Twelve Minutes Before the Walls Speak

I have understood this for some time now. The way Creel’s schedule shifted the week after my second report. The way he walks the corridors I walk, thirty minutes behind me, every night. The way he asked me last Tuesday, in a voice calibrated to sound casual, whether I had found anything interesting lately.
I told him no.
He smiled in a way that did not reach his eyes.
I step into the shadow of a pipe run and wait for his beam to pass. My phone is in my jacket pocket, the photographs already uploaded to a cloud account I created three days ago under a name that is not mine, the access credentials written on a piece of paper folded inside the maintenance log I am holding.
The log that I intend to leave, tomorrow morning, in a specific locker that belongs to a specific journalist whose name I found attached to a 2021 inquiry into Varreck’s safety record — an inquiry that was quietly closed before it produced any findings.
Creel’s beam sweeps the corridor and moves on.
I breathe.
I walk toward the exit, steady, unhurried, the way a man walks when he has nothing to hide and nowhere particular to be.
Behind me, somewhere in the walls, I hear it again.
The ventilation dampers, moving in sequence. Corridor 4-East. Section 12 through Section 17. The old evacuation route, opening and closing in the dark, the way it has done every night, the way the building has been practicing the path that should have been taken.
Tonight, for the first time, the sequence does not repeat.
It runs once, all the way to the end, and then it stops.
The corridor is completely silent.
And somewhere in the sealed room behind the grey-painted door, on the workbench where the red-bound log used to sit, the overhead fixture — the one that has been dead for years — flickers on for just a moment.
Then goes out again.

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About the Author

Tarek Al-Rami — a safety engineer from the night shift, where an ordinary job can turn into a nightmare.

— Tarek Al-Rami

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August 25, 2026

10min-stories