Chapter Twelve

The plan was straightforward enough: all Bethany needed was a name. The name of someone who worked inside this building in the present day. A loose thread to start pulling on, and they might have the FBI involved within the hour.

Among these ruins, paper files and computer drives would be long lost, but an office building had other storage media that should have survived the intervening years just fine. Specifically, Travis was thinking of office door nameplates. They tended to be made of either plastic or bronze, and the names and job titles on them were usually deeply engraved-sometimes they were cut fully through the plate. A plastic nameplate could probably sit out in the elements for a million years and still be legible, and even bronze should be good for a long while. Longer than most other metals. Corrosion resistance was one of the advantages that had made bronze such a big deal, way back in the day.

A single name. It was all they needed.

They rounded the cluster of birches and got a full view of the high-rise. It'd borne the years better than most of the other structures they'd seen. Its frame, though heavily rusted, was still standing whole and straight. A good portion of the concrete flooring at each level remained intact-maybe a third of it in all. Travis could see even the remnant of a stairwell near the building's core, thick metal risers and treads still in place. It wasn't hard to guess why the building had fared better than its neighbors along the street. It was newer. Built in 2006, it probably had a few decades on any other structure within a couple blocks. That meant it was not only younger, but that its steel had probably been of higher quality to begin with. It'd benefited from all the advances in refinement and impurity removal in the years leading up to its construction. For all that, it was still another relic waiting to fall. Its superior attributes would buy it an extra five years on its feet, at best.

They reached the building's concrete foundation wall. It stood three feet above street level and was four feet thick. They peered over the edge. The foundation was only a single story deep, but a third of that depth was filled with a compost layer of leaves and branches and probably a few dozen tons of gypsum plaster that had once made up the building's drywall. Travis stared at the layer and felt his optimism fade. He thought of looking for an eight-by-two-inch nameplate among half an acre of chest-deep biomass. He thought of needles and haystacks. Then he saw something that turned his optimism all the way off.

It was a blackened, fibrous slab of wood maybe two inches thick. A corner of it was just peeking from the mire ten feet away. There was a rusted hinge attached to it. A single, inch-long steel screw clung to the free-swinging half of the hinge. Both the screw and the hinge were deformed. They hadn't just corroded to rust and flaked away. They'd sagged and bent. They'd half melted.

Fire had ravaged the foundation pit at some point in the past. It hadn't burned hot enough, or long enough, to affect the massive footings of the girder structure, but everything else had suffered in the heat. The heavy wooden door had probably been solid oak. It looked like the carbonized remnant of a campfire log now. Travis thought of bronze again. He thought of the other thing it was celebrated for: the ease with which it could be heat-softened and reshaped. Plastic and bronze nameplates might last for millennia against rain and snow and mildew, but they wouldn't last five minutes in a fire hot enough to warp steel screws. T hey walked the building's perimeter. They searched for any scraps that had fallen outside the foundation. They found a few shards of green glass and chunks of concrete from the missing floor sections above, but nothing useful. Nothing with anyone's name on it. Decades of rain and wind had scoured the exposed street of anything small enough to be carried away. Travis imagined meter-wide storm drains beneath the city clotted with every kind of refuse. T hey climbed a maple growing against the girders on the west side of the building and got onto the second floor. They made their way across the level toward the intact stairwell at the center of the structure. They avoided walking on the huge pads of concrete that still held in some places among the steel framing. All of the pads showed cracks, and some were sagging. It was impossible to know the amount of weight they could hold. Sooner or later each one's capacity would reach zero and it would collapse. A day or a week or a month before that point, the capacity was probably just a few pounds. Given that most of them had already fallen, it seemed prudent to stay the hell off of them.

They reached the stairwell and found it to be solid. The treads and risers were at least an inch thick. None of the flights they could see above had collapsed or even decoupled from the structural members they were welded to.

They made their way up.

They stopped and studied each floor. A few very heavy objects from the building's interior remained atop the concrete pads here and there. One was a squat granite bookend, like a little pyramid cut in half. Travis lifted it and saw traces of carpet fiber and foam beneath it. The thing had sat there, a little too dense to be blown away, while everything had rotted around it-even out from under it. They found a pair of hexagonal iron dumbbells, twenty pounds each. Travis imagined them sitting in someone's office and not seeing much use. They'd seen even less lately.

They saw a few steel door frames still held in place against the sturdiest uprights, but there were no doors left in any of them. No doors lying flat on any of the concrete pads, either. They'd have long since rotted to fragments light enough that a once-in-a-decade storm could push them over the edge. At least half a dozen such storms would've happened over the years. No doors. No nameplates.

They saw something shiny at the north edge of the fifth floor. They crossed to it along the girders. It was the foil lid of a yogurt container, its edge pinned beneath the rim of a tipped-over trash basket-a stylish, heavy little thing carved from a cubic foot of limestone.

Travis pulled the yogurt lid free and held it up to the light. Whatever writing had once been on it had long ago faded to almost nothing in the sun.

But there was a line of text along the edge that remained legible-tiny letters and numbers that'd been stamped into the foil.

They read: exp. dec 23 2011.

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