There's a floor in this hotel that the directory skips, and the elevator panel skips it too.

I do the audit rounds on graveyard, which means I count every room against the property map twice a night, and I learned the building from a woman named Diane Karras, who trained me on this same clipboard before she retired. She always told me the count only works if you trust the map over your own eyes.

The lobby directory runs floors two through fourteen, and the elevator buttons jump from nine straight to eleven, no ten, like the number was never poured. I told myself it was a renovation gap, because older properties seal a floor for asbestos work and just stop listing it. I almost left it there.

But the stairwell doesn't lie the way the panel does. When I walked it, the painted landing numbers climbed nine, then ten, then eleven, and the door on ten was the same fire-rated steel as every other floor, warm under my palm in a building they keep at sixty-five all night.

Through that door I could hear an ice machine cycling, and the hallway carpet past the wire-glass window was the burgundy diamond pattern they tore out everywhere else in 2011.

I told myself a maintenance crew left a unit running. I checked the master log at the desk anyway.

The last entry for floor ten was a checkout, room 1014, signed by the auditor on shift.

Diane Karras. Dated tonight.

I'm not going to tell you whose handwriting the signature matches.