Chapter 3: Chapter 3

It was dead quiet. I simply stood and waited for the shoe to drop, but it never did. I glazed up at the open hatch in the ceiling, and could have sworn something in the shadows simply dissolved out of existence- and with it the feeling of being watched. Relief washed over me as I caught breath I didn’t know I was holding, all my muscles loosening from the sudden adrenaline rush. 

 

Even if it ended up being nothing, I took whatever had just happened as an omen to get moving. I made my way back up the ladder, carefully closed the hatch and started my journey through the cramped space to my stash. It would add another 50% to the distance I needed to travel if the diagrams I had been using were correct, but that was acceptable. I had some useless stuff to drop off and a few things to pick up from it, and I guess it was time for a general inventory anyway. 

 

My watch read 9:02 as I crawled off. I should be able to get back by 9:50, which would give me plenty of time before I need to sleep. Breakfast was served between six and eleven, and tomorrow there were no scheduled medical checkups or whatever, so I could try to sleep in a little. The attempt to bait myself into sleeping in would likely be pointless- I always woke up within a few minutes of 6:30 much to my displeasure. Sleep was great and I never had enough.

 

By the time I got to my stash I was considering just burning this jacket. It was so full of dust I created a cloud whenever I moved too fast, meaning if I wasn’t purposefully trying to not create a messy cloud, I would shed like crazy. On the bright side, my stash was just as it ever was: a mess of arbitrarily organized piles. The most notable inclusions were three locked tablets, a previously locked phone that had such greasy fingerprints I could see the pin combination on the glass, two USB sticks of patient data (illegal for the hospital to have made), and a $40 gift card for a fast food chain that didn't exist in the western hemisphere. I hadn’t sold any of this stuff because I didn’t want anyone figuring out their previous owners and potentially from that, where the items had come from. The phone was also kept shut down with the battery out to be sure it wasn’t pinging the single cell tower close enough to get reception, which would also be a dead giveaway things weren’t just being lost.

 

To a small pile of possibly valuable shinies, I added the necklace and grabbed a cheap-ish looking ring. One of my aunt’s birthdays was coming up, and it would likely make a good present. I decided to keep the weird keys on me so I could figure out what they were for, and took the cash I had up here back to my room to consolidate it all. 

 

With my business done, all that was left for the night’s excitement was to get back to my room- which meant another fifteen to twenty minutes of crawling and squeezing for me.

 

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A dusty metal trapdoor had never looked as enticing as the one from my starting closet did when I reached it. I was almost to the point of trying my new respirator due to all the dust, but that would have meant I’d have to spend even more time up here fiddling around with it. 

 

A brief listening check was conducted and I concluded it was safe to go down, being as careful as I could to not make too much noise. After turning on the lights in the small room, I realized how much of a mess I was. My jacket looked like I had crawled out of a lint trap and created a visible haze around me as particles fell off. It would be way too conspicuous if anyone saw me, but I also was only wearing a bra under it- which would have similar issues. What? The building is kept at a nice 70° F, and the jacket was hot enough that I was sweating before I started crawling around in an unventilated attic- I didn’t need another layer to heat me up even more. After a bit of thought, I decided to beat it like a rug while still in the closet, and try to sweep the dust that would be generated into the corners and be satisfied with a slightly less dusty- but still conspicuous- look.

 

I was about to start hitting the jacket with a dustpan I had found before I remembered the respirator. It would have probably been really bad for my lungs if I had just started whaling on the filthy fabric taking the form of a jacket. A couple of minutes of fiddling to get it tight against my face and verify the filters were working were worth less potential health problems. Squeezing my eyes shut, I smacked the jacket upwards of three-dozen times as firmly but quietly as I could before putting it back on. I kept my eyes closed for a good couple of minutes to try and let as much dust settle as possible, but when I opened them I was immediately sent into a blinking fit as tears tried to make up for the moisture sucked up by what still remained in the air. 

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I was so done with this. Screw sweeping everything up- I was just going to hold my breath, stash the respirator under my jacket, and leave. I wanted to lie down and listen to music while I researched the items I had acquired. Conspicuous dust wouldn’t be enough to convict me of anything if anyone cared in the first place. In fact I could just blackmail them by telling everyone they had been trying to sell patients private medical data if the hospital tried.

 

Worries eased, I paused just long enough to make sure no one was coming in or out of the bathrooms before I casually strode out and relocked the door. I made sure not to look at the cameras as I traveled back to my room at a relaxed and normal pace.

 

The slip of paper falling from the top of my door assured me no one had been in here since I had left. With one of my last worries gone, I stripped and put on a fresh set of clothes- using the inside of the dust riddled ones to try and remove the layer coating me. I made sure what I took off was at the bottom of my laundry bin before grabbing my laptop and phone and flopping onto my bed. My phone told me it was 10:04 as I switched it to mobile data and set up a hotspot for my laptop. It might have been a more-than-healthy dose of paranoia, but I didn’t want anyone checking the hospital’s internet traffic to pick out what I had been searching and connect it to the ostensibly lost items. 

 

From what I could find, the necklace was an off the shelf design from a high-end jewelry store going for a few thousand dollars- likely only due to the brand name. After I had left the head doctor’s office, I had regrets about having taken that necklace. It wasn’t as bad as the watch, but I tried to keep things under a thousand- more than that and you’re less likely to find someone to buy it. Although in this case, it was generic enough that I could probably get away with saying it was part of an inheritance I had gotten and just sell it on ebay for a moderate fraction of the real price. 

 

After flipping a coin, I decided to move onto the USB. As a precaution, I opened a virtual machine before inserting it- but that ended up not being needed. I didn’t look through it for long- the little thumbnails for the photos on it 100% confirmed my theory of incredibly lewd workplace behavior. What the fuck was I going to do with that? The best option was probably just to destroy the thing and try to not have my view of the head secretary affected too much. Wait, on second thought- I already guessed this sort of thing was going on, so her reputation with me wasn’t going to change as sad as that was to say.

 

Lastly was the keys. I could only go off the logo, but that didn’t yield much. It was a frustrating combination of indescribable in searchable terms and generic- I couldn’t get a combination of words that brought up a matching logo in an image search. I could guess that it was likely for a sports car or similar- and that would fit the head doctor’s rich-playboy-surgeon stereotype to a tee. I guess the next step would be to check the staff parking next time I went on a walk? Try and see if someone’s car has a matching logo.

 

Just as I was about to close everything down and mindlessly consume media, I heard a voice behind me.

 

“Looks like you had a fun evening, Silvia.”

 

Surprisingly, I didn’t immediately panic. Although that was less due to my self-control, and more so that the voice sounded familiar and comforting- having a tone of amusement rather than accusation. When I turned to see who had said that, I was greeted by what looked like my childhood cat sitting perfectly still to the point of looking like a statue on the foot of the bed.

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