The heavy fire door at the end of the sixth-floor corridor latched shut with a dull, pneumatic thud, signaling Arthur’s reluctant retreat down the stairwell. Ryan exhaled a long, measured breath that fogged slightly in the cooling air of the hallway, then pulled his door closed and clicked the deadbolt into place. The quiet of the Rhodes apartment instantly rushed back in, broken only by the low, mechanical thrum vibrating against the bedroom drywall and the faint, sweet-and-sour tang of chemical coolant drifting from the wardrobe. Treating an impossible spatial anomaly the way he would handle an unexpected printer jam before a major corporate event, Ryan shed his blazer, hung it over the back of the low kitchen table, and rolled up his white shirtsleeves with grim, methodical precision.
Stepping into the narrow bedroom, Ryan slid the mirrored wardrobe door open, bracing himself against the plume of pale, frigid vapor that billowed outward from the strapped timber crate. The matte-black machinery components inside were sweating heavily, pooling a clear, viscous fluid along the bottom of the floorboard where his neatly pressed charcoal suits usually hung. With the clinical detachment of a man auditing a disastrous quarter-end expense sheet, Ryan grabbed an extra cotton bath towel and wedged it firmly beneath the crate's leaking seam, silently cataloging the bizarre emergency under the mental heading of routine residential maintenance. It was a hopelessly inadequate fix for a machine that shouldn't have existed in a sixth-floor apartment, but as he wiped a bead of cold condensation from his forehead, it was the only protocol he had left.