"We have been at this since seven," Natalie said to the nearest technician. "The room is cooling, then the fan stops, and the demonstration equipment begins overheating again. Explain to me why the diagnostics keep claiming the environmental system is healthy." Her voice did not rise, but the men in the hallway grew quieter. A silver-haired supervisor told her they were waiting for an additional vendor engineer, and Natalie looked at the wall clock as if she could make the man arrive by disapproving of the time.
Marcus turned away and began wiping the reception counter. He knew better than to step into a conversation about equipment he had not been asked to examine. At his last repair job he had learned that offering an observation to the wrong supervisor could be mistaken for telling that supervisor how to work. At Meridian, where his job title was cleaner, it was easier not to be noticed at all.
Then he heard the click. It came from the equipment cabinet, a small deliberate sound almost swallowed by the distant rush of conditioned air. Marcus kept wiping, but a few seconds later he heard it again, followed by a faint change in the pitch of the ventilation fan. He stopped with the cloth halfway across the counter, listening as the fan tried to regain speed before the clicking returned.
Machines had always spoken to Marcus in patterns. His father called it learning the rhythm, the habit of noticing when a sound came early, late, or at the wrong point in a sequence. A refrigerator compressor starting after a quiet interval made one kind of click. A contactor releasing because its control circuit lost permission made another, and this one had a familiar, slightly frustrated rhythm.
He turned slowly toward the cabinet. The engineers were looking at their laptops, not listening, and there was nothing insulting about that; modern systems generated so much data that people naturally watched the screen for the answer. Marcus himself had made that mistake more than once. He waited through another cycle, holding his breath long enough to hear the relay close, the fan respond, and the relay open again before the fan had settled into a steady run.
One of the engineers looked up and noticed him. "Can I help you?" he asked, his tone not unfriendly but unmistakably guarded. Marcus lifted the cleaning cloth. "Sorry. I heard something from that cabinet." The man looked at the open equipment and back at the cart, unsure why a member of the cleaning crew had stopped to comment on a technical problem.
Natalie turned from the conference room. "What did you hear?" she asked. Marcus almost wished she had not. He could still walk away, finish the corridor, and remain the invisible man whose only urgent problem was getting home before Emma woke. Then the click came again, plainly enough for everyone to hear, and he knew he would think about it all night if he pretended otherwise.