IX

The in-lab night is on the consent form, page four, a routine I skipped past on the way to signing. One supervised overnight with full instrumentation, offered to any participant who wants it, encouraged for anyone reporting "unusual dream content or fragmented recall." I called the number on the card and reported both. It wasn't even a lie. It was a lock I already had the key to.

So at nine at night I'm sitting on the edge of a bed in Suite 6 in a T-shirt and my own pajama pants, and Theo is peeling adhesive backings off a strip of electrodes and narrating each one like a cooking show.

"Okay so this guy goes above your eyebrow — sorry, cold gel, everybody hates the gel, I've stopped apologizing except I just apologized. This is your frontal. He tells us when you're actually under versus when you're doing the thing where you think you're awake but the machine's like, buddy, you were gone." He presses it, thumbs the wire flat, tapes it. "You've got good skin for this, by the way. Some people, the gel just sits there. Yours takes."

"Is that a real category. Good skin for electrodes."

"It's my category. I've got like nine categories nobody asked for." His grin comes easy, the mustache still not quite committing to being a mustache. Three enamel pins ride the collar of his scrubs — a crescent moon, a little white ghost, a cassette tape. "You want the tour of my categories or you want to sleep? Trick question. Nobody sleeps the in-lab night. First-timers, forget it. You're gonna lie there feeling every wire and being weird about the window."

The window. Long, mirrored, set into the sage-green wall across from the bed, the same one in every suite, the one I trained myself in the first week to stop seeing. On the far side is the control room. That's where he'll sit.

"You watch from in there," I say.

"I watch from in there. Me and about forty channels of you." He crouches to run a lead down my shin, taping at the ankle. "It's not creepy, I promise, it feels creepy. You're a waveform to me. Beautiful person, sure, but mostly you're a green line that better stay boring."

I let him work. I let the room do its circadian trick, the light easing amber toward nothing, and I catalog what I came to catalog, because that's the job now and the job doesn't care that the kid taping my ankle keeps calling me a beautiful person to fill the silence.

The control room is smaller than I pictured and Theo lives in it. There's a travel mug that says NOT A MORNING PERSON, ON PURPOSE, a phone charger, a paperback split spine-up over the arm of the chair. Two monitors of my own body in colored lines. And clipped to the console lip, where a normal tech would keep a pen, a battered gray recorder with a crack running corner to corner across its little screen.

I came out under the excuse of water. He didn't send me back.

"That's the famous recorder," I say.

"Oh no. Did I talk about it at intake? I talk about it at intake. It's a whole thing." He picks it up, turns it over, the cracked face catching the light. "Tascam. Handheld. Dropped it on the loading dock nine months ago, screen's toast, still runs. I record — okay, this is the part where people's faces do a thing — I record buildings."

"Buildings."

"Sound of. The HVAC when it kicks on at like 2 a.m., there's this whole breath the building takes, this whole—" He does it with his hands, a swell and a release. "Parking garage has the best echo in the whole property. Loading dock when it rains, forget it, that's my Sistine Chapel. I mix 'em into these, like, ambient tracks. Lowercase. Nobody listens to them. My mom listens to one so she can tell people her son's an artist." He sets it back on the lip, careful, screen-up. "Empty rooms only, though. That's the rule. I don't record people. Feels — I dunno. You're not sleeping so somebody can tape you. You're sleeping 'cause you finally can."

There it is, the thing under the jokes. He means it. He's the one awake while a floor of strangers lies wired and helpless behind mirrored glass, and he has decided, all on his own, that this makes him responsible for them.

"Somebody should be listening to the building," he says, quieter, almost to the recorder. "Everybody's asleep. Somebody's gotta be up hearing it."

I file that. I file the crack in the screen and the loading-dock rain and the rule about empty rooms. I file it the way I once filed a dying man's service record and the name of his dog, because the details are what make a source real, and a real source is what makes a story land — and I know exactly where that road goes, I paid five men's worth of toll on it, and I keep filing anyway. That's the part I don't get to feel good about. I do it anyway.

"Play me one," I say.

He lights up. He thumbs the wheel and holds the cracked thing out between us, and out of a speaker the size of a fingernail comes the parking garage — a long low echo, water somewhere, a fluorescent's electric stutter, the ghost of a car door two levels down. Twenty seconds of a place with nobody in it.

"That's nothing," he says, delighted. "That's a garage. But you hear it, right? It's got a whole—"

"It's got a whole," I agree, and mean it, and hate how much I mean it.

"Walk me back," I say, standing, tugging my sleeve down over the lead he taped to my wrist. "If I lie down now I'll just stare at the ceiling and give you a bad green line for an hour."

"See, this is the correct instinct. Tire yourself out. Do a lap." He comes with me into the corridor, because a good tech doesn't let a wired participant wander a dark building alone, and because he'd rather talk than sit, and both of those are true and only one of them is why I asked.

The corridor runs the length of the floor, sage on sage, the acoustic panels drinking our footsteps so completely that I hear the fabric of his scrubs. Suite doors down the left, six of them past mine, each with a little frosted number and a card reader glowing a patient green. He points as we pass, low, the roll call of a man who knows where everyone is. "Four's got a lady doing her third night, real easy sleeper, wish they were all her. Eight came in late, hasn't gone under yet. Rest are empty tonight."

At the end the corridor opens onto the elevator bank, and I slow the way you slow at a thing you're pretending not to look at. Two cars. The left one I've ridden a dozen times, buttons worn, a scuffed steel frame. The right one sits beside a red fire extinguisher in its glass box, and its call panel is a single flush plate with no up, no down, no floor lights — a door that only opens for people it already knows.

"Bathroom's the other way, if that's the mission," Theo says.

"Just stretching." I nod at the west end, where a heavy door stands under an EXIT sign, and where, exactly as he described it, a folded brown paper towel is wedged at the base against the strike plate, holding the latch off its keeper. Above it, in the corner, a camera housing with a small dark eye and no live light at all. "That the stairs?"

"That's the stairs. Don't tell facilities about the towel, the cleaning crew will actually revolt." He rubs the back of his neck. "Camera's been dead since spring. I filed it three times. 'It's on the list.' Everything's on the list. I'm on the list."

I stand in the mouth of the elevator bank a second longer than water justifies, and the floor plan sets itself down in me, clean and complete — the twelve suites, the two cars, the propped stair with its blind corner — and I turn us both around before he can wonder why I stopped.

He talks as lonely night-shift people talk when a warm body wanders into their bubble — freely, gratefully, filling the dark. I don't have to work him. I just have to not stop him, and ask the second half of the question when he trails off the first.

The cameras. He tells me without knowing he's telling me. He's complaining, is all — the one at the main elevator bank runs about four seconds behind the others, "so if you ever see yourself on the hallway feed doing something dumb, relax, it already happened." The shifts. Day staff clears out by seven. From nine to six it's Theo and whoever's on the phones, which most nights is nobody. Marsh comes in early, before the participants wake, "she likes to be first, she's got this whole ritual." The building after midnight is his and the HVAC's and the green lines'.

Back in the control room I hold my water and let the second elevator sit in my mind next to the fire extinguisher where I left it.

"The one by the extinguisher," I say, level, the polite version. "I've never seen it open."

His face resets. Not fear yet. A tech reaching the edge of his own map.

"Yeah, that one doesn't — that's not for us." He turns back to my waveform like it needs him. "Goes down. There's a lower level. Servers and stuff, records, HVAC plant, I think? Badge-only, and my badge doesn't do it, I tried once 'cause a light was on down there and I'm a curious idiot. Just beeps red at me." He shrugs, and the shrug works too hard. "Above my pay grade. Way above. I'm barely at my pay grade."

"Whose badge does it."

"Marsh. The Somnex guys when they come. The—" He stops. His thumb finds the crescent-moon pin and worries it. "There's people who come at night who I don't have on any sheet. Like, I get the overnight roster, right, who's in what suite, when they came in, when they go home. That's my whole job, know where everybody is. And then some nights there's — visitors. For specific people. They don't sign the book, or they sign a book that isn't mine, and they go down in that elevator, and they come back up, and I'm not — "

He doesn't finish it. His sentences have a wall in them and he just hit it, and he veers.

"— it's fine, it's probably compliance, it's probably some FDA thing, these trials are insane about audit trails, you would not believe the paperwork—"

"Theo."

"—which is good! You want the paperwork. Paperwork means somebody's watching."

"What visitors."

He looks at the door. There's no one in the hall. There's never anyone in the hall; that's the whole design of this place, a building that makes 3 a.m. feel like nowhere. He looks anyway, and lowers his voice to match the emptiness.

"Some of the participants get sessions that aren't in the app," he says. "You know the app plays your — the sound, the pink noise, the whole closed-loop thing, it's automated, it's on a schedule, I don't touch it, nobody touches it, that's the point, it's a device. But some suites, some people, there's audio going in that I never queued and that's not in my log and that Marsh doesn't — " The moon pin, again, back and forth. "I flagged it. Once. Early on. Because I thought it was a malfunction, right, I'm looking at a channel that's got playback active on a unit I didn't start, and I'm a good tech, I write it up. And this guy comes and finds me — nice guy, real soft-spoken, gray suit, you'd like him actually, he's got this voice—"

The moon pin goes still under his thumb.

"—and he doesn't yell, he doesn't write me up, he brings me a coffee. And he says the extra sessions are part of a protocol I'm not read into, and it's totally normal, and the best thing I can do for these people, the kindest thing, is just — not notice. He said it exactly like that. Not don't say anything. Just, 'It's easier for everyone if you don't notice.' And then he asked about my recordings. Like, knew about them. Said he'd love to hear the garage one sometime." A short laugh with nothing in it. "So now I don't notice. I'm real good at not noticing. It's basically my sixth category."

I keep my face a green line. Boring. Under.

"When you flagged it," I say. "Do you remember which participant."

"No." Fast. Too fast, then honest under it. "I mean — I could probably tell you which nights, the extra ones cluster, there's like a rhythm to it once you stop not-noticing, which I'm not supposed to — but names, no, I make myself not keep the names. That's the trade, right? I keep everybody safe and I don't keep the names." He rubs his face with both hands, and when they come down the grin is trying to come back and can't quite. "Can we — you're supposed to be asleep. I'm supposed to be making you sleep. This is the worst in-lab night I've ever run. I'm gonna get a note in my file. 'Theo talks too much,' subtitle, 'we already knew that.'"

I could push. There's a version of me, the one before the March I won't name, who plants a foot in that open door and leans until the whole thing gives. I feel her stand up in me.

I sit her back down. Not because I'm kind. Because I watched what happens to people who become interesting to that soft gray voice, and Theo already carried a coffee cup's worth of that man's attention across this room, and every question I ask writes his name a little bolder on a list I can't see.

I ask him nothing else. That's the closest thing to mercy I have left, and it isn't much.

"Put me under," I say. "Earn your note."

He wires the last of me into the bed. The halo across my forehead, my own unit, the one I've slept in ninety-odd nights; the lab's electrodes fanning off my scalp into a bundle he gathers and clips to the headboard so I can turn without tearing loose. My watch is on the nightstand, charging, its little light breathing. He checks the leads, checks the window, checks me.

"You did good," he says, from the doorway, the cracked recorder back on his hip. "For a talker. Takes one to know one." The grin makes it, finally, tired at the edges. "I'll be right in there. You're a green line. Stay boring."

The door seals. The light goes to nothing. The building takes its 2 a.m. breath early, or I imagine it does now that he's taught me to hear it, the whole structure drawing air through ducts nobody's awake to feel move.

I lie in the dark and let the map finish drawing itself behind my eyes, clean as a diagram, the way any operation looks once you stop pretending you're only a patient. Twelve suites. Two elevators. A stairwell with a dead camera and a door propped on a paper towel. A four-second lag at the bank. A lower level behind a badge my host can't beat, where an elevator carries visitors who don't sign his book down into rooms full of servers and comes back up empty.

And somewhere overhead, threading into certain skulls on nights that keep a rhythm, audio that isn't in the app, that isn't in the log, that a kind man in a gray suit crossed a dark building to make sure a good kid would learn not to hear.

I close my eyes with the electrodes tugging and the halo warm and the watch breathing beside me, and I let the last fact settle where the others can't dislodge it, the one I drove out here to confirm and now can't unknow.

There are sessions in this building that officially don't exist.

And I'm about to sleep through one.