County facilities met us at the annex with a ring of keys and no master list. The front alarm showed no breach. Carmen's cleaning cart was parked beside the basement elevator, coat draped over the handle. Her phone lay underneath a stack of trash liners with a cracked screen. The supervisor repeated that she had left because the time system recorded a scan. I asked him to show me the exit. The record identified the archive corridor, not an exterior door. Carmen had scanned into a restricted area, and nobody had checked for a matching exit.

We called her name through rows of shelving. The corridor smelled of dust, bleach, and overheated electrical wiring nearby. Near the far stairwell, I heard three dull taps, then silence. The green door would not open from our side. An officer forced the latch while facilities cut power to the magnetic lock. Carmen lay conscious but confused in the narrow corridor, wrapped in a canvas dust sheet. Her ankle had swollen after a fall, and her glucose was dangerously low. Paramedics treated her with their own supplies and carried her out. The sealed blue device never left their transport pouch.

Carmen managed to say that the door trapped her after she scanned in to retrieve a fallen records box. She had pressed the intercom, but the button produced only static. She struck the pipe with her flashlight until its battery failed. The supervisor began explaining that staff were forbidden from entering that corridor alone. Carmen looked at him and asked why her schedule required her to clean it alone. I wrote his answer, including the pause before it. Then I called the station and told Leni her mother was alive and going to the hospital. Relief traveled through the speaker as one long breath.