Intruder

Ken walked down the stone corridor, hunched over slightly out of instinct. His fingers danced along the grip of the pistol tucked firmly into the waist of his pants. 

He'd reached the bottom of the stairs, but the fear he felt hadn't faded in spite of the slightly better visibility he found at the bottom of them. 

Lights flickered ominously above, casting brief shadows all along the corridor. For a moment, he thought he saw a person at the end of the hallway, but they disappeared as quickly as he could register them there. It did nothing to help his discomfort.

He walked along as quietly as possible. The wall to his left shook from time to time as a train passed by through the subway. The sensation made him jump every time. 

He had no idea where exactly he was at the moment in relation to the pavilion, platforms, railways, or anything. The terror he felt at walking down this strange hall had scrambled his logic and memory. 

But eventually, as he continued shuffling along, he realized that the hallway had a slight downward grade. The trains started passing by above his head, with the rattling shaking the lights above him. 

The sound of a train passing faded from earshot. He breathed a sigh of relief as it did, the lights returning to their eerie stillness. 

Something to his left reflected light into his face. A placard. On a door.

Dr. S. Burnwick

The door it labeled hung slightly ajar, pushed into the room a few inches. Ken's heart pounded in his chest. He reached out his hand holding his phone, shining the light into the room. And as he peered around the door, his stomach knotted.

Papers littered the ground. The desk was overturned, its contents spilling out. A cabinet was on its side. Folders were thrown about. A complete mess. It looked as though the room had been ransacked.

A door at the back of the room was open a crack, faint light radiating from beyond it. But he didn't dare approach it—not with the atmosphere as it was, and not with this being the wrong room anyway.

Dust floated in the stale air pervading the area, and him pushing open the door let it loose into the corridor. He coughed into his elbow, waving away the dirt and dust and pulling the door closed. 

Who had raided that room? What were they hoping to find? What had he gotten himself into? The questions plagued him as he continued onward. 

He heard a faint humming from a door ahead: the hum of a faulty but functional light. 

The placard on this door... 

Dr. I. Alexandrova

Her door was closed. Ken stood outside it, trembling with fear and anticipation. The handle of the door was warm as he touched it. He breathed deeply, and pushed it open. 

He looked around. It was... empty. 

She wasn't there. Ken whirled around, poking his head into the hallway. Nothing. 

What? She invited him here, gave him all these signs, clues needlessly encoded beyond the point of being understandable, and she wasn't even here?

He retracted his head. 

The light was still on, as he'd heard from outside. It flickered randomly, clearly on the verge of failure. However, this room was in a state of much more order than the other one had been: while the other one looked like a tornado had run through it, this one was about as far to the other end of the spectrum as was possible to be. 

The desk was perfectly neat. Pencils were exactly parallel to each other, all identical in placement and appearance. The keyboard, not connected to anything, was aligned immaculately. Papers were stacked on the desk's corner with crisply aligned, impossibly square edges. 

He took a few tentative steps in. "Irina?" he hissed. 

Nothing.

Well, now what?

The room was fairly bare, and quite plain for an office—even a secret one. The walls were plain white brick. The back wall featured a plain steel door that had no card scanner, but a hole for a key on the handle instead. A couple filing cabinets stood in each corner. The drawers lining their faces were labeled with small cards identifying their contents. 

He walked over to one. All irrelevant work: government contracts, personal projects, and a couple expansions on previous work. It was all old and completed, hence its relegation to the filing cabinets, he supposed. 

Next, he moved to the desk. The papers on its surface were also for dated projects—even those closest to the top. He frowned. Was this an old office? He ran his finger over the top of the desk. It was completely free of grime, as if cleaned that same day. 

So if it wasn't an old office, what was this old research doing here like this?

None of it lined up. 

He walked around the desk to her chair. It was old, rickety, and hard as he sat in it, but it would suffice for going through her things. He began rifling through the drawers of her desk. 

Old.

Old.

Super old.

He took a behemoth stack of research from years ago from a drawer. The stack had been perfectly aligned, just as the ones on the desk. Rifling through it revealed that none of it was relevant. He pushed it closed again, spinning in the chair.

Why am I even here? he thought, standing. But as he stood, his eyes caught on something on the corner of the desk, on the side of the set of drawers. A button, it looked to him. 

Squatting down beside it, he pushed it firmly. 

With a click, a smaller drawer emerged from between two of the larger and more prominent ones. A silver key lay inside it, with a tiny note affixed. 

Ken, 

I'm sorry I could not be there. I left in a hurry.

I have to assume you will find this key, given your observant nature. It unlocks the door behind you. The true key lies within that room. 

Irina

He couldn't help but laugh quietly to himself. Her riddles and clues were somehow complicated, yet so childishly simple. With the briefest inspection, anyone could have found this key. But it didn't matter. He stood back up, the key now in hand.

The door at the rear of the room was unmarked. He thrust the key into the handle and twisted, and with a satisfying click, the bolt in the door retracted. 

Inside the room was dark, the light in the office insufficient to light the area. And though he felt frantically along the walls for a light switch, he could not find one. He resorted again to the flashlight from his phone. 

The dim light didn't clarify much. Rows of shelves, occupied by various implements of their trade, took up most of the space, with a corridor down the middle. A single folder sat on the surface of a steel table at the back of the room. 

As he walked past the shelves, memories flooded back to him of their time spent researching together; the beginning days of their love, long since blossomed and wilted. The memories further soured his already poor mood. 

The folder was relatively plain. Standard manila, with a label on the front. 

Project Aerodramus: Continuance

He glanced over his shoulder after reading it, a pang of nervousness running through him. Continuance?

But even without understanding its meaning, the intentionality of it all forced him to take it, stuffing it inside his coat's inner pocket. 

And he turned to leave. 

But a shadow flickered across the open door. And the sound of footsteps in the office followed.