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They stared for a few minutes and then Veek snapped her fingers. “They’re wiring schematics.”

Nate looked from her back to the wall. “What?”

Veek nodded. “Some of the symbols are sort of archaic, but I’d bet big money that’s what they are.” She pointed at the diagram. “That’s a switch. I’m pretty sure that’s a fuse.” She tilted her head. Nate decided it was her thinking pose. She drew a circle around several items with her finger. “No idea what any of that stuff is,” she said.

Tim rubbed his chin. “I think you’re on to something.”

“But what’s it for?” said Xela. “What the heck does all this make?”

Nate looked at Veek. “What do you think?”

She stared at the walls.

“Veek?”

She blinked and glanced at him. “You know what this means?” She tapped the walls. “These were always here. Being set up like this is part of the original design.”

“Or at least as far back as all this was painted,” Tim pointed out. “They could—”

“What in God’s name haff you been doing?!
”

Oskar stood in the doorway with his fists clenched.

Oskar’s nostrils flared. “Haff you lost your minds?” he growled. “Apartment sixteen is ruined!”

Nate opened his mouth and glanced at Veek. She was already looking at him. He decided it was better to keep his mouth shut and pushed his lips together.

Oskar glared at Tim’s walls and clenched his fists even tighter. Then he took three slow, deliberate breaths. His jaw relaxed a bit and his hands opened up. “Haff you fandalized all your apartments?”

Nate kept his lips sealed and nodded.

Oskar focused on Veek. “I warned you about your crazy ideas, Miss Fishwanath.” He shook his head. “I am going to haff to call the painters in.”

“No!” said Veek. She gestured at the walls. “Look at this, Oskar. Aren’t you curious? Don’t you want to know what—”

Oskar dismissed her with a wave. “I do not,” he snapped. “You haff made things bad for everyone now. Do you haff any idea how much this is going to cost to repair? The owners will be furious. You will all be efficted.”

“No we won’t,” said Tim.

Oskar’s eyes locked onto Tim’s.

“We’ve redecorated,” Tim said. “What we’ve done in our own apartments is within our rights as outlined in the lease. It’s not specified what counts as ‘damage,’ so at the best you’ll be able to deduct the expense from our security deposits.”

“You think I cannot—”

“Try anything else and I’ll take you to court.”

The stout man sucked in a breath and held it.

“I’m going to go out on a limb and guess the owners wouldn’t like the publicity of a court case,” Tim continued. “Even a minor one. So no matter how angry you are, I suggest you take a few moments to calm down.”

Oskar let out his breath. “Apartment sixteen—”

“—
was my responsibility. No one else was there. First offense of a new tenant. I’m sure it can be excused, especially since I’m offering to pay for it.”

Oskar’s jaw moved back and forth. His eyes shifted off Tim to Nate, then to Xela, and settled on Veek again.

“I haff run out of patience,” he said. “This is the last warning for all of you.” He looked at the math-covered walls again. “I am going to call the painters. All your apartments will be painted.”

Nate glanced at the walls and bit his tongue.

Oskar gave them a last glare. “And it is coming out of your security deposits.” He turned and marched back into the hall. They heard him stomp down the hall and into the stairwell.

Veek let out a sigh of relief.

“You just saved our asses,” Xela said to Tim.

He glanced at her and smirked. “Well, how could I let such a fine ass go to waste?”

“Okay,” said Nate, “we need to take photos. Get all of this documented before the painters get here.” He looked at Xela. “Your camera can do high-resolution pictures, right?”

“It can, yeah,” she said, “but I can’t.”

“Don’t tell me you’re chickening out.”

Xela shook her head. “No, I just...I’ve got class in two hours. I need to get showered and get over to campus.” She shrugged. “Sorry.”

Veek nodded. “I’ve got to get ready for work,” she said. She looked at Nate. “So do you, don’t you?”

He bit his lip and looked at the wall. “I could call in sick.”

Tim raised an eyebrow. “Weren’t you just complaining your hours had been cut?”

“We can’t lose all this,” said Nate.

“We also can’t lose you,” said Veek. “If you can’t pay rent, this little investigation of ours is over.”

He looked at Tim. “What about you? Could you start taking pictures?”

“A couple, but I’ve got a meeting at ten in Santa Monica.” The older man shook his head. “Oskar probably can’t get painters here until tomorrow at best. We can meet up tonight and get everything photographed.”

Xela yawned and stretched. “But we are going to sleep at some point, right?”

“At some point,” said Nate with a nod.

* * *

It was the longest day of work in human history.

Once the excitement of discovery wore off and his regular life resumed, Nate was exhausted. He poured a cup of coffee and drank it in the break room. He took the second one back to his desk with him. The morning was an ongoing fight to stay awake. It was a relief when another mail crate arrived and he had to get up and walk around.

He ran timetables in his head while he stared at the addresses on his computer. When would Oskar call the painters? How many would there be? When would they get there? How long would it take them to paint an apartment? Would they scrape the walls first or just layer the paint on over the bare spots?

He skipped lunch and stretched out in his office chair. In one of the timetables he’d come up with all the walls had been painted by now. His head leaned back against the top of the chair and his eyes closed. The faint hum of his computer blended with the rattle of the air conditioner and the rumble of traffic out on the streets of Hollywood.

Then he was on the roof of the Kavach Building with Veek and Xela. Veek wore a baggy orange sweatshirt and her dark hair was cut in a retro bob. Xela was naked, because they’d come up there when she was sunbathing. She’d changed her hair from blue to bright green. He tried not to stare at the small patch of emerald fuzz between her legs. “I wash it with cockroaches,” she explained.

Veek nodded. “I would too, but I’ve got a bug thing.”

“It looks totally different under black light,” Xela said. “You should take a look.”

Roger stood by the oversized machine room. He shook the top padlock on the door and it made a noise like the decked-in-chains ghost from
A Christmas Carol
. “Waste of time,” Roger said. “Elevator’s in the basement.”

“All the cool stuff is in the basement,” agreed Veek.

Xela grabbed Nate by the shoulders and shook him hard. He turned and looked, but all he could see was her green hair. He tried to twist away, lost his balance, and almost fell out of his chair.

“Easy, tiger,” said Anne. She stood next to his desk. “Just thought you should wake up before Eddie makes his afternoon appearance.”

He blinked a couple of times and glanced around. “I slept through lunch?”

She smiled. “You were out cold. It’s almost two-thirty.”

“
Shit.” In two of his timetables the equations were painted over by now. In one of them the workers were just getting started.

“You looked like you needed it,” she said.

“Yeah, kind of. Nobody saw me?”

Anne shrugged. “New schedules, remember? It’s just you and me today. We could have wild cubicle sex and no one would know.”

He nodded and rubbed his eyes.

“Wow,” she said. “You really are tired, aren’t you?”

He looked up at her. “Sorry?”

“Never mind. You’ll be kicking yourself later, though.”

He blinked again. She patted him on the shoulder and walked back to her own cubicle.

Nate tossed one of the bundles of returned flyers into the bottom drawer of his desk. There was already one in there. Part of him acknowledged he was falling very far behind and needed to get caught up sometime soon. Most of him watched the clock and wondered how fast he could get home.

Eddie stopped by and lamented the amount of work getting done. Nate nodded, but didn’t bother to argue. He processed a few dozen more returns and then started packing his bag an hour early. Anne peeked in at him. “Somewhere to be?”

“Yeah,” he said. He tried to think of something more believable than the truth. “I’m trying to get home before my landlord goes into my apartment for some repairs.”

Her face twisted up. “Oh, I hate that,” she said. “People in your place with all your stuff.”

He nodded and paused. “Would you mind if I...?”

“Go,” she said. “I’ll cover for you. Again.”

“You rock.” He slung his backpack over his shoulder. “Thank you.”

“Get some sleep,” she called after him.

Nate fought rush hour and skimmed through three yellow lights before he made himself slow down. It took him over half an hour to get home. He drove up to the Kavach Building and was stunned to find an empty parking space.Tim and Xela waited for him on the steps. “Calm down,” she said. “Nothing happened. They didn’t paint anything.”

Nate stopped. A wave of exhaustion made him sway for a moment. “You’re sure?’

“Oh yeah,” said Xela. She gestured at the building. “I’ve been home all afternoon and Oskar’s growled at me three times about it.”

Tim hopped down the steps and opened the gate. “They’ll be here first thing in the morning, though,” he said. “Roger got the paint off his walls and there’s more math there. We tried to talk Mandy into it but she’s just too scared of getting evicted.”

“Roger’s okay with it?”

“I’ve got him wrapped around my finger,” Xela said, smiling. “I think I’m going to ask him to rob a bank for me.” She held up her camera. “I’ve already got my room photographed. Veek isn’t back from work yet. I was just going to start Tim’s and we realized it was about time for you to get home.”

“They’re good pictures?”

“I took triples to be safe. Already checked on my computer. High resolution, perfect detail. You can see everything.”

“Awesome.” He hefted his pack and nodded to Tim. “Let me dump this and I’ll meet you guys in your place.”

Xela’s camera was on a tripod when he walked next door to apartment 26. Two poster-sized pieces of white foamcore bounced extra light onto the walls. “Don’t move around too much,” she said. “Long exposures. Don’t want to shake the camera or mess up the lights.” She looked from the camera’s small screen to the wall and back, then tapped the button. A moment later the camera chirped, the electronic sound of a shutter. Xela took two more shots and moved the tripod to the next wall.

There was a knock at the door. “Hey,” said Veek. “Looks like we dodged a bullet.”

Xela finished the fourth wall and carried the tripod into Tim’s small living room. The others shifted back into the kitchen and helped move her bounce boards. “I’ll have to go download these when I’m done in here,” she said. “They’re really huge at this setting.”

Nate nodded.

Veek gazed around the apartment. “This is sort of...claustrophobic, isn’t it?” she asked Tim. “The whole space divided up like this?”

Tim looked at the tiny kitchen they were clustered in. “Not much worse than a college dorm room,” he said.

“It’s a lot smaller than mine was.”

“But I’ve got four of them,” he said. “I’ve grown to like it. It appeals to my compartmentalized nature.”

“What about downstairs?” Nate asked him. He pointed a finger at the floor. “Sixteen?”

“Locked up tight,” said Tim. “I think Oskar made sure of that.”

“We could ask Roger to pick the lock,” Xela called from the other room. “That’s what I figured we’d do.”

Veek wrinkled her brow. “Do you really think he can do it?”

Tim shrugged. “We can let him try. I think the real question is, do we need to get in there? It wasn’t math on the walls. It looked pretty simple and straightforward. ‘Stay the hell out of this room.’”

“I think we’d rather have it than not,” said Nate.

“If Oskar steps out, he’ll see us,” said Veek. “Straight shot down the hall.”

“We’ll save it for last,” said Nate. “Maybe he crashes early.”

“Second to last,” said Xela. She picked up the tripod and shuffled through into the next tiny room of the apartment. “I promised Roger I’d do his last and have a drink with him.”

Nate gave her a look. “Are you okay with that?”

“Don’t worry, oh-captain-my-captain. Roger’s kind of cute, but he’s not one-drink cute.”