Karen noticed the first web on a Tuesday, strung between the coffee maker and the recycling bin, so fine it looked like a crack in the air. She walked through it without thinking. It caught her wrist and snapped back like a rubber band.

By Thursday there were webs in the supply closet, in the stairwell, behind the monitor on Greg's desk, thick enough now to see the dust caught in them. Facilities sprayed something that smelled like a swimming pool. It didn't help.

Friday, the spiders came out during the all-hands.

Not dramatically. Nobody screamed. A woman named Priyanka from accounts payable just stopped mid-sentence, looking at the ceiling tile above the projector, where a shape the size of a dinner plate sat motionless, legs folded like a hand at rest. Then another shape, smaller, dropped from the light fixture and hung there, turning slowly.

"Continuing," said the VP running the meeting, and continued.

That was the thing nobody talked about afterward. How ordinary it felt to keep going. The quarterly numbers were still due. The spiders didn't bite anyone, didn't chase anyone, just occupied the building the way a smell occupies a building, and everyone adjusted the way people adjust to a smell.

Karen started keeping her jacket zipped to the chin. She learned to check her keyboard before typing, to run her hand along the underside of her chair before sitting. The webs multiplied in the corners of the break room, in the gap behind the vending machine, along the top of the cubicle walls where nobody looked because nobody had ever needed to look there.

Management sent an email. Subject line: Facilities Update. It said an exterminator had been contacted and thanked everyone for their patience during this transition period. The word transition sat strangely in Karen's inbox, like it belonged to some other kind of announcement, a merger, a rebrand.

By the following week the fourth floor stopped answering its phone. HR was on the fourth floor. So was legal, and the two conference rooms nobody liked because the AC never worked in either of them. When Karen asked her manager what happened up there, he said he'd heard they'd relocated some functions and left it at that, his eyes sliding off the question the way water slides off a slope.

She took the stairs one afternoon instead of the elevator, telling herself she needed the exercise, telling herself that was the only reason. The fourth floor door was propped open with a shoe. Not a whole shoe. Half of one, chewed through at the heel in a way that had nothing to do with wear.

The office beyond it was fully webbed, floor to ceiling, in a soft gray gauze that caught the afternoon light and turned it the color of old paper. Desks were still visible underneath, chairs, a coat rack, a birthday banner someone had hung and never taken down. In the center of it, something moved, patient and enormous, folding a strand of silk between two limbs with the unhurried focus of someone finishing a report before the end of day.

Karen didn't go in. She went back down the stairs and returned to her desk and opened her laptop and looked at her calendar, which had a meeting on it for three o'clock, a status update, recurring weekly, no end date.

She attended. She gave her update. On her way out she noticed a thread, thin as a hair, running from the doorframe to the light switch, and she ducked under it without breaking stride, the way she now ducked under all of them, the way everyone did, because the meeting had already started without her and there wasn't time to ask who had strung it there, or why the building kept growing quieter, floor by floor, while the invoices still went out on schedule.