The building was a nice place, with brass-capped white pillars at the outside. It looked like a hotel, stately, but there was no sign of any occupancy and the wear and tear of age that I’d noted earlier seemed to have caught the outside, leaving it dusty and plastered with a few pieces of trash that had blown up against the building face and then stuck there with residual grime, dust, and rain.

“This place has a keypad lock,” Kenzie said. “I was thinking of the shopping center, that would work too, but getting inside would be hard. Instead…”

She slapped a box the size of a smartphone onto the side of the front door keypad, tapped it once, and then pushed the door open.

“It’s concerning just how naturally you did that,” I said.

“Pshh.”

I helped her lift the box.

“What’s concerning is that she probably spent four hours building that, instead of looking up one of the thousands of tutorials online on how to break a keypad lock,” Chris said.

“One and a half hours, thank you very much. Except it was closer to three because I was splitting my attention between watching television, homework, and building that.”

“So pretty close to four hours, then? Or are you doing that thing where you took three hours to get it technically finished, and another half an hour to build a nice case that matched the outfit you were going to wear today?”

Kenzie sighed.

“Or was it forty five minutes? Was it an actual hour? Was I actually right on the nose with my guess about it taking four hours total?”

“It was twenty minutes to build the case, you booger. I made resin and glassworking machines since I like my work to look nice and I make a lot of lenses. It cut down on the time, even if it wastes material if I’m not paying attention.”

“I was close,” he gloated.

“You were sorta close, you booger.”

Sveta let her hand drop to the floor. She brought it back up, a cigarette butt clasped between two fingers.

“People have been here,” I said.

“They might still be here,” Sveta said.

“Hmmm,” Kenzie said. She consulted her phone. “This way.”

‘This way’ was to the penthouse, which took up the entirety of the fourth floor. The stately, crimson-carpet, white-pillar look was in full force for the open concept room.

The window was open and the fierce wind blew the sheer curtains into the room. Even the heavier crimson velvet curtains were moving.

Cigarettes littered the floor by the window. The wind had blown them and the ash across the floor, and moisture or humidity had given the cigarettes and their ash enough dampness to run and stain the tiled floor beneath them.

Kenzie indicated for the box to go down. We eased it to the floor.

“I hope this works,” she said.