Lift
by Marley Quinn
Copyright Information
Lift
by Marley Quinn
© 2026 Marley Quinn
All rights reserved.
Author: Marley Quinn
Email: marleyquinn.reformist760@passinbox.com
Twitter/X: marleyquinn2000
Telegram: t.me/marleyquin2000
Book cover, illustration: Marley Quinn
Editing, proofreading: Marley Quinn
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AI Use Disclosure
This story was entirely conceived, written, and edited by a human being without any input from AI whatsoever. The only use of AI tools was in composing the cover artwork and spellchecking the text.
Table of Contents
Double Digits
“Where the hell are those updated Watson files?” snarled my boss.
I physically recoiled from his voice even though he was on the other end of the phone line. In the few short months since I’d joined Apex Design Associates, the man had done nothing but terrorize me and the rest of the people in my department. The way he treated us was truly monstrous, but the old-timers said that anyone who could survive his gauntlet was on a fast-track for promotion.
“Um, I, uh, emailed them to you last night, sir,” I stammered.
“Last night?” said my boss.
“Yes, sir,” I said with a gulp. “You, um, told us to stay until we got the report done, sir. Which we did, ahem, I mean.”
“Well, there’s nothing in my inbox,” said my boss.
At that point, I truly began to panic. Had I stayed at work until 11:00 for nothing? Collating all those updated numbers and getting them to line up coherently in the report had consumed me from the moment I’d walked in yesterday morning. After all that sacrifice, had I really dropped the ball by forgetting to do the easiest part - hitting send? It didn’t seem possible, yet that’s what my boss was claiming.
“I’m, uh, sorry, sir. I can resend the report to you right away,” I said.
“Not good enough,” growled my boss. “I’ve got a presentation in front of the CEO in half an hour. I need you to print it out and deliver it to The Oval.”
“The, um, what, sir?” I said, my mind spinning. “You mean the conference room on the sixteenth floor?”
“Christ, are you deaf? Yes, of course,” roared my boss, once again making me wince. “Now step to it.”
“Right, of course, sir. Right away,” I said, sweating profusely as I set my phone down on my desk.
Although my hands were trembling, it only took a minute or so to find the file and send it to the printer. What had me shook up was that I had been summoned to the top floor of the building where only senior executives and the firm’s most prestigious clients were allowed to go.
Many of my coworkers, even some who had been working there for years, had never been up there. There were rumors that the bathrooms all had gold-plated fixtures and that they had a five-star chef on standby to prepare food, including for meetings in the conference room that was nicknamed “The Oval” for some reason.
Normally, just getting an invite to the sixteenth floor was a huge privilege and a sign that you were in favor with upper management. I didn’t think that was the case for me, though. It was more like my boss was too impatient to print out the report himself. I was just a glorified donkey being granted a glimpse of heaven because I’d apparently been too stupid to correctly send an email.
Either way, once the printer was done shooting out all the pages, I carefully placed them inside a binder and then tightly clutched that binder to my chest as I walked over to the elevator and pressed the call button. After a few minutes, the doors opened, and I stepped inside, my heart in my throat as I leaned over and pressed the illuminated circle marked “16.”
There was a young woman riding in the elevator alongside me, but I was so keyed up that I scarcely paid any attention to her. Instead, I kept my eyes glued to the display panel at the top that showed what floor we were on. So far in my career, I’d never been above the ninth floor, so once we got to ten, I gulped. Double digits.
The number kept rising and rising, and a distant part of my mind wondered why the woman wasn’t getting off. But I had more important things to concern myself with, such as praying to all the saints in heaven that all the pages had printed out correctly. Otherwise, my boss would probably fire me on the spot for sheer incompetence, not that I would blame him.
Just as we slid past the twelfth floor, though, the elevator jolted hard, nearly causing me to lose my balance. Before I could figure out what was going on, though, I heard the audible whine of a motor, and then we came to a stop. After that, there was just silence.
I stood there for a really long moment as I waited for whatever the problem was to resolve itself so the elevator could continue on its way, but it remained motionless. There were no warning beeps or flashing lights, anything to indicate that a real emergency was going on. The elevator just wasn’t working, and I had no idea why.
I shot a quick glance over at the young woman, and she glanced over at me, and we both kind of shrugged like, “Oh well, what can you do?” Because there really was nothing to do. Elevators are supposed to just work. That’s been my experience at least. You press the button, they do their thing, and you never think twice about it.
The lights were on, so I knew we hadn’t lost power. Furthermore, the circle with “16” written on it remained illuminated, so the elevator knew where I wanted to go. It just wasn’t moving for some reason. It was one of those things that’s frustrating and baffling at the same time because you can’t possibly imagine what could’ve gone wrong for it to stop in between floors like that.
I really don’t know how long I stood there, staring at the panel as if I were expecting a revelation or something. All I know is that the situation soon became quite awkward. Normal elevator etiquette requires you to politely ignore the people in there beside you, but that only works if you’re only sharing the space with them for a few moments.
As soon as the elevator becomes a motionless box, it starts to become a farce, two people just silently staring at the wall together. But I didn’t really know what else to do. My mind was doing an endless hamster wheel loop, first expecting the elevator to jolt back into life and then worrying about all the time that was ticking by, my boss getting angrier and angrier by the second. Before I knew it, my pulse was racing, and I was finding it difficult to breathe.
“I think something’s wrong,” said the young woman, finally breaking the silence - and the tension.
“Yeah, seems so,” I quipped in response, still avoiding direct eye contact, another ground rule of elevator etiquette.
For the first time, I began to really examine the panel on the elevator. It was made out of some silver metal, presumably steel, and besides the buttons listing all the floors, there was a red knob that said “emergency stop.” Below that, there was a small perforated grill. Was that some kind of speaker system?
If so, maybe a maintenance or security person had been alerted to the fact that the elevator had stopped working and would soon be informing us that they had everything under control and to sit tight. But the speaker, if it was a speaker, remained silent.
Nonetheless, I tried to steady my nerves by imagining a control room somewhere in the building with dozens of black and white monitors and a crack team of experts all staring at a board of blinking lights, using their radios to communicate with the maintenance guys, telling them that they’d noticed the elevator was out of order and dispatching them to perform urgent repairs.
In other words, everything was fully under control, even if it did feel like we’d been abandoned. The firm I worked for had almost 700 employees in that building. Surely, two members of staff couldn’t go missing and an elevator break down without someone noticing, right? Especially not in a building the company had designed and built itself. No, that was impossible.
“Hmm,” said the young woman, jolting me out of my reverie by pulling on a little handle on the panel that I hadn’t noticed.
It turned out to be a small door, and inside was a phone handset. Instantly, a flood of relief washed over me. The brilliant engineers at Apex Design Associates had included a way for elevator passengers to communicate with the control room precisely for situations like this. Excellent!
“Hello?” said the young woman, lifting the phone handset to her ear.
First Day
I stood there and watched, smiling as I imagined the commander on deck in the control room telling her that the problem was being fixed, and all we had to do was be patient for just a few more minutes.
“It’s not working,” said the young woman with a frown, placing the handset back on its cradle.
“What?” I said, convinced that she was obviously too incompetent to know how to use a phone handset.
I snatched it out of the cradle and lifted it to my ear, but instead of busy security chatter or a ringing tone or anything else, all I heard was dead silence. I followed the cord on the mouthpiece to where it ran to inside of the little doorway on the panel, looking for some kind of button or switch to activate it, but there was nothing.
“I told you,” said the young woman. “Oh well. I guess someone forgot to pay their Verizon bill this month.”
I was so distraught at that point that it took my overheated brain a few moments to realize she was making a joke. Even then, I didn’t crack a smile because the situation we were in was far from being funny. We were trapped in a broken elevator, and I had an angry boss waiting for me to deliver my report.
“Maybe the wire got loose or something,” I said, tugging and pulling on the cord, hoping that somewhere in there, a connection would be made, and then we’d be back in touch with civilization again, but the line remained stubbornly dead.
“Eh, doesn’t surprise me that the damn thing doesn’t work,” said the young woman with a shrug.
My hands clammy, I replaced the handset back in the panel. She might find our situation to be one big lark, but I certainly didn’t. My job was on the line, not to mention that we were hanging twelve floors up in the air in a metal box that refused to move and a non-functioning emergency phone. The situation was pretty dire, as far as I was concerned.
I just didn’t know what to do about it, though. I began looking around the rest of the elevator just in case there were some secret switches or buttons I hadn’t noticed. There weren’t, but as my gaze swept past my fellow passenger, I got my first good look at her, and that instantly riveted my attention.
I didn’t dare risk staring openly at her, but even via my peripheral vision, I could tell that she was quite good looking. She was wearing a formal black skirt and dress shoes, but what really caught my eye was the light blue button-up blouse she had on, which was displaying an impressive amount of cleavage.
As I continued to visually survey the inside of the elevator, I snuck more and more glances in her direction until that image of her creamy expanse of bare chest had been firmly implanted in my mind. I also saw that she had glossy dark hair. I was sure that I’d never seen her before because there was no way I would’ve forgotten her if I had.
“I wonder what this does,” said the young woman, pushing and then pulling on the red ‘emergency stop’ button.
“No, I don’t think you’re ...