She awoke to the sound of the radiator hissing.
It was late. The light coming through her window had the hazy white-blue cast of a Chicago morning already halfway gone. The kind of light that made you feel like you were behind on something, even if nothing was waiting for you.
Clara sat up slowly, the cotton of her nightgown clinging to her back. Her eyes burned from too little sleep. She hadn't remembered closing them. Just sitting on the edge of her bed after pulling the shade. Watching the light shift in her apartment. Listening.
She shuffled to the kitchenette, poured cold coffee from the percolator, and sipped it without reheating. Bitter. Metallic. Familiar.
On the kitchen table sat her small spiral notebook.
She flipped it open and scanned the hastily scrawled notes from the night before:
> "Confirm echo entry."
"Vector Hal."
"Umbra node awake."
[Scream]
[Thud]
She ran her fingers over the pencil grooves, then underlined Hal again. No last name. No rank. Just HAL, floating in capital letters like a bullet point in a memo never meant to be seen.
What kind of person ended a conversation with "not yours to know"?
She'd heard thousands of calls over the years. People drunk. People sobbing. Lovers. Fights. Confessions. She'd even heard someone die once—an older man who had a heart attack mid-conversation. She still remembered the sound of the receiver clattering against tile.
But this call—this one felt like it hadn't been meant to reach anyone at all.
She scratched another note under the time:
> Line 4. 11:52 PM.
She looked at the phone mounted to her wall. For a moment, she considered calling the operator line and asking if Line 4 had registered anything unusual.
But she knew what they'd say.
Crossed wires. Radio bleed. Imagination.
She pushed her notebook aside and pulled a dry piece of toast from a crumpled wax bag. Ate it slowly, not tasting a thing.
Whatever that call had been—it wasn't a mistake.
And she wasn't done with it.
The Bell switchboard room looked no different than it had the night before—same pale green walls, same warm buzz of the fluorescent lights, same scent of coiled rubber and pasteboard folders—but Clara walked in with different eyes.
She offered Betty a polite nod and hung her coat with deliberate slowness. Miss Luntz wasn't at her post yet, which was rare. The morning shift overlapped just briefly with the graveyard crew, and Clara knew it created gaps. Little shadows in the day where questions could go unasked.
She waited until the floor settled—Betty flipping through her morning crossword, two other girls already on their headsets—and then moved quietly toward the rear filing alcove.
The door was never locked. The records weren't classified. But no one really went back there unless asked.
She stepped inside.
Dim, dust-laced light fell across metal shelves stacked with binders labeled by date and hour. She found the one marked MARCH 6 – EVENING SHIFT, then flipped to the log pages for 11:00–12:00 PM.
She ran a finger down the entries, her eyes catching on familiar notations: routine, repeat, missed ring.
Then—Line 4. 11:52 PM.
Except the entry said:
> "Test Pulse — Degraded line — Cleared."
That wasn't hers.
Clara knew her own writing. Her notes had said "Call connected — abrupt disconnect — voice anomaly."
This line had been altered.
Her stomach turned cold. She checked the surrounding pages. No other entries labeled "Test Pulse." In fact, that phrasing didn't match Bell's standardized language at all. It was too vague. "Degraded" wasn't even one of their approved fault terms.
She flipped back to the top of the page.
The handwriting didn't match hers. Not Miss Luntz's either.
And yet—someone had signed her initials beside it:
CV.
She stared at it. That wasn't her "V." Hers curled at the bottom. This one hooked.
Footsteps echoed faintly from the corridor.
Clara snapped the binder shut, replaced it on the shelf, and exited quickly—smoothing her blouse, fixing her expression. Neutral. Normal.
The headset felt heavier than usual when she slipped it back on.
Something was wrong.
Something—or someone—was writing her out of her own work.
Clara waited for her break.
Not the official one—fifteen minutes for stale coffee and shared cigarettes—but the real kind. When Miss Luntz disappeared to the supervisor's lounge, and Betty was deep in a crossword loop, tongue caught between her teeth on 7-across.
It came just past noon.
Clara walked to the back again, this time with a clipboard in her hand and a pencil behind her ear—just enough props to look purposeful. She pulled not the hourly log, but the routing journal—a heavier, older book kept near the bottom shelf. Most of the girls didn't even know what it was.
She opened to the routing sheet for March 6. The columns were divided by line, time, origin, destination, and notes.
Line 4 — 11:52 PM — Origin: Local
Destination: Region Tag: 51-OOR
She narrowed her eyes.
OOR. Out-of-Region.
That made no sense.
Region 51 was rural Illinois—half-shuttered towers and backup exchanges. It didn't handle urban calls. And nothing from there should have been flagged as active. Certainly not at that hour.
She looked at the final column. Notes.
> TEST LINE 6A – MAINT. ECHO
She blinked.
"Test Line" entries were rare, always temporary, and always scheduled. They were supposed to route through Bell maintenance systems, not standard operator boards. And she'd never seen one listed under a live circuit.
Echo. That word again.
Clara copied the entire line onto a small slip of paper and slid it behind the backing of her clipboard.
As she closed the routing journal, she noticed something else—a faint crease on the page, as if someone had folded it earlier. A dog-ear. Smoothed flat, but still visible.
Someone else had been looking.
She exited slowly, past the desks and humming boards, back to her station. She slipped the paper into her notebook and drew a small symbol next to the region code:
A tiny spiral. Like a coiled phone cord.
Like something looping back.
The rest of Clara's shift passed like molasses poured through wire.
She took calls, rerouted lines, and nodded politely at the mailroom boy when he dropped off the operator memos. But her mind kept circling back to Region 51-OOR. Echo. Hal. That fake entry in the logbook.
And the feeling that someone was trying to quietly undo her.
She stayed an extra ten minutes after her shift ended, under the excuse of logging a minor line glitch. When she finally packed her purse and turned for the exit, she wasn't alone.
June Farrell—one of the more seasoned operators, rarely chatty, always perfectly punctual—was leaning against the far locker bay, arms crossed.
Clara hadn't even noticed her working that day.
"Looking for ghosts?" June asked, her voice light but tight.
Clara blinked. "Sorry?"
June nodded toward the hallway Clara had slipped down earlier. "You were in the back logs. Twice. You make a habit of tracing dead wires?"
Clara hesitated. Then: "I had a flagged call last night. On Line 4. It—sounded wrong."
June didn't laugh. She didn't scoff. She just studied Clara's face for a long second.
Then she said quietly, "We all hear one eventually."
"One what?"
"One call that doesn't belong. Not prank lines. Not drunks. Not even code-breaker chatter. I mean the kind that ends wrong. That sounds like it wasn't meant to come through."
Clara's mouth went dry. "So what do you do?"
June shrugged. "Most of us file it. Some don't even do that. We get reassigned. Promoted. Or dropped to part-time."
She took a step forward.
"And sometimes, nothing happens. Just a car parked across your street at night. For a few days."
Clara stared at her.
June glanced around, then leaned in. Her perfume smelled faintly of cloves.
"You strike me as the kind that pulls threads. I get it. You want to understand what you heard. You think you're doing something brave."
Clara swallowed. "I think something's being hidden."
June gave a soft, almost maternal laugh. "Of course something's being hidden. You think Bell's about connecting people? It's about collecting patterns."
Clara stood still.
June straightened, stepped back, and smiled. "Just be careful, Clara. Some lines aren't meant to be traced."
And then she was gone, heels clicking softly down the corridor.
Clara stood frozen, heart rattling against her ribs. She didn't remember telling June her name.
The next morning, the air inside the switchboard room felt heavier.
Clara was twenty minutes early, hoping the extra time would help her settle her nerves—or sort through the unshakable unease June had left her with.
Some lines aren't meant to be traced.
She tried to laugh it off, but the phrase clung to her ribs like something damp and cloying.
She settled at her console, sipping from a paper cup of weak coffee, pretending to review her shift schedule. Her headset was still looped around the hook when she noticed it.
Noticed him.
A man.
Near the far end of the maintenance corridor, just outside the restricted switchboard access bay.
He wore coveralls, navy blue, with the Bell insignia stitched over his left chest pocket. His clipboard looked standard, but he wasn't checking anything. Just standing. Watching.
Not staring—but facing her. As if that just happened to be the direction he'd chosen to rest his eyes. Too still to be incidental. Too calm.
Clara glanced away. Looked at her watch. Counted six seconds. Then looked back.
He hadn't moved.
She dropped her gaze again, opened the bottom drawer of her desk, and shuffled the contents for show. Her breath quickened.
When she looked up again, the man was gone.
She stood abruptly and walked—too fast—toward the coat rack, pretending to adjust her scarf. From the corner of her eye, she caught a sliver of the hallway again.
Empty.
She pressed a hand to her chest.
Then sat back down, slowly.
Slipped her notebook from her bag and opened to the last page. She wrote two words in blocky, careful pencil:
> WAS WATCHING.
And beneath it:
> WHO ELSE?