overhead hollowed his face into planes and shadow, but his mouth was soft at the corners, his gaze steady. No pity. No patronizing calm. Just a human anchored to the same box. She dragged in a breath that didn’t go far enough and then another that did a little better.

“We’re not falling,” he said, tone practical. “If we were, we wouldn’t be talking about it. It stopped. That’s what it’s going to do until someone restarts it. In the meantime, we can either beat the hell out of that button and get the same nothing, or we can ration what we’ve got.” He tapped his pocket lightly. “Which includes juice.”

She swallowed, throat working. Her hand dropped an inch. “I have a meeting,” she said, as if he’d somehow missed that fact inside the metal coffin. It came out thin, humiliated by its own smallness against the mechanical indifference pressing in.

“I figured.” His mouth pulled in a quick, not-quite smile that didn’t try to fix anything. “Important?”

She stared at him like he’d asked if water was wet, and then, to her own shock, she heard the smallest laugh scrape out of her. Not because it was funny, but because humor found cracks. “Yes.” She smoothed the front of her blouse with both palms as if she could iron time. She pressed the call button again, this time with less force, holding it steady. Her chest moved fast under the thin fabric. She released. The silence was now a thing with edges.

“Breathe with me,” he said. He lifted his hand between them, palm up, and drew his fingers in slowly like he was pulling a rope hand over fist. “In,” he said, inhaling for four beats. “Hold.” He held. “Out.” He exhaled, slower than the in. He didn’t close his eyes. He stayed with her.

She matched him, shaky the first round, better the second. The buzzing in her limbs dulled to something she could contain, small enough to put in her pocket and carry instead of it carrying her. She nodded once, jerkily. “Okay.”

“Good.” He tipped his head toward the emergency plaque again. “We’re going to try the call again in a minute. Between tries, we let the system catch up and we don’t drain anything else.” He made a loose motion toward the corners of the ceiling where the fixtures glowed. “These will probably stay on.”

She flexed her fingers, then set them purposefully at her sides to stop herself from hammering the buttons just to feel like she was doing something. Her portfolio lay where he’d placed it, tidy again. The order of it clicked a gear back into place in her brain. “There should be a hatch,” she said, squinting up. “Not that we’d climb it. I know better.” Her voice steadied more with information.

“There,” he said, following her gaze to the outline in the ceiling—the cut rectangle you only ever noticed in movies or nightmares. He didn’t say the latch was probably bolted from the other side. He didn’t say if it wasn’t, they still weren’t going to risk it. He just acknowledged. “Yeah.”

She pressed the red button one more time, holding it for a precise ten count, her face set. When it stayed dead, she released it and set her hands on the cool rail behind her, gripping it hard enough to make the tendons in her wrists stand out. “Fine,” she said, that brittle edge she’d been hanging onto cracking into something honest and raw. “We wait.”

“We wait,” he echoed, like an agreement rather than a surrender. He leaned his shoulder against the wall at her side, leaving a deliberate inch of space between their sleeves, a buffer he could close if she needed it or keep if she didn’t. “And we keep your phone at a hundred for when you need it.” He tipped a brow. “I’m expendable. I just have to play the world’s most depressing lobby gig later.”

She let out another breath that wasn’t quite a laugh. The yellow light made her eyes look strange, almost bruised, but there was focus in them now. “I don’t need—” She stopped, corrected herself. “Thank you.”

He nodded, once. They stood in the buzzing hum of the emergency system, the elevator a small, stubborn room that had decided to be a room and not a ride. Elara watched the dead speaker as if it might find its voice. Jules watched Elara, measuring her breaths with his own, ready to draw another rope of air if hers snagged. Outside, somewhere up and somewhere down, the building did whatever buildings did. Inside, they counted seconds and held the line.