The van's diesel cough woke the alley as if someone had cleared a throat in the building's back yard. Asha Varma killed the engine, left the halogen work light swinging from its hook, and listened for whatever the night thought it ought to be. Garratt House sat like an old wristwatch between two newer towers — brass scuffs, a curved bay window on the third floor that caught the last of the streetlights, and a hundred small domestic rituals that hummed behind its plaster. Farther down the lane the spice cart that did midnight rolls at this end of the year was folding up, the vendor complaining about new refrigeration codes while offering Asha a free bun out of habit. She waved him off with a grin that meant she would take it if he ever ran out of excuses.
She carried her toolbox like a familiar limb. It was heavy and organized: a place for things that bite and a place for things that soothe. Garratt’s maintenance hatch gave reluctantly; the hinges complained in a language Asha considered ancestral. Hector Ruiz, who had been awake long enough to know how the house protested, was already there with his flashlight angled like a favors-forged crown.
“You make a habit of midnight drama?” Hector asked, a practical man whose jokes were made of thrift and brass.
“That’s my Tuesday,” Asha said, slipping a gloved hand into the shaft. The glove left a path of grease and city dust, and her palm found the cable as if greeting an old acquaintance. It was spring-cold, then not — an odd warmth bled along its run and left her glove smelling faintly of cloves.
Hector’s light swam up and down the shaft like a slow nod. “You sure you don’t want a coffee first?”
Asha hooked a headlamp and climbed the ladder into the machine room. Her knees remembered angles the way bones remembered old songs — the bends she avoided, the joints she trusted. She worked like a surgeon with noisy tools: ratchets sang, a torque wrench clicked approval. The elevator had hung between the sixth and seventh floors when the call came in; residents always insisted on theatrics even when the building provided the stage free. She scanned a panel of sensors; one feed showed a phantom load that ought not to be there — a weight reading spiking in the small hours before midnight then easing. The cab’s telemetry was polite and evasive.
She pulled the access panel and leaned over the exposed drum. A dark smear clung to the cable like an old rumor. It resisted at first, but when Asha scraped at it with the edge of her scraper, it had the displeasure of something waking. It left a residue on her glove and, for a breathless second, the residue puckered like the skin of a thought about to be said. She laughed under her breath; the sound was half a joke, half a way to name the weird.