Chapter 16 — The New Plan

He found the envelope on a Tuesday.

On the doormat. No name, no return address, same type as the first. Thinner. One sheet inside.

A floor plan.

His apartment. Drawn with architectural precision. Hallway, living room, kitchen, bathroom, bedroom. Measurements in the margins. Proportions correct. The same space he’d been living in for months and thought he knew.

In the top margin, a printed code: Rev. 3B — Approved update. Below it, a date. Four years ago.

Except for one thing.

In the east wall of the bedroom, a door.

A plain door. Frame, handle, the clean line of something that was supposed to be there. Marked with a solid line, not dashed — in plans, solid means it exists, not that it’s proposed.

Hugo went to the bedroom.

The east wall was blank.

Same white as always. No frame, no threshold, nothing suggesting anything had ever been different.

He pressed his hand against it.

Knocked in several places. Most of it returned the dense sound of solid masonry. But one stretch, maybe seventy centimetres across, closer to the centre — different. Hollow. The response of something with air on the other side.

He found a measuring tape.

Living room: twelve metres forty deep.

Kitchen alongside it: three eighty.

Bedroom: four ten.

He added them up. Twenty metres thirty.

Then he went into the hallway and measured the building face to face. Nineteen ninety.

Forty centimetres unaccounted for.

He checked twice. Same result.

His apartment had forty centimetres that didn’t show up from outside. Or the building had forty centimetres that didn’t show up from inside.

He picked up the plan. Next to the marked door, in small letters, a handwritten annotation in pencil — different from the printed precision of the rest of the document.

A date. Tomorrow.

Hugo didn’t sleep.

He sat in the bedroom chair with his back to the east wall. Back against what should have been solid. Eyes on the real door — the one to the hallway — in case anyone came.

Nobody came.

23:12. Nothing.

Seven in the morning, he picked up the plan.

The pencil annotation had changed.

It no longer said tomorrow.

It said Today.