east corridor.
It wasn’t the boiler itself.
Walter knew every creak and groan that old machine made, knew its rhythms the way you know the breathing of someone you slept beside for years.
This was different.
This was shuffling.
And then, very quietly, a cough.
Walter stood still for a long moment.
His first thought was an animal, a stray cat, maybe, that had gotten in through the loading dock.
His second thought was a vagrant, someone who’d found a way inside to escape the cold, which had happened twice
