"There's a repeater on the roof," Agata said. "It's supposed to cover the stairs. It covers about half of them. It's on Kiran's list."
He looked at the radio a moment, and then clipped it back to his belt, and took out his phone, and looked at it, and she watched him see what she knew he would see in the top corner of the screen. No bars. No service.
"He'd have had his phone," Alvin said.
"Probably."
"He always had his phone. Florine made him. Because of the asthma."
He started down. She followed. The stairs went down in two flights per floor, a long one and a short one with a landing in between, folding back on themselves like a ribbon, so that at any moment you could see only the flight below you and the yellow handrail turning out of sight. He took them carefully, one hand on the rail. On the landing at twenty-one he stopped in front of the door.
There was a card reader beside it on the stair side, a black plastic rectangle the size of a deck of cards with a small LED at the top that glowed a steady red. There was a lever handle. And above the reader, at eye level, there was a sign, white with green letters, that she had also ordered from a catalog and installed herself, after Quentin, on the four doors in every stairwell that she had made into re-entry floors. It said RE-ENTRY FLOOR. THIS DOOR UNLOCKED FROM STAIR SIDE.
Alvin read it. Then he put his hand on the lever and pressed down.
It did not move. It went down perhaps a quarter of an inch, to where the locked lever met the locked cam, and stopped with a small hard click, as final as a no.
He pressed again. Click. He let go of it.