Bethany screamed.
It was all Travis could do to keep his body from pitching right over the desktop and slamming down like a dropped anvil onto the concrete behind it. Bethany was yelling something at him, but the bloodflow ringing in his ears made it hard to tell what it was. He checked his forward momentum, both hands pressing hard onto the smooth desktop, and suddenly the world went still and silent. He heard his own breathing. He heard Bethany’s breathing too.
He turned and looked at her. The word pale didn’t quite do the job. Her breath went in and out in little jerks. Her eyes stayed with his for a few seconds, and then they dropped and went to the right. He followed her stare.
The largest of the lateral cracks had opened up all the way to the girder on one side, and the concrete had sagged free of its seat against the beam there, its hold having crumbled completely except for a single, fist-sized formation. That piece, clinging to the steel by an inch, was all that had stopped the pad’s total failure. It was all that was preventing it now.
Bethany found her voice again. “Off.” Her hands made little circular gestures, calling him back to the beam.
Travis still had both his hands on the desk, most of his weight distributed to its footings. He looked at the drawers. He could probably open all four from here without shifting his mass around very much.
“Travis,” Bethany said.
He looked at her again.
Her eyes: don’t.
“It’s okay,” he said. What else was he going to say?
He turned to the tray drawer on the top left. He raised one hand from the desk. Felt the weight that’d been on it transfer to the other hand. No real change to the pressure the desk was putting on the pad.
He pressed four fingers behind the rounded top of the drawer’s face panel and put his thumb against the edge of the desktop just above it. He pushed with his thumb and pulled with his fingers. There was a moment of resistance. Then he heard the lock mechanism crumble like a pretzel, and the drawer opened smoothly on plastic rollers.
The drawer’s sides and bottom were made of the same material as the rest of the desk. They’d held up perfectly. The contents of the drawer hadn’t. There were three metal paperclips that’d rusted to what looked like orange chalk drawings of themselves. Travis blew on them and they vanished in a little cloud. There was a stapler that had corroded to a solid lump. Right beside it was a perfect little rectangle-shaped piece of rust that Travis couldn’t identify at first. Then he understood: a box of staples, the cardboard long since eaten away by mildew and the tightly arranged staples inside fused together by oxidation. There were three nickels and a quarter. There was a pile of rubber bands that’d broken down to dried crumbs. There was a layer of dead mold coating everything. Once upon a time it’d been paper: memos, Post-its, business cards, maybe check stubs.
And that was it. There was nothing else in the drawer. Nothing with a name on it.
Travis considered the larger one below it. A file drawer. Was it even worth bothering with? What could have been in it but paper? What could be in it now but an inch-deep layer of mold dust?
He opened it.
It contained an inch-deep layer of mold dust.
He lowered his hand carefully to the mold and sifted through it. It came up in ragged tufts. They caught the wind as they cleared the top of the drawer and were scurried away. There was nothing lying concealed beneath the mold layer.
Travis pivoted carefully on his feet, trying not to move them or change the amount of weight on them. He put his free hand back on the desk, and slowly raised the other, letting the pressure transfer. He faced the other two drawers.
He tried the file drawer first. An inch of mold. Nothing under it.
He opened the tray drawer.
Empty.
Not even a dusting of long-gone paper.
He exhaled. Closed his eyes. Opened them again and began to stand upright.
And then he stopped.
Because there was something in the drawer.
Something narrow and black, lying against the back end. It blended with the dark cherrywood color and all but escaped notice. It was a pen. It looked expensive. He picked it up and drew it into the light. The metal parts—the clip and the point—were rusted dark, but the body looked fine. It was made of something that felt harder than ordinary plastic. Something that wasn’t cheap. Its grip was ornate but not fancy. It looked serious. Like something a high-powered executive would whip out on special occasions—maybe the signing of final contracts for a hostile takeover. Travis rolled it between his fingers.
There was a name engraved on it: eldred warren.
Travis turned and held the pen up so Bethany could see the engraving.
“Very good,” she said. “Now can you get the hell off there so I can start breathing again?”