Blythe followed several steps behind, instructed by Grant to accompany them until Operations signed a report. Her heel caught on an uneven floor joint. She stumbled, recovered, and scowled at the tile as though it had conspired against her.
“Are you really some kind of inspector?” she asked Rafael.
“I'm an architect by training. Specifically, emergency circulation. I review whether buildings give people a fair chance to get out.”
“You could have said that at the counter.”
“Would it have made the ticket valid?”
She did not answer. They walked past a wall advertisement showing a couple laughing in a restaurant that had not opened yet. Yasmine lifted the corner of a protective panel. Behind it was a faded green arrow pointing toward an exit that no longer appeared on airport directories.
“The new maps send everyone west,” she said. “Even people starting east of the security line. They want the concourse to empty through the shopping gallery.”
“Can the gallery hold that many people?”
“Not if the service shutters are down. Not if the elevator is out. And certainly not if a family has a wheelchair and a stroller.”
Blythe looked at the arrow. “I was told that exit was abandoned.”
“By whom?” Rafael asked.
“Training. The supervisor says the old service passage is a liability.”
Yasmine stopped beside an ordinary gray door fitted with a new magnetic lock. Above it a security camera blinked. “This is the shortcut we used when the terminal got smoky during last month's electrical test,” she said. “The lock stayed closed. We reported it.”
“What response did you get?”
“A message saying the concern was resolved. No one tested the door in front of us.”
Rafael wrote the time in a pocket notebook. He could hear his daughter Nora's voice from their last argument: You are always taking notes when someone needs you to stay. That had been two years ago. He had not heard her say his name kindly since.
His phone vibrated. A message from the municipal commission said the hearing had been moved up. Instead of afternoon, the preliminary inspection would begin in one hour. The change had been made that morning, after Rafael had checked in online, and his allotted public comment time had been shortened to four minutes.
He turned the phone toward Yasmine. “Who requested the change?”
“Facilities, probably. Or the concession contractor.”
Blythe glanced at the screen and paled. “The company that redid the shopping gallery?”
“Yes.”
“My brother works there,” she said. “He was told to clear the old stairwell before dawn.”
Yasmine and Rafael exchanged a look. People in an airport were constantly carrying things, but an instruction to clear an emergency stairwell just before a review was not ordinary housekeeping.
“Call him,” Rafael said.
Blythe shook her head. “He'll lose his job if anyone learns I told you.”
“Then don't call him for us,” Yasmine said. “Call him because you want to know whether he's safe.”
The call went unanswered. The three of them stood in the public corridor, surrounded by announcements of boarding groups and good weather, while the silence from Blythe's phone grew more alarming than any warning tone.
CHAPTER 03
A Door Under Paint
North Passage was not on the new airport map. It survived in older drawings, tucked between a mechanical room and a line of retail storerooms. People who had worked in the terminal before its renovation remembered it as a broad, brightly lit corridor with benches at its halfway point. Rafael remembered the measured slope of its floor and the day his daughter, then nine, had raced him from end to end in a red raincoat.
“Why do you call it Sunrise?” Nora had asked him that day.
“Because there should always be another way toward daylight,” he had said.
At the time he believed clever design could protect everyone if people followed the plan. Six years later a warehouse fire in another part of the city killed his wife Iris. The fire door had worked. The route beyond it was blocked by deliveries. Rafael had helped design that building years earlier, and although he was not responsible for the obstruction, he carried the knowledge like a stone lodged behind his ribs.
Now, escorted by Yasmine and a security officer named Mateo Velez, Rafael entered the service wing. Blythe remained with them at her request. She had received a terse message from her brother, Oscar: I'm fine. Don't come down here. Asked to move something. Can't explain.
The corridor behind the polished lounge was cold and unfinished. Fluorescent bulbs flickered above concrete walls. A floor-cleaning machine sat abandoned beside bundles of cable. Rafael paused by a printed evacuation poster. It showed a clean, uncomplicated route across a broad space, but the wall facing him was lined with shelving.