Every light in the building was off and it was night-time, which meant that Connie could only

see at

all thanks to the second-hand glow coming through the office's windows; a light so faint that it

didn't seem to cast any shadow, only to trace the edges of objects surrounded by darkness. It was the

light loaned from streetlamps and the curtained windows of nearby housing, but up here on the

office's fifth floor – far higher than the lampheads, well above most windows – what little there

was, this greying of the air, crept in diffuse and subtle. When Connie looked to the windows she

saw that their panes were much the same watery shade as the sky a mile above a light polluted city.

With such scarce light around them the desks and cabinets of the office looked pure black to

Connie, an undifferentiated black in which no details were visible, only the outlines of obstacles

formed into a silent labyrinth of laminate fold-out walls and her colleagues' desks. Although she

was five floors above the street and the office had been deserted for hours now, Connie had taken

off her shoes so as to cushion her steps into silence. She knew from the quietness of her apartment

how sound carries at night-time, and in her dozing hours had once constructed a sort of intuitive

physics of those miniscule noises. After all, when it was deep night and Connie was awake she

could overhear the footsteps of her neighbours through the walls of their apartments almost anytime

they left their beds. Wasn't that proof that in the absence of competition a sound would keep on

moving until it found a set of empty ears, slipping through walls and rushing down empty corridors

like a message in a pneumatic tube? Perhaps she wasn't hearing the pipes crack, but lonely trees in

distant forests falling. A sound from the office's fifth floor, freed by the total absence of motion in

the rooms below, might carry so far as street level, even if all the sound was were a delicate click of

the heels or the frictiony drag of a flat sole across cheap carpeting.

Connie strained to step without sound, tensing her shoeless foot so that it could settle into

the floor from the heel to the toes. Her fingertips were splayed at hip height to keep her safe from

crashing into any unseen wheely chairs which must have been left untucked under their desks. She
measured her way carefully, coming ever closer to the desk of Kevin Robson.

She touched the plastic weave back of what must have been Andrea's self-supplied

ergonomic seat, felt its rough hatching, and knew that the next window-side desk must be Kevin's.

After laying one hand on its surface so as be surer of her bearings, Connie knelt, letting her other

hand trace the frontage of the under-desk shelving all the way down to the bottom one, its shell-

shaped handle. Now came the risk.

Back at home Connie had turned off everything she could on her mobile in preparation. No

wi-fi or satellite or start-up apps, she'd done it thoroughly enough that not even Google knew where

she was any more, and this all so that she could use its torch function now. Before she risked using

the light, there was the matter of moving the shelf. Connie gripped the rounded handle and used her

other hand to hold the shelf's bottom edge, then, as attentively as if she were tracing eyeshadow on

the lid of a jittery friend, she slid the MDF drawer along its rail in a controlled motion, its barely

tangible passage keeping Connie in suspense as she did her best to muffle any sound with pure

slowness. At last she felt the slight downward pressure on her hand which meant that the drawer

was more than halfway out – meaning it was time for her torch. Judging by touch she found it in her

handbag then, without turning it on, put it inside the drawer so as, so far as possible, to trap its light

inside.

Despite Connie's half-hoping for the screen light to suffice, turning the phone on did more or

less nothing. The unfocussed shortwave radiation from its screen showed her nothing of the

drawer's insides. With nervous fingers she turned on the torch.

The view from the glass doors by the elevator had, just a moment before, been of near-

perfect darkness, a featureless view of charcoal silhouettes on slate in which only one shadow so

much as moved. Now, with the light from inside that drawer, Connie was revealed – a crouched

figure, downturned face ghost white in the phone glow, the vole brown of her fringe and the russet

of her jumper's collar the only colours in what had, til then, been a greyscale world. Exposed as she

was by the phone's light, Kevin's desk shielded Connie from the window, and she had to trust that
the light coming from inside the drawer was too little to show clearly to any midnight pedestrian

chancing to take a look up at the office's higher floors. For Connie herself everything outside the

desk disappeared into utter blackness by contrast to the torchlight. She was focussed entirely on her

target. Rather than rush to finish her work, it was important that Connie leave no trace of intrusion

for Kevin to see.

The lowest drawer in his desk didn't have any of the everyday paperwork or stationary

which needed to be closer to hand. At its bottom were some old folders of client printouts which

would likely never be opened again, and atop of these a small array of computery wiring and

widgets, her goal.

Connie balanced the phone against the drawer's rear inside wall so as to free both hands for

her work. Here were Kevin's headphones – freebie black earbuds he'd got with some walkman in a

foregone decade and kept ever since; here was the shorter USB-linking charger for his mobile

phone, since it's always a good idea to keep a spare at the office, and Kevin was the type to keep

one himself and grumble if you tried to borrow it. Connie took the slightly coiled left earbud wire,

straightened it, and began to weave it between the phone charger and the right earbud, making a

loose knot shape someone might accidentally tighten with an ill-placed pull. That done, she started

retwisting the wires until they looked like skinny strings of that crinkly pasta and for a final flourish

tied the plug-end of the earbuds into that of the phone charger, this time pulling hard enough to

make a tiny and incredibly tight ball of knot between them. Connie lay the tangled wires back down

on the old folders and switched off her phone, feeling safe.

Of Connie's crimes to date this was the cruellest and most shameless. Breaking the lids of

those biros, splashing water on the toilet paper inside of its dispenser and stealing that sock from Mr

Frederick's gym bag were nothing compared to this. Can you feel proud of something shameful? If

you couldn't dopeheads wouldn't boast about their hits or men about their ugliest lay. Connie

couldn't help but picture Kevin's beefy face getting red with anger and imagined that it must be

some sort of justice she was carrying out since you could tell with Kevin, though he was now in
middle-age, that he had been a bully as a schoolkid. A prime example was the thing with the

building-manager last week. A LED tube had gone out over Customer Relations and several hours

had gone by without a replacement. Kevin had run upstairs to the building manager's storage area

and hammered on the door until she'd come out, then stood underneath the ladder moaning about

the delay. He was one of those people who was never more than a single reverse away from turning

aggressive.

Connie told herself that this was why she'd picked him – because he was the type who'd look

around for somebody to blame even when the situation was just bad luck. Which made it still riskier

for Connie to have snuck in at midnight to target him. This risk was in a very modest way heroic,

although it was true that Connie had never even felt an impulse to do this sort of thing back when

she'd been living in the old place. Life back then had been complicated whereas life now was both

purer and, thanks to her new experiments with vandalising her workplace, in a way imbued with

mystery, as if she'd re-found the instinctive understanding of a child for the meanings of colours and

trees.

Since Connie'd turned her phone off the office had returned to its natural state of slate-black

and her eyes had once more found a way to tell the outlines of obstacles. A car passed in the road

below, the breath of its motor lasting improbably long. As she waited for its last traces to die off in

the distance Connie arrived at another idea. Since she'd been able to find her way here without any

light to guide her – meaning that she'd seemingly so learned the layout even of the Ala's section of

the fifth floor – couldn't she now retrace her footsteps with her eyes closed? How hard could it be,

and wouldn't it prove what Connie already knew – that work had become a part of home for her and

the actual destination of her life's journey? She could easily walk all the way across this room with

her eyes shut, turning every few steps when she had to, quiet like a ghost and without even brushing

the edges of anything. Not today, she thought. Maybe it would be better to make that a whole late

night trip of its own and be sure that if she did chance to knock over some object that had been left

out of its proper place then at least the error wouldn't coincide with what she'd just done to Kevin.
Congratulating herself on her foresight and maturity, Connie crept back across the space between

the desks, slipped around the corner of the meeting room and found the doors onto the central

hexagon.