Don't look now... but you can see through the metal floor. All the way down.

Time and neglect have taken a toll, but it's only stood here for about a half-century.

A man, white-knuckled, spits on the stone yet to be engulfed by the plants. 'Traitor', he says afterwards, curling his lip in contempt.

SOME DEAD REACTIONARY, WHO CARES.

The intelligence has self-redacted.

Pulse within the rock. Old power.

The plumber fills his cup with ice and a little bit of water first thing in the morning. By the afternoon, sweating away in the hot, dark, half-flooded humidity, he sips at the lukewarm liquid.

A sudden cramp wracks your body as an electricity runs through it, but there was no current.

The crackling void is different from the last time you used this phone in some inexpressible way.

This is exactly what sane people do.

Time seems to hold its breath with you as you wait, listening.

The old man was kidnapped for what he knew or had discovered, and you know nothing.

An absolute lapse in stagecraft that plays to your advantage just now.

Occurring at a perceptual level so low that it's hard to distinguish from things merely imagined, you hear a click somewhere down the line.

In the silence after she speaks, the audio momentarily wavers. The telltale sign that the line has just been interrupted.

In the silence after she speaks, you sense, rather than hear, something on the line. A presence. Someone is listening in.

Spared from catastrophic error by your own incompetency.

It's a common joke that the Opera have preemptively bugged all public phones to spare the Superbloc's citizens the awkwardness of uncertainty.

The whisper of a smile at the corner of her mouth suggests she even enjoyed it.

She's often lingered in that doorway here, after you've gone to bed and in the odd hours of the day.

The club hates to see an operant abandoned on the pitch, deadly for morale.

'Yes', she means.

Immediately.

Behind her eyes, flickers of fear and apprehension. But she's keeping them down, for your sake and hers.

Some days pass without a single customer.

An age old recruitment technique. Let those with a sufficiently 'international' perspective reveal themselves.

She likes remembering him this way, in her shop, pretending to discreetly examine her list of services.

The disconnected fantasies of someone who only knows how to be alone.

The image in her mind growing fainter, like it might disappear the second she stops believing in it.

No match for us.

You swim with sharks and jellyfish.

Somewhere within your third left intercostal space, the bullet by your heart makes its presence known with a nasty twinge.

The inextricable swirl of global perils and the middle-aged terrors of a life wasted.

She doesn't trust you. Yet.

The facility's nickname is new to her. A delicious tidbit to hide away for later.

Permanent wrinkles.

Mouth drawn down in what's threatening to become a permanent frown.

Tape retains a lower profile, leaves no holes -- no evidence. Also, she won't hesitate to subtract the price of wall repairs from your stipend.

He died alone, in an unfamiliar room, with nothing to remind him of who he was or where he came from.

No no, this is an artistic meeting of the minds. A curatorial critique!

She tries not to think about it.

She feels his eyes on her, through the bag, through the paper, the second she enters the room. She shuts the door quickly and totters back down the stairwell with a shudder.

Her features seem to harden ever-so-slightly.

There's no such policy. She knows taking your money would make her complicit in the act.

Another expense she can add to the Operant Bureau's running tab.

But you've been leched many times before. This is not a garden variety leching.

You're no 'type', you are singular. Sui generis. Unrepeatable.

This is no mere 'Look', it is an expression of absolute, devastating neutrality. It will take weeks to recover.

MASSIVE LOSS OF FACE ON THE INTERNATIONAL STAGE.

The natural hierarchy of the photo shop rearranges itself. You're now on the very bottom, just below the street boars snuffling through the rubbish bins.

Checks