Carmen increases her pace to the CNS, occasionally breaking into a jog as she rounds corners or crosses streets. Hypotheses float through her mind: that somehow SAAR knew what was going on, knew about her, knew about Kierk . . . had found Kierk alone after he had left yesterday . . .

Entering the CNS she finds no security guard at the little vestibule. After ringing the bell and waiting for a minute she leans over and swipes her own card in. She presses the elevator button but it doesn’t light up—probably the power outages had affected it and it needed to be reset or something. So she takes the stairs, which she’s never done from the ground floor before. Oddly not all the stairwells in the building go all the way up—this one ends at the fourth floor and so she has to wander the floor, which she’s never been on, looking for another stairwell. The lights are all dim. Sometimes she gets halfway down a dark hallway before a motion detector illuminates the section. She wonders if Skylar is in here yet. In fact, Carmen realizes she stupidly hadn’t specified where Skylar should meet with them—stupid Carmen, overconfident Carmen—she mentally berates herself, picking her way through the corridors.

She stops because of a low sound, like a moan, and is momentarily frozen in place listening before she recognizes it as the change in air pressure between rooms. She realizes that the door is resting just an inch from being closed with wind whistling through it. She’s never noticed the doors in this structure do that before. At first she’s relieved for this explanation but then disconcerted. The building is whistling at her. It was just like her dream of the building being alive this morning, wasn’t it?

She’s halfway down a long corridor when the footsteps begin. At first she doesn’t identify them as such, they are so loud and heavy in the silence. But they are indeed footsteps. And they’re on the floor above her, walking down what must be a similar corridor, booming each step. The ceiling above her echoes as the sounds approach Carmen’s position where she has stopped, looking up. There’s something wrong, the footsteps cover too much space between them, like it’s a giant walking. They come to a stop directly above her. Carmen’s hand goes to her mouth to quiet her breathing. Her mind spins. What if it’s the same person who left the mannequin? Or the same . . . She wonders if there’s some kind of entrance in the basement of the building to the subway system . . . maybe in the animal rooms, the large drains by the monkey cages leading down into cylindrical pits that connected to forgotten sewage tunnels. Something could definitely come up through those tunnels, something that had been moving under the city unseen . . .