The elevator hummed its familiar mechanical song as it climbed through the downtown high-rise, and nobody in it was paying the slightest attention to anybody else.

That was the rule of elevators. Four strangers, one small steel box, eyes on the floor numbers or the phone or the middle distance. Alex stood in the back corner with a messenger bag slung over one shoulder and a lanyard still hooked around his neck from a meeting that should have ended at six and had ended at eight-forty. He was going up to fourteen to retrieve a laptop charger and then going home and then, with any luck, going to sleep for eleven hours.

Across from him, a woman in black leggings and a sports bra leaned against the wall with her earbuds dangling around her neck. Her hair was pulled into a knot that had given up halfway through the day, and she carried the loose, heavy-limbed glow of somebody who had just worked very hard at something and enjoyed it. A gray gym bag sat between her sneakers. She had pressed twelve when she boarded, and then she had looked up, straight at Alex, for exactly one second longer than strangers do.

Alex had looked at the floor numbers.

There were two others. A man in a wrinkled suit, early forties, scrolled through his phone with the grim thumb of a man reading something he wished were different. And a woman in navy scrubs, with her badge turned backward on its clip and her eyes half shut, who had the particular gray pallor of the end of a double shift.

The numbers climbed. Nine. Ten. Eleven.

The lights flickered once.

Then twice.

Then the whole car gave a long, shuddering lurch, like a dog shaking off water, and stopped. The hum died in the middle of a note. The display above the door went black. And for a few long seconds the darkness was so complete that Alex could not see his own hand, and could hear nothing at all but four people breathing.

“Okay,” said somebody. “Okay. That’s fine.”

The emergency lights clicked on, dim, yellow, and sickly, a single strip high in the ceiling that made everyone look like a photograph left too long in a drawer.

It took the better part of twenty minutes for hope to die.

The man in the suit, whose name turned out to be James, found the emergency button and pressed it until the plastic cracked under his thumb. A recorded voice told him that help was on the way and to remain calm, and then the line went dead. The woman in scrubs, whose name was Meredith, held her phone up in every corner of the car like a woman trying to catch rain. “No signal,” she muttered. “Nothing. Anyone?”

“Nothing,” said the woman in the leggings, checking hers. “I’m Jordan, by the way. Since we’re apparently going to be friends.”

“Alex.”

“Hi, Alex.”

She said it simply, with no particular weight, and Alex felt it anyway, somewhere low in the spine.

“It’s the whole grid,” Jordan went on, looking at her dead phone. “I saw it on the lobby screens as I came in. Some substation on the east side. They said it might be a couple of hours.” She shrugged. “I figured I’d be home by then.”

“A couple of hours?” said James.

“It’s an estimate.”

He swore, long and low, and slid down the wall until he was sitting on the floor with his knees up and his tie pulled loose. Meredith closed her eyes and let her head fall back against the steel. Within ten minutes she was either sleeping or doing a good impression of it. James talked for a while, about his wife and his two kids and the dinner he was missing, and then he ran out of things to say and just sat with his phone dark in his hands, watching the yellow light.

Alex sat too. It was the only thing to do. He put his back against the wall and his bag between his feet and looked at the dead screen of his phone, and the heat started to come up.

It does, in a stalled elevator. Nobody tells you. No air handlers, no fans, just four bodies and a ceiling an arm’s length overhead, and the air thickening and warming until Alex’s shirt began to stick between the shoulder blades and the lanyard felt like a collar. Across from him Jordan had pulled her knot loose and shaken out her hair, and a sheen of sweat lay along her collarbone and in the hollow of her throat, catching the yellow light.

Alex watched it. He did not mean to. He had been very careful all day, all week, all of his adult life, not to mean to.

When he looked up, Jordan was watching him back.

She did not look away. That was the thing. People look away. They glance, they catch your eye, they flinch off. Jordan held it, with her head tilted slightly against the wall and her mouth very still, steady and unhurried and entirely aware of what she was doing, and Alex felt his pulse go off like a dropped tray.

“You keep looking at me,” she said.

She said it quietly. It was meant to carry no farther than the four feet between them, and it did not, quite. In the silence the words seemed to hang.

“Sorry. I—”

“I’m not complaining.”

James had stopped scrolling. Meredith’s breathing had changed, though her eyes were still closed.

Alex’s mouth had gone dry. In a normal life, on a normal day, in a room with the lights on, this was the moment where he would have said something polite and turned to the wall. But it was not a normal day. It was dark, and hot, and no one knew where they were, and the world outside the doors had stopped existing; and under all of that there was a thing Alex had carried for fifteen years, in a locked box, in a back room, with the lid held down by both hands.

“This is going to sound insane,” he said.

Jordan pushed off the wall. She took one step, no more, and the car was so small that one step put her knees almost against his. She crouched, easily, and rested her forearms on her thighs. “Try me.”

“I’ve always—” Alex stopped. Started. Looked at the ceiling. “There’s a thing I think about. It’s not even—I don’t think about sex, exactly, or not only. I think about being seen. Not by a camera. By a person. Somebody there. Somebody who’s watching me and can’t look away, and I know they’re watching, and—” The words were coming faster now, in a low, miserable, honest rush. “I’ve wanted it my whole life. To do it somewhere that isn’t private. Somewhere that someone could walk in. That’s the part that—it’s not a side effect. That’s the point. I’ve never told anyone. I’ve never even said it out loud.”

It was very quiet in the car.

“Well,” said Jordan. “You’ve said it now.”

Her voice was warm and a little rough, and there was no mockery in it anywhere. Alex let out a breath that shook.

“I’m sorry. That was a lot, I don’t know why I—”

“Alex.” She was smiling now, slowly, at the corner of her mouth. “Look around.”

He looked.

James was sitting bolt upright against the wall. His phone had slid out of his hand onto the floor, and he had not noticed. Meredith’s eyes were open, wide and dark in the gloom, and her hands were gripping her own knees.

“We’re stuck in a box,” Jordan said, “with an audience, in the dark, for at least two hours, and nobody can get in.” She leaned in, so that her mouth was an inch from Alex’s ear. “I’d say the universe has just handed you a permit.”

Alex’s skin went hot from the neck down.

“But I’m not going to do anything,” Jordan murmured, “that you don’t want. And I’m not going to do anything that they don’t want to see. So here’s what I think we do.” She straightened, and turned, and looked across the car in the dim light with a plain steady courtesy. “James. Meredith. That’s—you heard that. I want to ask you both. If you don’t want any part of this, say so, and nothing happens. We’ll sit here and talk about the weather. You can look at the wall. Nobody will think anything about it.”