The vending machine suggested that Leila drink a glass of water and reconsider her choices.

She had put her last lunch coin into it. Behind the glass, a noodle cup hung by its rim, close enough to freedom to be insulting.

“I'm reconsidering yours,” she told it.

A man waiting for the public lift turned to watch.

Leila set down her tool bag. The machine belonged to Ling Nutrition, which belonged to Ling Systems, which owned enough of Shin Dao to have opinions about everyone else's lunch. She repaired six of its machines. Ling had paid her for three.

She opened the service panel. Water trickled from the lift housing into a channel above the payment unit. Somebody had tried to fix the leak with a shopping receipt and tape. The receipt had disintegrated. The tape was doing its best.

“Authorized repairs are available through your personal wellness account,” the machine said.

Leila pulled its speaker lead.

The man at the lift laughed.

“Wish you could do that to my supervisor.”

“Different connector.”

She found yesterday's work order on her tablet. Her repair had held. The new fault was the promotional assistant, installed remotely at six that morning. It used so much memory that the machine forgot what it was doing whenever the compressor started.

She removed it. She put a small plastic shield above the payment unit. Then she went into the laundry next door and asked to borrow a broom.

The laundromat owner knew better than to ask why. He watched her stand on a chair, lever the drain cover open, and extract a wad of synthetic hair the size of a small rat.

The water stopped entering the machine.

At the test command, two noodle cups fell into the tray.

The man at the lift straightened.

“Don't tell me,” he said. “Part of the job.”

She gave him one. He accepted it with the solemnity of a person who understood free lunch.

Her tablet chimed. Ling had received the completed work order.

PAYMENT PENDING REVIEW.

Leila ate standing beneath the overhang. The noodles tasted mostly of salt. She added half a sachet of chili and checked her balance.

Forty-seven clips.

The replacement air filter she needed cost ninety. Her existing filter made a grinding noise when the building got warm, which was most of the time. She'd put a sock beneath the housing to quiet it. Now it sounded like a grinding noise trying not to wake anyone.

Across the lane, a narrow shop stood empty behind a faded TO LET sign. The window was dirty, but the light inside was good. Enough room for a workbench, shelves, perhaps a chair that customers could sit in without first moving her laundry.

A proper repair shop.

She had gone in twice. The first time, the landlord had been delighted to meet a prospective tenant. The second time he'd asked about the deposit. There had not been a third time.

She looked away before the noodles cooled.

Her phone buzzed.

CHEZ: Are you busy?

She sent a photograph of the hair she'd pulled from the drain.

CHEZ: Is that the customer?

LEILA: Customer paid. Don't insult it.

Three little dots appeared, vanished, returned.

CHEZ: Squid. Seven. Dinner on me.

She called him.

“Which part?” she asked when he answered.

“Of what?”

“Which part of this will make me wish I'd stayed at work?”

“It's a business proposition.”

“Lunch would have made it one. Dinner makes it a problem.”

He breathed against the microphone. Somewhere on his side, a chair squeaked.

“I could use you looking at something.”

She waited. Chez usually filled silence. If he was leaving some, she wanted to hear what was in it.

“Please,” he said.

That was worse than business proposition.

“All right. Actual food. No packets.”

“Bowls. Cutlery. The works.”

She hung up and finished the noodles.

At home, she emptied the bucket beneath the leak before doing anything else. The bucket was a permanent resident. Sometimes she thought of charging it rent.

Her room occupied a maintenance space above the laundromat's old plant floor. The landlord didn't know she lived there. Neither did the city, the electricity provider, or the people insuring the building. She had built a bed from a freight platform and repaired the hotplate herself. There were two chairs. One held tools; the other usually held the bucket.

It wasn't the shop across the lane. It was hers, provided nobody asked.

She unhooked her work shirt, washed at the small basin, and put on a faded black tank top. The shirt was clean enough to go back on tomorrow. That counted as planning.

From the locker she took her cassette player. Her mother had bought it at a market because music, she said, should not require permission from a company in another country. One headphone had orange foam; the other had a piece of fabric Leila had sewn around the bare plastic. She checked the tape, put the player in her pocket, and paused over the photograph behind it.

Her mother stood on a beach holding her shoes. Wind had blown hair across half her face. Leila remembered taking the picture and being annoyed that her mother wouldn't stand still.

She shut the locker gently.

On her way out she returned to the tool bag and added the little shock baton. She'd bought it after a night repair at a car park. She had never used it on anyone. She was happier with it in the bag.

Chez called again while she was locking the hatch.

“You coming?”

“Yes.”

“Good.”

“Are you all right?”

“I'm fine.”

She leaned against the door.

“Try again.”

He said nothing.

“Stay where there are people,” she told him. “And order me something before you start explaining.”

On the other end, he gave a small laugh.

“I can do that.”

She put the phone away and started down the stairs. If Ling paid tomorrow, she could buy the filter. If Chez's business proposition was a real job, she might even put something aside for the shop.

She allowed herself that thought for six whole steps.

Then she remembered he had said please.

Chez had polished his boots.

Leila noticed before the bowls, before the two untouched glasses of water, before the way he rose when she approached and couldn't decide what to do once he was standing.

“You want money,” she said.

He looked down.

“They were dirty.”

“Your boots are always dirty.”

The Squid occupied a former aquarium. A surviving projection on the ceiling cast a pink tentacle through their booth every few seconds. Downstairs, the public tank held two fish and a cleaning robot. Upstairs, the fish were an excuse for a license that allowed the club to stay open too late.

Chez slid a bowl toward her.

She sat and tried it. Hot noodles. A real egg. She disliked how much that improved her mood.

“All right,” she said. “How much?”

“Forty.”

Her spoon stopped.

“Forty clips?”

“For something worth more.”

“Then sell it for more.”

“I'd rather sell it to you.”

He had dressed as if their meeting might involve photographs. Black flight jacket, repaired at one cuff. Hair arranged to look less arranged. His boots, now that she looked, had new soles. She had helped him choose them, arguing for grip while he argued that the expensive pair looked faster.

They'd settled on grip. For once.

She liked Chez. She liked the way he noticed when she was cold and gave her his jacket without making a performance of it. She liked riding behind him on Toothless when the roads were clear. She did not like being reminded that she had forty-seven clips while looking at his new boots.

“Show me.”

He took a black storage wafer from his pocket and put it on the table. Then he took out his tablet.

“Your headphones.”

She wiped her fingers before touching them.

The picture showed a loading bay. Rain. White minibus. Two men carrying a stretcher toward a warehouse door. A silver-haired man stood beneath an umbrella. Behind him, a younger man in a blue jacket signed a delivery sheet.

Leila watched without comment.

The next clip was indoors.

Beds stood in rows beneath clear lids. Tubes ran to panels above them. The camera paused at each face, automatically finding a patient number. Women. A few men. Nobody awake.

The silver-haired man said, “Keep the fresh intake downstairs. We haven't matched the last group.”

The clip ended on a young woman's face.

Leila knew it.

She saw it on the tram, above a cosmetics shop, across the top of the home-screen weather feed. Liz Arden, smiling as if somebody had told her the world would be kind if she wore the right lipstick.

Leila removed one headphone.

“What is this?”

“I don't know.”

“Chez.”

“I don't. I was after auction footage. There was a camera cut at the port. I went into the controller, and somebody had left a diagnostic folder open.”

“On a camera?”

“On the network the camera was connected to. Six gigabytes. I took it before they shut it.”

“And you opened it at home.”

He looked away.

Her appetite disappeared. She put down the spoon.

“Does anybody know you've got it?”

“I asked Sour about the tap.”

Sour did the club's sound work and sold old equipment on the side. She had once repaired Leila's cassette player while calling it an expensive way to make a worse noise. They had liked each other immediately.

“What did she say?”

“Hasn't answered.”

“How long?”

“Since afternoon.”

Leila looked toward the stage stairs.

Chez put the wafer beneath her hand.

“You know people who move data. Better people than mine.”

“Which is a very low bar.”

“I've made copies. If somebody wants it back, it isn't just—”

He stopped.

She kept her hand on the wafer.

“Just you?”

“That's not what I meant.”

“It sounded close.”

A woman in a silver jacket appeared at the booth carrying a crate of glasses. She had the compact build of someone who lifted awkward things for a living and no patience for people who thought her height was funny.

“Who's being stupid?” Ajax asked.

Chez looked offended.

“Why do you assume—”

“History.”

Leila showed her the last frame.

Ajax set the crate down very carefully.

“Where's Sour?” she asked.

Neither answered quickly enough.

She took out her phone and made a call. Went to voicemail. Made another.

“Her spare workshop,” she said. “I can get someone there. Don't move.”

She went toward the service door.

Chez pushed the bowl away. He looked smaller without his usual commentary.

Leila wanted to tell him off properly. She wanted him to explain that she'd misunderstood and the people in the beds were part of something ordinary. She also wanted to have dinner with him without wondering which of their families would be called if this went wrong.

Instead she counted forty clips onto the table.

His eyes widened.

“I didn't mean—”

“It's bought. If somebody asks, that's the truth. Now you go home, find your mother, and take her somewhere else.”

“She'll think I've lost my mind.”

“She knows you. She'll adjust.”

“What about you?”

“I'll stay with Ajax. We'll get it to somebody who can use it.”

He looked at the money. Didn't take it.

“Leila, I thought it was just going to be somebody wanting an embarrassing clip back.”

“You've watched it.”

“I know.”

“So stop saying just.”

His face closed. Then opened again with effort.

“Right.”

He got up, put the money in his pocket, and left by the service corridor. At the door he looked back. She lifted a hand, mostly to get him moving.

The pink tentacle passed through the empty seat.

She opened the file list. Shipping numbers. Maintenance charges. A column headed SOURCE CARE. She didn't understand the device records and was relieved to admit it. Some problems were allowed to belong to other people.

Her phone offered the city safeguarding portal. Unlawful confinement was on its list. She began a short report without attaching the footage. Address. Number of beds she could see. Possible danger to life. Request for an independent contact.

A button at the bottom said SEND CONCERN.

She pressed it.

The confirmation appeared almost at once.

REFERRED TO APPROVED FACILITY SAFEGUARDING OFFICER.

Leila stared at the screen.

Across the club, Ajax was coming back quickly.

The main doors opened above the stairs. A broad man in a cream suit stopped on the landing. His companion, shorter and wearing pointed boots, spoke to the bouncer.

The bouncer pointed at Leila's booth.

The broad man put a hand inside his jacket.

Leila pocketed the wafer and stood.

She walked toward the toilets with the confidence of a woman who had chosen them freely.

In the bar mirror, the man in the cream suit changed course.

Leila kept walking. She reached the side corridor, stepped out of his sight, and pushed a loose tile beside the emergency door. Behind it should have been a key.

No key.

There was a new sticker above the lock.

KEEP ALL SAFETY EQUIPMENT SECURE.

“Ajax,” she said into her phone.

“I'm coming.”

“The key.”

“I moved it.”

“Move it back.”

Footsteps entered the corridor.

“Leila Voss.”

She turned. The man filled most of the available space. Cream suit, dark shirt, shoes that hadn't been bought for standing in a queue. He looked at her bag, then her hands.

“Somebody wants a word.”

“They can make an appointment.”

He gave her a disappointed look. People never seemed to appreciate resistance unless they'd paid to watch it.

His hand went into his jacket.

Leila threw the tool bag at him.

It hit his forearm instead of his face, which was unfortunate for both of them. The bag dropped. A meter bounced across the tiles. Leila drove her shoulder into the emergency door and got exactly the result she deserved.

“Move!” Ajax shouted from the other side.

Leila ducked. The door flew open and struck the man in the chest.

Ajax stood in the rain holding the key on a plastic fish.

“Big L,” she said. “You get uglier or is it the suit?”

He swore and shoved the door.

Leila snatched up her bag. They ran.

At the alley mouth the shorter man waited beside a yellow cab, one of the squat little taxis everyone called ducks. Ajax saw him first and hauled Leila sideways into a basement window.

They landed in a kitchen.

The cook looked up from a pan.

“No.”

“Sorry,” Leila said.

“No means—”

Ajax was already through the curtain to the dining room.

Leila followed, almost slipped on a wet patch, recovered, and tried to look as if entering through kitchens was a valid lifestyle choice. A couple at the nearest table watched her. The woman lifted her chopsticks clear of the table edge to let her pass.

Behind them, the big man hit the window frame with his shoulder. The cook shouted with new conviction.

Outside, a band was marching through the street beneath plastic ponchos. Umbrellas crowded around a banner: LET MY AUNTIES FILE JOINTLY.

Ajax borrowed one end of the banner from a startled young man and gave Leila the other. They stepped into the procession.

“Marriage-equality march,” Ajax said.

“I can read.”

“Then look supportive.”

Leila looked over the cloth. Big L came out of the restaurant, stopped at the sight of cameras, and put his hand back inside his coat.

“What's he collect?” she asked.

“Debts. People. Depends on the invoice.”

The procession turned a corner. Ajax gave the banner back with a thank-you nobody heard.

Leila pressed the wafer into her palm.

“Find Sour.”

Ajax looked at it.

“No.”

“They're following me.”

“They can follow both of us.”

“The other copy is at Chez's house. If this one goes, that's it.”

She wasn't sure it was true. She needed Ajax to take the wafer, which was becoming an unpleasantly familiar way of thinking.

Ajax caught her looking toward the next street.

“If you get yourself killed doing a clever split, I'm keeping your tools.”

“Meter's cracked.”

“I know. I've been waiting.”

Ajax disappeared through the march toward the tram stop. Leila crossed the road, felt the hot slip of a bus mirror pass closer than she liked, and went into Deon's Donuts.

The woman behind the counter pointed to the entrance mats.

“Wet end. Floor robot's having a day.”

Leila slowed. Her pulse didn't.

Through the window she saw Big L stop at the crossing. She passed a booth, turned back, and slid into it.

A man and a woman stared at her.

“I'll only be a minute,” she said.

The woman held half a pink donut. Her coat had the soft finish of something more expensive than anything in Leila's room. The man wore a blue jacket.

Liz Arden. The face from the cosmetics ads—and, minutes ago, from the bed in Chez's footage.

The man wasn't anyone Leila knew. But she'd just watched him sign for that delivery on the same recording. Same blue jacket.

For a moment the whole chase became secondary.

“What are you doing with her?” Leila asked him.

The woman set down the donut.

“I'm sitting here.”

He went pale. His hand moved toward his phone.

Leila grabbed his wrist.

“Don't.”

“Let go of him,” the woman said.

Big L passed the window.

Leila released the wrist and ducked behind the seat back.

“Who's following you?” the man asked quietly.

She looked up at him.

“You know.”

The woman turned toward the window, then back to her date.

“Max?”

He didn't answer.

The bell rang above the door.

Big L had to turn slightly to get through. He stood on the wet mat, rain darkening his shoulders, and looked straight at the booth.

The woman rose.

“You're in our agency's security pictures.”

He hesitated.

“Miss Arden.”

Leila took the coffee pot from the warming plate behind the booth and threw its contents at his chest.

He shouted. The counter woman shouted louder.

“That pot is leased!”

Max pushed the kitchen door open. Leila scrambled through after the woman, who moved surprisingly fast in shoes like those. A cook pointed them toward the loading door without being asked. Perhaps the entire neighborhood had developed an emergency route for this sort of thing.

They came out in a yard full of crates. Leila shut the door, dragged a stack against it, and bent over with both hands on her knees.

The woman stood beside her, breathing hard. One shoe had lost a decorative buckle. She held it in her palm as if uncertain what it had cost.

Then she turned to Max.

“You're going to explain,” she said.

Leila's phone buzzed.

AJAX: Found Sour. Hurt. Vu's. Now.

She straightened.

“I have to go.”

The woman caught her sleeve.

“Not until you tell me what that was about.”

Leila glanced at the loading door. The crates shifted against it.

“I watched a recording tonight. A locked ward. You were lying in one of the beds.”

“I've been with Max all evening.”

“He was in the recording too. Signing for a delivery.”

Max started to speak.

The woman turned to him.

“Were you?”

“It wasn't a ward. I was there for—”

“Show me,” she told Leila.

“Not here. My friend's hurt. I'm going to Vu's, two streets over. You can see it there.”

The woman looked at the door, then at Max. She let go of Leila's sleeve.

“All right. Two streets.”

Max took a step toward her.

“Liz, let me explain.”

“You'd better,” she said, and followed Leila out of the yard.

The repair woman had stolen Liz's evening, endangered her life, and arrived with the worst possible timing.

Liz had been about to ask Max a serious question. She'd spent twenty minutes working up to it. She would have liked the answer before the coffee assault.

Now they were walking through a narrow service lane toward a noodle shop Liz had never heard of. Two streets, the woman had said. Somewhere to watch the recording without the man in the cream suit coming through the door.

Liz wanted to see this alleged double of hers. She wanted to see Max signing that delivery sheet even more. He'd denied the ward, not the visit.

Max kept pace beside her, trying to catch her eye. She let him try.

“Who is he?” she asked.

“Muscle,” the woman said.

“I know that. Whose?”

“Your boyfriend's, apparently.”

“He's not my boyfriend.”

Max made a small wounded sound. Liz hated that she noticed.

His date profile had described a man who did construction work and struggled to keep a plant alive. He'd sent pictures of the plant. She had sent increasingly unnecessary advice. She'd been pleased when one of his replies arrived at three in the morning, after a bad shoot, because it felt as though somebody had chosen to be awake with her.

Tonight he'd turned up late with a bag of fuses. She had been halfway through forgiving him when the woman arrived.

“What's your name?” Liz asked her.

“Leila.”

“Good. Leila, I'm capable of walking and hearing things. You can stop talking about me as if I'm cargo.”

Leila looked at her properly for the first time.

“All right.”

Max said, “She doesn't know what she's talking about.”

“Then this will be easy to clear up.”

He went quiet.

They entered a noodle shop through the back. A woman at the stove looked at Leila, then at Max, then at Liz's shoes.

“Complicated order?”

“Bad night, Mrs. Vu.”

“Everyone has one. Sit.”

Liz chose a chair facing the back door. Her feet hurt. She wanted the recording, an explanation, and a car home, in that order. The room smelled of broth and clean hot metal. Two tables remained uncleared. An old clock over the till showed a time she couldn't read from this angle.

Max sat opposite her. Leila stayed by the counter.

“Your stepfather,” Liz said.

He looked at her.

“I saw the name on your phone. Does he arrange all your dates?”

“No.”

“This one?”

He put his hands on the table. There was a small cut across one thumb. She had liked that, at dinner. It had made him look less carefully presented.

“Yes.”

For a moment she heard only the stove.

Leila moved away from the counter. Mrs. Vu put down a lid quietly.

“Go on,” Liz said.

“His company owns most of the agency. They wanted someone they could trust. Someone to take you out without talking to the press. Help you settle before the launch.”

“All three weeks.”

“Yes.”

She tried to remember exactly what she'd told him. Her bad dream about the blue room. The interview she hated. The fact that she sometimes had to check her own notes to remember who she'd already met.

“The plant?” she asked.

“That's real.”

She looked at him until he understood it hadn't helped.

“I liked talking to you,” he said.

She believed him. That was the most irritating part. She could hear the effort in his voice and remember enjoying a message he'd been paid to send. Neither fact canceled the other.

“How much?”

“What?”

“How much were you paid?”

He looked down.

She waited.

He told her.

It was less than she'd expected. Somehow that made it worse.

The back door opened. Ajax came in with a man carrying a young woman in his arms. The woman was awake, trying to keep her head steady. There was blood in her hair.

Liz stood.

“Oh my God.”

“Upstairs,” Mrs. Vu said.

Leila cleared the chairs from the path. Liz picked up a glass of water and followed, because standing there doing nothing would mean continuing the conversation with Max.

At the top of the stairs, the injured woman looked at her.

Her face changed.

“Ellie?”

“My name's Liz.”

The woman tried to focus, then shut one eye.

“Sorry.”

Liz wanted to ask who Ellie was. The room had a basin, folded towels, and a bed someone was already covering with a clean sheet. It was clearly not the time to ask the injured woman about Liz's evening.

She held out the water. Her hand was shaking. Ajax took it without comment.

Leila knelt beside the bed.

“Sour. Who did this?”

The woman looked away.

“Not now,” Ajax said.

“We need to know who's—”

“Not now.”

The sharpness startled Liz. It seemed to startle Leila too. She stood and went onto the landing, her face shut.

Downstairs, Max's phone rang.

He answered on the second ring.

“I've got her,” he said. “Yes. She's safe.”

Liz felt herself go cold.

Leila passed her on the stairs, took the phone out of his hand, and ended the call. She removed the battery and set both pieces on the counter.

Mrs. Vu covered them with an upturned bowl.

Max stared at it.

“That doesn't stop anything.”

“It stops me losing it,” Mrs. Vu said.

Liz stood at the bottom step.

“Don't report on me again.”

He opened his mouth. Closed it.

Leila took out her tablet.

“There's something you both need to see.”

The video lasted less than a minute. Liz watched a young woman behind a transparent lid and waited for her own face to become somebody else's.

It didn't.

The woman had her mouth. Her cheekbones. A small crease near her right eye that the agency usually removed from photographs.

“Is it fake?” Liz asked.

“I don't know enough to swear it isn't,” Leila said. “But somebody wanted this back badly.”

Max leaned closer. On the screen he signed a delivery.

“That was equipment.”

“You're sure?” Leila asked.

“That's what the paperwork said.”

Nobody answered him.

Liz replayed the face. There was no panic she could recognize in it. The woman simply lay there, absent from a room full of people who could decide what happened next.

“I have to go home,” she said.

Leila began to object.

“My manager expects a call. My things are there. If I disappear, they'll find out.”

Max stood.

“I'll take you.”

“No.”

The word felt too loud. She let it remain.

Leila called a cab using a number Mrs. Vu supplied. While they waited, she wrote her own number on a receipt and gave it to Liz.

“If anything feels wrong, use the stairs. Don't use a car they send.”

Liz looked at her.

“Anything?”

Leila almost smiled.

“Fair point.”

Outside, the duck waited with its heater on. Liz got in, put her ruined shoe beside her, and gave the driver her address.

Her phone held six messages from her manager.

The latest said, Hope he's lovely. Take your evening capsule.

Liz read it until the screen dimmed.

Then she turned it back on and took a photograph.

By half past midnight, Mrs. Vu had locked the noodle shop's front door and turned off the sign. Leila was still at a table downstairs. Liz had gone home by cab; Max had left separately. Upstairs, Ajax was sitting with Sour.

Leila had sent Chez the shop's address and asked him to bring someone who could examine the files. He arrived through the back door with Kate, a hard case, and his phone pressed to his ear.

“Mum. Stop. Where are you?”

Leila stood. She'd sent him home to get his mother out. His jacket had a muddy patch across the shoulder.

A woman's voice came sharply through the phone, too faint for Leila to make out the words.

“Yes, Leila's here,” Chez said.

He listened, then put the call on speaker.

“She wants a word.”

“Which Leila?” his mother asked.

“The one who fixed your ignition in the flood,” Leila said.

“Good. Tell him I'm staying at Pauline's. He isn't to come here and lead anyone to the door.”

Chez closed his eyes.

“I was checking you were safe.”

“Then listen when I tell you.”

At least she was alive. Leila sat down again.

Chez took the call off speaker and moved beside the back door to finish arguing quietly.

Kate set the hard case on the cleared table. Chez had collected her from a repair cooperative in D3, where she'd been making something small and airborne that didn't work yet. The case held an isolated reader. He'd also brought two sandwiches and a screwdriver he had apparently borrowed from her against advice.

Leila knew Kate slightly. Precise haircut, square glasses, hands that moved quickly until somebody watched. She had once refused payment for fixing an accessibility lift and then charged a property developer double for changing a password. Leila liked that balance.

Now Kate opened the stolen footage on the reader without connecting it to the shop's network.

“Who else has seen it?”

“Us. Max. Liz.”

“The model?”

Leila nodded.

Kate stared at the screen a moment too long before scrolling.

“What?” Leila asked.

“Medical integration. Some of the equipment's familiar.”

“Why?”

“I worked at Ling. Not on this.”

Chez ended his call.

“She was at Pauline's playing cards when they came to our house,” he said. “The next-door neighbor saw men letting themselves in and called her. I was nearly home when she rang me. Told me to stay away.”

He showed them a photograph sent by an unknown number. His blue stuffed rabbit sat in his computer chair. A man's hand held it by the ear.

Beneath it: PIER 78. BRING THE ORIGINAL.

“You didn't go?” Leila asked.

His offended look was almost reassuring.

“I came here.”

Kate took his phone, removed the battery, and put it beside the bowl covering Max's.

“Popular centerpiece,” Mrs. Vu said.

Upstairs, Sour cried out.

Leila was on her feet before Ajax appeared on the landing.

“She needs a doctor.”

“Hospital,” Chez said.

Sour's voice came thinly from the room.

“No.”

Kate looked up. “There's an independent clinic in Ten. My brother used it before he transferred. I can call.”

“Call.”

Leila went upstairs while Kate looked for the number.

Sour lay with the dim lamp behind her. Ajax sat on the bed holding a basin. The blood in Sour's hair had been cleaned away, revealing swelling near the implant port behind her ear.

Leila stayed standing.

“How did they find us?”

Ajax looked at her.

“Really?”

“We can't help anybody if we don't know—”

“I told them,” Sour said.

Leila's stomach sank.

“What?”

“Your name. Where I thought you were going. Chez. They wanted the tap back. I thought it was a sale.”

“How could you—”

Ajax stood so fast the basin rocked.

“Finish that sentence.”

Leila stopped.

Sour stared at the wall. Her breathing had changed.

Leila felt the anger still there, hot and ready, looking for somebody easier to reach than the men who'd done this.

She sat on the chair because her knees were suddenly unreliable.

“I wasn't there,” she said.

“No,” Ajax said. “You weren't.”

It was an ugly silence. Sour put a hand over her eye.

“Can you two be mad somewhere darker?”

Ajax let out a breath, half laugh, half something else. Leila turned the lamp lower.

After a while, Sour said, “That woman. Liz.”

“She went home.”

“She looks like Ellie. Worked the cloakroom sometimes. I fixed her headphones.”

Leila leaned forward despite herself.

“Ellie who?”

“Dalton. Her mum came round last year with pictures. I should remember when.”

“You don't have to.” Leila heard the automatic kindness in the words and winced. She was not entitled to make the last minute vanish. “I'll find out,” she added.

Sour looked at her, then closed her good eye.

Downstairs, Chez was trying to persuade the clinic receptionist that a concussion qualified as urgent. Kate took the phone and said five ordinary words. The receptionist agreed to speak to a doctor.

“How?” Chez asked.

“I didn't say implant-cracking,” Kate told him. “I said someone hit her.”

Leila sat opposite the reader.

Kate showed her the shipping records. The warehouse belonged to a transport contractor called Triton. The medical devices came from Ling. The company owning the tower and the charity paying for the beds shared an address.

“What are they doing?”

“I need to look properly.”

“How long?”

“Longer if you ask again.”

Leila shut her mouth. She disliked being correctly told off twice in ten minutes.

Her tablet chimed. An update from the safeguarding portal.

FACILITY CONTACT ACKNOWLEDGED.

“Tell me you didn't send it to them,” Kate said.

“Only the address. What I saw. I asked for an independent contact.”

“It referred you to the facility.”

“I saw that after.”

Kate read the message. Her expression lost its irritation.

“Then they know somebody reported it.”

Leila looked upstairs.

She had wanted to get responsible people involved. She'd chosen the button with those people promised behind it. Somewhere, a person holding her report now worked for the men who'd chased her through the club.

Chez sat beside her. His new boots were wet.

“I need to say something.”

“Please don't make it worse.”

He looked at the table.

“I asked you to buy it because I thought that made me safer. If I wasn't the only one holding it.”

She watched him struggle to look at her.

“And me?”

“I thought you could move it. Get paid. I didn't think they'd come with guns.”

“You didn't ask.”

“No.”

She could have shouted. She wanted to. But Sour was upstairs trying to tolerate a refrigerator hum, and Mrs. Vu was cooking in a shop that should have closed hours ago, and Kate was working out what none of them understood.

Leila took her bowl to the sink.

“You're paying for tonight,” she said.

Chez nodded.

“I mean the shop. The doctor. The fuel. Call your bank before they do.”

He went very still. Then he took the spare emergency phone from his pocket and started making calls.

Mike had brought two coffees and a cigarette.

Don accepted the coffee.

“You're doing that on purpose.”

“Smoking?”

“Enjoying it.”

Mike looked at the cigarette, then at the wet trees.

“Would be a strange hobby otherwise.”

Don chewed the nicotine gum in his cheek. It had attached itself to a filling. He hated it almost enough to go home and tell his wife the whole experiment was medically unsound.

Beyond the road, the drainage flats lay under standing water. The sheet was thirty yards out. A small foot showed beneath it, green polish bright against the gray mud.

“Who found her?” Don asked.

“Boy looking for a drone. He's home. His dad stayed for the statement.”

“How old?”

“Twelve.”

Don looked at the sheet again.

Eight in three months.

He had written the first report after a storm, requested help, received an acknowledgment and a case number. By the fourth, he was calling people who'd stopped recognizing his voice on purpose. His district was small. Its people were poor. Both facts appeared to make the dead less urgent elsewhere.

“Doc coming?”

“On the way.”

They walked out together. Mike was careful where he put his boots. He had already photographed the ground before the recovery crew arrived.

“No prints apart from ours, the boy's and his dad's.”

“Water.”

“Maybe. Look here.”

Two reeds bent toward the bank. A narrow groove ran between them. Farther out, a second pair marked a path toward the old pump channel.

Don crouched.

“Dragged?”

“Floated. Small platform. Backed through here.”

“You see one?”

“No.”

“Then that's a thought. Keep it.”

Mike nodded. He left the platform out of his notes for now and photographed the bent reeds.

A car pulled up beside the road. Dr. Sandra arrived carrying her examination bag. Mike went to meet her and brought her out along the route he'd already checked.

She knelt beside the sheet and folded it back. Don stayed beside her while she examined the body.

“Late teens, perhaps early twenties,” Sandra said. “I'll know more after the examination.”

Up close, Don could see that the green polish on the young woman's toenails was barely chipped.

Sandra pointed out marks left by medical lines. Someone had been treating her recently. Then she turned one of the woman's hands so Don could see the damaged fingertips.

“Someone's tried to make sure we can't identify her,” she said.

Don looked back at the young woman's face. Eight bodies, and he still had to make himself listen when the doctor described what had been done to them. He could keep his hands steady now. That was the improvement.

“How long has she been dead?” he asked.

“Probably less than a day. That's an estimate until I can examine her properly.”

“Do the injuries match the other women?”

“Some of them. I need to compare them before I say more.”

They put up the shelter. Don held a pole while Mike fixed its foot in the mud. A gust lifted the fabric; Mike moved into the wind before Don asked.

At the truck, a little later, Sandra stopped him.

“These are not women who've been living rough. Their care has been maintained. Then it stops. Whoever is doing that knows something about bodies.”

Don looked at the riverward trees.

“And getting rid of them.”

“Yes.”

Back at the outpost, Mike made fresh coffee. The office had once sold feed. Its sign still showed through the paint whenever it rained. Don occupied the front room, Sandra borrowed the examination space behind it, and the corridor required everybody to be on good terms about passing.

Don pinned a new card on the board.

UNKNOWN WOMAN. APRIL 18.

He stood back. Eight cards. Eight numbers. They needed names.

A man from the local station arrived carrying a camera with a taped battery door.

“No body pictures,” Don said before he asked.

“I brought a tripod, not a shovel.”

“Tom.”

“I know. Appeal. Description. Contact.”

Don gave him the details he could safely release. Mike brought a clean map, and they recorded the request in front of it instead of the board.

“Any district,” Don said to the camera. “If somebody is missing, even if you've reported it before, call us. We will answer.”

Tom lowered the camera.

“That's going to fill your line.”

“Good.”

“You'll need somebody to take calls.”

Mike lifted his notebook.

Don didn't thank him. There would be plenty of time to mean it afterward.

When the office emptied, Don went out back and sat on the step. The smell of pine carried over from the flats. Across the road, a man was unloading garden chairs from a trailer, preparing for a Sunday he'd no reason to fear.

Don's phone buzzed.

His wife.

“Lunch?” she asked.

“Busy.”

“That wasn't the question.”

He looked at the gum stuck to its wrapper in his hand.

“Not yet.”

“I'll bring something.”

“I can manage a sandwich.”

“History suggests otherwise.”

He wanted to tell her not to fuss. He also wanted her to come. He resolved the conflict by saying nothing, which she interpreted correctly.

Mike opened the back door carrying an evidence bag.

“Found this on the channel. Transport-shell clip. Could be any medical supplier.”

Don turned it over. Pale blue plastic. Broken tab. Tiny part number.

“Find which one.”

“There's also the gate.”

“What gate?”

“Old boat ramp. Contractor fenced it off. I wrote the ticket.”

“Did they pay?”

“No.”

Don handed back the clip.

“Somebody's finally made me happy about an unpaid fine.”

Anna could hear a man eating on the other side of the wall.

Paper rustled. A fork tapped a carton. Once he laughed at something on a phone.

She pressed her eye to the little hole somebody had punched through the container. Yellow bollard. Crane wheel. The bottom of his arm. A bird tattoo above the wrist.

“Don't,” Sofía whispered.

Anna moved back.

The engine beneath them had gone quiet. They were in port again, though not where they had been loaded. Through the slit under the door, the light stayed level.

Sofía sat with her knees drawn up and an empty water bottle in her hands. She was sixteen. Anna had asked, thinking fourteen, and still regretted the look she'd received.

The woman opposite them was checking an injured ankle. She had worked in a clinic before this. Her name was Mireya, and she had made everyone tell her theirs when the doors closed, refusing to let the darkness reduce them to the order in which people happened to sit.

Twenty-three women and girls. That was the current count.

“Small mouths,” Mireya said, passing the last bottle.

Anna waited for it. When it reached her, she took one swallow and gave it to Sofía.

The girl drank, wiped the rim with the cleanest part of her sleeve, and turned the bottle over.

“That mark.”

On the base was a blue trident inside a circle.

“The hotel office had it,” Sofía said.

Her sister Elena had gone to a hotel job on the coast eighteen months earlier. At first she sent money. Then the messages stopped. Recently a recruiter had shown Sofía a photograph of Elena in uniform and said her sister wanted her to join the staff. Their aunt had checked that the office existed. Sofía had gone carrying sandwiches in a paper bag.

Elena would be twenty now. Sofía hadn't told anyone she was really going to find her.

“What did the office say the company was called?” Anna asked.

Sofía shut her eyes, searching.

“I can't remember.”

“It's all right.”

“Don't say that.”

Anna looked down.

The man outside finished his food. The carton crumpled. Footsteps crossed the narrow line of light, and a padlock scraped against metal.

Everybody went still.

The door opened only far enough to admit two water containers and a bag of food packets. A man shouted for them to move back. Someone asked for a doctor. He said something Anna didn't understand and shoved the door shut.

The engine started.

Mireya went around the container again. She made the ones who could stand move their legs. The others had to flex their feet and count. Anna helped the woman with the ankle sit against a different part of the wall.

“Can you tell where we're going?” the woman asked.

“No.”

“The sea?”

“I think.”

They had been at sea already. It had felt like hours. It might have been a day. Time was the light under the door, the water running out, somebody falling asleep and waking frightened. Anna didn't trust the rest.

She returned to Sofía.

The girl was worrying a loose thread from her bracelet. White string, two blue beads. She tore the thread with her teeth and held it up.

“Your hair.”

Anna turned. Sofía tied it back, clumsily but firmly. Anna had been wanting to wash it for so long she'd started dreaming about a shower at a bus station she used to hate.

“Better,” Sofía said.

“Thank you.”

“Now tell me something.”

“Like what?”

“Your sister. The jacket.”

Anna had told her about Olivia because it was safer than talking about the bar, the last evening, the man she'd trusted long enough to accept a drink. She still couldn't put those memories in order. The jacket was easier. Green. New. Too expensive. Olivia had wanted to borrow it for a school trip.

“She'll have taken it by now.”

“Good.”

“Little thief.”

Sofía smiled briefly.

The container tilted. Not much, but enough that the light vanished under the doors and returned. The ship was moving.

Anna touched the bottle's trident with one finger. She counted the prongs, repeated the circle in her mind, and asked Sofía to do the same.

“Why?”

“So we can tell somebody.”

Sofía looked toward the locked doors.

They had both begun sentences like that before. Later. When we get out. When somebody comes. Sometimes the words helped; sometimes they made the metal feel thicker.

Now the girl nodded.

“Three prongs. Circle.”

“Blue.”

“Blue.”

Anna rested her head against the wall. She could hear Mireya saying names as she moved between people. Checking who answered. Checking who had grown too quiet.

She took her turn listening for the next lock.

At three in the morning, Liz burned a piece of toast and discovered she was too hungry to care.

She ate standing in a kitchen designed to prove that she didn't eat. Glass-fronted cupboards. Shiny pans. Fruit arranged by color. Her reflection in three surfaces, none of them forgiving.

Beside the sink lay the evening capsule she'd told her manager she'd taken.

Leila had said to photograph the label and find an independent doctor before changing anything. Liz had photographed it six times, peeled back the pharmacy sticker, and found a patient code underneath.

CV-ED-019.

She had sent it to Leila. The reply said, Keep the bottle. We'll find someone.

Now she put the capsule back. She didn't want to swallow it. She also didn't know what was in it. A night of discovering she'd been managed was not the best time to guess at chemistry.

She made more toast and set a timer.

Her manager called at three-ten.

“Can't sleep?”

Liz looked at the phone camera, made sure it was off, and put on her public voice.

“Too much coffee.”

“How was Max?”

“Tall.”

A pleased laugh. “I told you he'd be lovely.”

“You didn't tell me you knew him.”

“We didn't want you feeling arranged.”

Liz bit the inside of her cheek.

“That was considerate.”

“You've taken the capsule?”

“I'm just going to bed.”

“Recovery day tomorrow. No exertion. Then Sunday fitting at five. You'll love the dress.”

“What's my mother's number?”

Silence.

The toaster clicked behind her.

“Sweetheart, we discussed this with the therapist.”

“I want to send her a picture.”

“She's not available right now.”

“Where is she?”

“I'll arrange a call with the doctor in the morning. You're getting tired.”

The manager ended gently, as if Liz had agreed to everything.

Liz put the phone down before she threw it.

There was a box in the wardrobe containing her old photographs. She had looked through it during the recovery program. School records. A birthday. Holidays. Her face grew older in orderly stages. Whoever took the pictures had liked sunshine.

She spread them across the rug.

In one, she stood beside a fountain at twelve. In another, at fourteen. Different clothes, different haircut. The bird above the fountain cast the same shadow. The water made the same splash.

Liz took photographs of both pictures with her phone and enlarged them.

The same water.

She pushed the second picture away so hard it slid under the bed.

Perhaps the agency had reconstructed missing photographs. Perhaps it was therapy. Perhaps somebody had a perfectly ordinary reason to give her a history nobody would discuss directly.

She was tired of doing their explaining for them.

In her phone was an old voice memo she'd always treated as precious. Seven seconds of a kitchen, a woman's laugh, her own younger voice complaining that a cookie was burnt.

“It has character,” the woman said.

Liz smiled before she could stop herself.

Then she played it again, all the way to the end.

Beneath the laugh was a name.

Ellie.

She sent the memo to Leila and stayed on the rug until the room grew lighter.

At nine, the apartment offered to begin her recovery routine. She switched it off. It offered again through the mirror.

She covered the mirror with a towel.

She would have liked to leave looking fabulous. This annoyed her almost as much as everything else. After the evening she'd had, vanity ought to have become a trivial concern. Instead she stood in the wardrobe judging practical clothes for whether they made her look abandoned.

In the end she wore jeans, a plain shirt, and trainers borrowed from the cleaning cupboard. She left a note offering the cleaner her shoes, which cost more and were less useful.

The lift asked where she was going.

Gym. Treatment suite. Lobby. Approved car.

She took the stairs.

By the fifteenth floor, she had developed strong views about architecture. On the fourteenth she sat and checked her phone. A message from Leila: Don't take their driver. Clinic in Ten. I'll send address.

A man came down carrying a little white dog.

“Lift broken?”

“No.”

“Then you're overcommitted to fitness.”

She laughed, unwillingly.

At the lobby window she saw the agency driver waiting beside the concierge desk. The man followed her gaze.

“You don't want to talk to him?”

“No.”

“Dog door.” He indicated another landing. “Smells terrible. Opens outside.”

She thanked him. He accepted it without asking for a photograph or a reason.

Outside, a tram machine offered a discount in exchange for identity verification.

Liz paid full fare.

At the platform she sat beside a student with a cracked violin case. He looked at her, then at the advertisement across the tracks, then back at her. Her face was on the advertisement, thirty feet high and smiling at a future she was suddenly frightened to reach.

“You look tired,” he said.

“I am.”

“Same.”

He returned to his phone.

Liz watched the tram approach. It was scratched, late, and full of people who'd rather be somewhere else. She got on without being recognized and held the pole with both hands.

At the next stop, a woman stepped on her borrowed trainer.

“Sorry.”

“It's fine,” Liz said.

For once, it was.

The caller said she knew the nail polish.

Don took the handset from Mike and asked her to begin again.

“Green,” she said. “Ugly green. My daughter loved it. I heard the appeal.”

“What's your name?”

“Jen Dalton.”

He wrote it in his notebook. Underlined nothing. He'd learned not to let hope make his handwriting theatrical.

“Your daughter's name?”

“Ellie.”

By ten they were on the road to District Nine. Sandra had requested the old medical records for comparison and cautioned him not to promise anything. He hadn't intended to. He knew how promises could sound in a room where someone had waited too long.

Jen lived above a hardware shop. She opened the door before he knocked and asked if they'd had coffee. Mike said yes, then changed his answer when he saw she needed something to do.

Ellie's room had a neat bed and a fan with one broken foot. Three photographs were tucked into the mirror. On the desk, a bowl held two rings, a watch, and a ticket from the Squid.

“Her nineteenth birthday,” Jen said. “She worked the cloakroom sometimes. They let her friends in free.”

“How long missing?”

“Eighteen months.”

Mike looked at Don. The girl in the swamp had been alive yesterday, or close enough that Sandra wouldn't separate the difference yet.

Jen sat on the edge of the bed.

“The first officer said she'd probably moved in with someone. The second said there was a treatment program. Voluntary. I asked where. They said she didn't want contact.”

“Did they show you anything?”

“Letters. Lots of letters.”

She pulled a folder from beneath the bed. Copies of messages, travel receipts, clinic responses, report numbers. Dates written carefully at the top of every page.

Don opened it on his knees. Mike photographed each document with her permission.

In one picture Ellie stood at a kitchen counter with flour on her cheek, holding up a hand to show off the green nails. Behind her was a small crescent burn on the worktop.

“Cookies,” Jen said. “She became interested in baking for about a month. Just long enough to damage the house.”

She smiled at the photograph, then stopped as if she'd been caught.

Don looked down at the folder.

“May I take a copy?”

“You can take anything. I keep being told to send more.”

He hated the practiced way she said it.

He showed her the formal identification image Sandra had prepared. Not at once. He explained first, asked whether she wanted Mike to stay, waited while she chose.

Jen looked for a long time.

Then she handed it back very carefully.

“I thought I'd know,” she said.

“We can compare records. Tests.”

“I mean know, before you came.”

He had no answer worth putting into the silence.

In the kitchen, Mike washed the unused cup before realizing he'd done it. Jen watched him.

“You don't have to.”

“Sorry. Habit.”

“It's all right. There's more if you want a promotion.”

He smiled awkwardly. She smiled back, grateful for an ordinary mistake.

Then she went to a drawer and brought out a tablet.

“There's something else.”

The screen showed an advertisement. A young woman stood beside the blue name of Eidolon, the newly polished tower in District Seven. The caption promised a life that knew you.

Don looked from the screen to the photograph in his hand.

The same face, almost. Different eyebrows, perhaps. Better lighting. A version that had never had a bad night's sleep.

“That's her,” Jen said. “Or someone who looks so much like her that I went to the agency. They wouldn't let me upstairs. Then I got this.”

She produced a lawyer's letter.

The client, Liz Arden, had no relationship to the person Ellie Dalton. Further approaches might be considered harassment.

Mike read the letter twice.

“You kept the envelope?”

Jen gave him a look.

He inclined his head. Fair enough.

On the drive home Don stopped at a public phone booth. Mike brought the folder and two coffees from a machine that had evidently never been told what coffee tasted like.

Don called Reese, a detective in District Seven. They'd worked a missing-person case together years ago. She'd kept looking after her own department had told her to stop.

“Don? What's happened?”

“We may have found Ellie Dalton. Nineteen when she disappeared, eighteen months ago. Her mother reported her missing in Nine.”

“Found her alive?”

“No.”

Reese went quiet.

“Identification's still pending,” he said. “Our doctor's comparing the records. But there's something I need checked in your district.”

He gave her Liz Arden's name and the agency's address from the lawyer's letter. Explained the resemblance, then the marks of recent medical care on the dead woman's body.

“I need to know who dealt with Ellie's missing-person report. And whether anyone actually spoke to her when they said she'd entered treatment.”

When he finished, she said, “I've seen the clinic closure letters.”

“How many?”

“Enough that I asked. My sergeant suggested the clinics knew more about patients than I did.”

“Do they?”

“That's what I'd like to find out.”

He gave her Jen's report number. She asked him not to send the evidence through the routine city portal.

“Why?”

“Because the last welfare inquiry I made got copied to the facility's lawyers before it got to my desk.”

Don looked through the booth glass. Mike stood outside holding the folder against his chest to keep rain off it.

“I can bring paper,” Don said.

“Good. Don't come to headquarters yet.”

After the call, Mike unfolded the site map he'd found that morning.

“Ramp's operated by Triton,” he said. “The transport cases come from their medical division. Part number matches.”

“Empty cases could match.”

“Yes.”

“Get me their inspections.”

“Already asked. Water inspector's been trying for six weeks.”

Don looked at him.

Mike took a drink of the terrible coffee.

“She said bring proper boots.”

For the first time that day, Don felt there was something ahead of them besides another request that might go unanswered.

He drove back a little too quickly. Mike noticed and said nothing until they reached a school crossing.

Then he put one hand on the dashboard.

“Sheriff.”

Don slowed.

“Right.”

The clinic doctor wanted payment before she wanted their story.

Leila found this refreshing until she heard the amount.

Chez reached for his wallet.

“Use the cash,” Leila said.

“I am.”

“I just—”

“I know what cash is.”

Ajax gave both of them a look from the examination-room door. They stopped.

Sour went in with her. Bonz, Ajax's boyfriend and the owner of the van, sat on a plastic chair and promptly fell asleep with his arms crossed. His feet blocked the magazine rack. Nobody needed the magazines enough to object.

Leila sat beside Kate. The isolated reader rested between them in a bag. Kate had dark circles under her eyes and a fresh burn on one finger.

“What's your brother's illness?” Leila asked.

Kate looked surprised.

“Immune condition. He needs repeated treatment. There are good weeks.”

“Seventeen?”

She'd seen the hospital photograph when Kate opened her phone.

“Yes.”

Leila nodded. She didn't ask another question. Kate was already preparing the sort of polite answer that meant she had supplied it too often.

On the screen above the reception desk, local news showed a river, a brown-hatted sheriff, and a telephone number. A girl had been found in District Eleven. Medical marks, green nails. They wanted families with missing daughters to call.

Leila watched until the report ended.

“Could be any girl,” Chez said.

“Yes.”

He rubbed his face.

“I wasn't saying don't.”

She got up and wrote down the number before the screen changed.

By the time she called, the appeal had been updated. A mother's kitchen photograph appeared on the station's public page, released while they sought further witnesses. The girl stood at a counter with flour on her cheek.

The same face again.

Leila called from the clinic's landline. A man answered with the name of the district.

“I know somebody who looks like your girl,” she said.

“We've had some calls about an advert.”

“Not just an advert. She's got medicine from Ling. CV-ED-019. She's alive. I saw her last night.”

The man didn't answer for a moment.

“I'm Don Raines. Who am I speaking to?”

“Leila.”

He asked questions she could answer. Where she'd seen the woman. Whether she'd spoken to her. Where the patient code came from. He didn't ask what Leila thought it meant until the end.

“I think somebody's keeping people in beds,” she said. “And somebody's paying a lot to make people stop asking.”

He let her finish.

“Someone hurt?”

“Yes. She's seeing a doctor now.”

“Stay with her. We can meet somewhere you choose. Daylight, public. I'll bring my deputy. I'd like a city detective there too, if you'll allow it.”

Leila looked at Chez, who had gone very still.

“Are we going to be arrested?”

“For what?”

She considered the possibilities.

“Can we start with the beds?”

“That was my plan.”

They arranged the park beside the tram depot at four. Four exits, a cafe, plenty of ordinary people. Leila said she would bring friends. Don said that was sensible.

When she put down the handset, she found her hands were shaking.

She washed them to give herself something useful to do.

The clinic doctor came out at eleven.

Concussion, injury at the implant connection, infection. Sour would need rest, monitoring, treatment that would cost more than Chez had expected. He paid the first part without looking at Leila.

“Can she travel?” Ajax asked.

“Not far. Somewhere quiet, with someone awake nearby.”

“Usual holiday, then.”

The doctor didn't smile. Ajax looked down.

“I'll write what to watch for,” the doctor said. “If any of it changes, you call. No deciding you can manage because you fixed something else once.”

She looked directly at Leila.

Leila wondered whether Mrs. Vu had provided references.

Liz called while they were arranging the van.

“I'm out.”

“Where?”

“On a tram. I feel very public.”

Leila gave her the clinic address.

A few minutes later Liz arrived in trainers that moved on her feet when she walked. Without the makeup and lights, she looked less like a campaign and more like somebody who'd slept on a floor.

She caught Leila looking.

“I know. Very approachable.”

Leila nearly laughed.

“Doctor's here. If you want.”

Liz put the medicine bottle on the counter.

“I do.”

She came back from the appointment quieter. The doctor would arrange independent tests and supervise any change in the treatment. For now Liz had instructions, a follow-up time, and a bill she looked at as if she'd never encountered one in the wild.

She paid it. Cash, after a moment's thought.

They took Sour to a small room the clinic used for patients who needed short observation. Ajax stayed with her. Bonz went for clothes. Kate took the reader and promised to meet them at the park.

At three, Leila bought bread and cheese from a shop near the depot. Seven clips, exactly what she had left.

Chez tried to pay.

“I've got it,” she said.

“Leila—”

“Let me have a sandwich I don't owe you.”

He pulled his hand back.

They ate on a bench. Liz accepted the cheese without checking its origin. She kept looking toward the tracks.

“You can go somewhere else,” Leila said.

“Could you stop telling me where I can go?”

“I meant—”

“I know. Everybody means something helpful. It's exhausting.”

Leila bit into the bread and discovered it was tougher than it looked.

“All right.”

They sat without speaking. Chez fed a pigeon, regretted it, and spent the next few minutes negotiating with its friends.

At four, a very old green truck pulled up beyond the park. A man in a brown hat got out, followed by a tall deputy. A woman arrived on foot from the cafe and showed them a badge.

Don set a folder on the picnic table.

Leila introduced herself. Then Chez, then Liz.

The sheriff's eyes stopped at Liz's face.

She saw them stop.

“Is that her picture?” she asked, pointing at the folder.

He put his hat on the bench.

“Yes.”

“Show me.”

The girl in the kitchen photograph had a chipped thumbnail.

Liz looked at her own. Smooth. Rounded. A color somebody else had chosen yesterday because the launch lighting was blue.

“Ellie Dalton,” Don said. “Nineteen when she disappeared. Her mother's made a preliminary identification. We're comparing records.”

“She's alive?”

He looked at her, and she knew.

The park didn't change. A tram went past. A boy on the climbing frame asked someone to watch him jump. A pigeon landed near Chez's shoe and Chez, for once, did not move.

Liz set the picture on the table.

“Then who am I?”

Kate had the isolated reader open. She turned it so Liz could see a diagram. A bed, a standing figure, a line between them.

“I'm going to tell you what the records say. Some of it may be wrong. The first part's clear enough.”

“Please stop preparing me.”

Kate nodded.

“They grew you. They used Ellie's brain patterns to teach yours. That's where the memories came from. The face, too. They call the new bodies Canvases.”

Liz waited for her to say the diagram was an analogy.

She didn't.

“But I'm here.”

“Yes.”

“I had a childhood.”

“You have memories of one.”

Liz looked up sharply.

Kate stopped. She had already done enough damage with a distinction she might have needed to hear more gently.

Leila reached toward Liz's hand, hesitated, and put her own on the table instead. Liz hated noticing that. Hated the care everyone was taking now, as if she might break in a way they would be blamed for.

“Do they keep people asleep to make more of us?” she asked.

“The records suggest they keep using the source,” Kate said. “Training. Adjusting. We don't know everything.”

“Don't call her that.”

Kate looked down at the diagram.

“Ellie.”

Liz studied the photograph again. There was a mark on the counter behind Ellie. A burned crescent.

“A pan,” Liz said.

Don looked at her.

“She put a pan down. It burned. Her mother said we'd turn the counter round when we had money.”

She had said her mother and then we. She heard both afterward and couldn't decide where the mistake was.

Don took a slow breath.

“I haven't asked Jen about the pan.”

“Ask her.”

“I will.”

“Please.”

He nodded.

Liz pushed the photograph away, then brought it back. She wanted a mirror, wanted none in the world, wanted to ask Max whether he had known this too. The thought of him was such a familiar destination that she became angry with herself for going there.

“Can they make me do things?”

Kate's face tightened.

“They use treatment and signals through the interface to reinforce behavior. It isn't a person steering you around. It's pain, reward, pressure, learned responses. Enough of it, and they don't need to send much.”

Liz touched the place behind her ear.

Her manager always stood on that side when the room was crowded. Adjusted a strand of hair, checked a fitting. Liz had thought she was being fussed over.

“They said the implant was part of recovery.”

“Some functions may be,” Kate said. “Your body needs proper care. They mixed useful treatment with things they had no right to do.”

Liz stood.

For a moment she thought she might fall. She kept standing anyway, because they would all have reasons for her to sit and she needed something not chosen from a list.

The woman detective moved farther away to take a call. The deputy went to fetch water. People making room. People doing their best. Liz wanted to be somewhere they were all doing something else.

“Walk?” Leila asked.

Liz nodded once.

They followed the path beside the fence. Leila kept a little distance. After a while Liz took her arm, mostly because it was there and solid and not asking questions.

“My photographs are fake.”

Leila said nothing.

“The nice ones. The fountain. Somebody reused the water. I didn't even notice until I put them together.”

“You weren't looking for it.”

“I looked at them every week.”

She stopped by the rail.

“I liked being pretty. I liked the clothes. The rooms. I liked the way people looked up when I came in. That's disgusting now, isn't it?”

“No.”

“You didn't think much of me when we met.”

“I was being chased.”

“Before you sat down.”

Leila looked away.

Liz almost smiled. Finally, someone had a less perfect answer.

“I thought you were very expensive,” Leila admitted.

“I am. Apparently there's paperwork.”

The laugh arrived badly and turned into something else. Liz pressed her face against Leila's shoulder. The work shirt smelled of soap and a little electrical dust. Leila stood awkwardly until Liz caught her hand and pulled it around her.

They stayed there while a tram rattled past.

Back at the table, Don had spoken to Jen. She remembered the pan. He didn't make a triumph of it.

“Would she speak to me?” Liz asked.

“She's willing. Not today, I think. Neither of you needs to do it today.”

“Does she think I'm Ellie?”

“I told her what we know. What we don't. She asked me to say she's not angry with you.”

Liz nodded, looking at the picture.

Something in her had been waiting for that without knowing it.

She asked for a copy. Mike went to the cafe to make one from the image Don had sent to his phone.

When he returned, Liz folded it and put it inside her coat.

“I'm keeping my name.”

Nobody objected. Good. She wouldn't have enjoyed explaining it.

“What's going to happen to the others?”

The detective came back. “We're working on it.”

Liz looked at her.

“I get that answer a lot.”

Reese pulled out a chair and sat.

“Then here's what I can say. Your manager's company has filed consent records for people whose families report them missing. I need actual people and original records to challenge those documents. A recording helps. It isn't enough to close every door they'll open.”

“Sunday,” Liz said.

They waited.

“I'm the main part of a demonstration. Eidolon Tower. They need me to smile and say the right thing.”

Leila began, “You don't—”

Liz looked at her.

Leila stopped.

For the first time since the photograph, Liz could imagine an action that belonged ahead of her rather than something done to her before she knew.

“I want the list,” she said. “I want to know whose face they're using when they say this worked.”

Don's wife put an old towel under the reader before she let Kate set it on the table.

“Scratches,” she said.

“It's rubber underneath.”

“Then it won't mind the towel.”

Leila liked her immediately and tried not to show it. People who owned their kitchens always had small rules. She envied the opportunity to become unreasonable about one.

Chez's mother arrived in a union van with a suitcase, two bags of food, and the blue rabbit from the photograph. Chez was outside before she got the door open.

She hugged him, held his face for inspection, then hit his arm with the rabbit.

“Computers,” she said. “Windows. Hydrangeas. We'll discuss them in that order.”

“Yes, Mum.”

“Alive first.” She hugged him again.

Leila watched from the doorway until the lump in her throat became manageable.

Reese had brought the missing-person files and news that her sergeant wanted the whole inquiry routed through the city's medical partnership office. She wasn't planning to oblige until someone explained why the partnership office shared lawyers with the facility.

“Are you off the case?” Don asked.

“Not yet.”

“That's an answer to a smaller question.”

“It's the one you get.”

They didn't smile at each other. Good. Leila had begun to worry that adulthood meant never being allowed to sound annoyed.

Max came at noon carrying two folders.

Liz stood in the hall, watching him take off his wet shoes. He looked as though he'd expected to leave them on and was grateful for a task.

“I brought the originals,” he said.

“From?” Reese asked.

“The construction office. Things I signed. Deliveries. Renovation schedules.”

“Do they show your involvement?”

“Yes.”

She took them before he could change his mind.

Liz went into the kitchen. He didn't follow.

Over the next hour, the operation acquired a shape Leila could picture.

Ling made the equipment and the biological bodies. Triton transported people and medical systems. A chain of charities recruited patients and produced paperwork saying they had consented. The beds sat beneath a former pumping station in D11. A service tunnel joined the annex to the tower's river entrance.

The tower was the old Ling headquarters, renamed Eidolon and polished until nobody remembered who cleaned it.

“My stepfather is Kazimir Cvetkovic,” Max said. “Chairman of the company. He signs the approvals through his office.”

Leila recognized the silver-haired man from the recording. At least one face now had one name.

“Originals in the country,” Don said. “Copies onstage in town.”

“People at both ends,” Liz said from the doorway.

He looked at her.

“Right.”

Kate spread a maintenance diagram over the towel.

Leila prepared herself to dislike it.

“There are two jobs,” Kate said, and drew two squares on the back of an envelope instead. “This is the annex. Clinicians need to move patients onto portable support. There's a red service kit that opens the local controls. It's kept at the tower.”

“Steal a key,” Chez said.

“Obtain,” Reese said.

He looked at her.

“I haven't authorized a burglary,” she added.

“Very broad word, obtain.”

Kate tapped the second square.

“The newer beds won't accept the change while they're taking commands from here. There's a physical isolation control at the tower. Hold that in maintenance position, the remote instructions stop and the local team can work. It leaves medical support running.”

“Hold?” Leila asked.

“It's a spring-return handle. Old safety design. They wanted a staff member physically there during service.”

“A clamp?”

“Would hold it. It also has to be watched. Let it go before the local changes finish and the system starts trying to put things back.”

Leila traced the two squares.

“One team there. One here.”

“Yes. Four of the old beds can be changed locally without the tower. The other nineteen need the isolation handle. It's on the maintenance plan, not a guess.”

“Why can't you do it from a laptop?” Chez asked.

“Because the cheap online controls kept going wrong and someone insisted on a physical fallback. For once, I'm glad they listened.”

Kate pointed to a thin line between the two squares. “There's a wired maintenance phone at each end. Echo line, the old plan calls it. It predates the identity network. Once the service console's open, you can talk without depending on city coverage.”

No secret master password. No program that would save everybody because somebody typed quickly. Leila understood a handle that had to stay where you put it. She understood needing another person at the other end.

She didn't like that part.

The old transport order in Max's folder scheduled the annex move for Monday morning. That was the time everyone had been working toward.

Max found the cooling report in his folder. A faulty bracket, unrepaired for months. A real work order could put a technician in the tower plant room, where the service kit was brought out for diagnostic tests.

Leila read the report.

“I can fix this.”

“We should wait for the order,” Reese said.

“How long?” Liz asked.

“I don't know.”

“Then say that first.”

Reese looked up sharply. Liz didn't look away.

Don pushed a mug between the papers.

“Both of you can be right after lunch.”

Leila's phone vibrated.

Unknown number.

She almost ignored it. Then she saw the message preview.

Forty thousand clips. Original recording and all copies. No questions.

She read the number twice. Counted the zeros without meaning to.

The shop across the lane cost less than that to take over. She could buy filters in boxes. She could get Sour the treatment, pay for Chez's house, stop borrowing rooms from people who were kind enough to pretend it wasn't a burden.

Another message appeared.

I can make this a transaction. Police will make it your life.

Kate saw the screen. Her face changed.

“Who's it from?” Leila asked.

“Ava,” Kate said. “Probably.”

“Worked with you?”

“Above me.”

Leila put the phone on the table. Her hand hadn't stopped holding it when her brain said to.

Chez read the message and went quiet.

“It's a lot,” she said.

Nobody volunteered the right answer. She was grateful, then annoyed that she was grateful.

Liz looked at the table, not at Leila. Don waited beside the kettle. Sour, asleep in the spare room, coughed once through the open door.

Leila blocked the number.

The money didn't become less real because she refused it. She would remember the zeros.

“We go this evening,” she said.

Reese opened her mouth.

“Not you,” Leila told her. “You didn't hear that. I'm going to repair a bracket. Somebody finally paid my callout fee.”

“Who?” Chez asked.

Leila pointed at him.

He sighed.

“Very popular arrangement, lately.”

When the doors opened, Anna couldn't see anything except light.

She covered Sofía's eyes and turned her toward the wall. A man shouted for them to stand. People tried, stumbled, pushed against one another. Mireya told them to wait until their legs worked.

The man kept shouting.

Anna rose with one hand against the container wall. Beyond the door was a warehouse apron, a white minibus, and water darkening under the evening sky. Beyond that, towers.

The tallest carried a blue name.

Eidolon.

She knew the shape from advertisements in the bus station back home. Shin Dao.

She said it quietly. Sofía repeated it. Mireya heard and passed it along the line.

A woman in a waterproof coat stood beside a scanner. She photographed wrists, looked for tags that weren't there, and grew angry with the man doing the shouting.

“Fresh intake. That's not on my order.”

“Change came through.”

“When?”

“Yesterday. Complaint. They're moving the closeout.”

The woman checked her screen and stopped arguing.

Twenty-three people came out. Two needed help. Anna took one woman's arm, Sofía carried the water, and Mireya supported the one whose ankle had swollen badly. They moved through a lower doorway into a room with benches, drains, and clean blankets stacked on a trolley.

Anna wanted a blanket so badly that she almost forgot to watch the doors.

Mireya took one and put it around her shoulders.

“Both,” she said. “You can do both.”

The woman with the scanner assigned numbers. Anna was A-28. Sofía was A-29. The woman tried to photograph them without speaking.

“My name is Sofía Vargas,” Sofía said.

“Next.”

“My name is—”

“I heard you.”

The woman pointed at Anna.

Anna gave her name too. By the fourth person, the woman stopped telling them not to.

A service door opened. Two women in pale uniforms carried a linen crate across the corridor. One had a scar above her eyebrow.

Sofía moved so suddenly Anna nearly lost her hand.

“Elena!”

The woman turned.

Recognition crossed her face. The crate sagged. Her companion caught the far end and hissed at her to keep moving.

Elena looked at Sofía, then toward the man beside the door.

For one awful moment Anna expected her to pretend she hadn't heard.

Instead she raised two fingers, then three, then turned her wrist.

The man stepped between them. The door closed.

Sofía stood with her mouth open.

Anna pulled her down onto the bench before someone decided to help more violently.

“What did that mean?”

“Cards.”

“Elena's code?”

Sofía nodded. Her eyes were wet, but she was smiling in a way Anna hadn't seen before.

“Twenty-three. She counted us.”

They stayed by the wall. More water came. Food packets. The man with the scanner's list took another photograph of every face, as if one photograph might have allowed a person to leave.

Anna watched the service door.

Elena had looked healthy. Frightened, but fed, dressed. That meant almost nothing. It meant Sofía's hope had something to hold, which was dangerous enough by itself.

Later Anna went for water. The supervisor had left a clipboard beside the dispenser. Its top page read:

TRITON MEDICAL TRANSPORT — D11 ANNEX

Below that, a time had been crossed out and replaced.

SUNDAY 21:30. SITE CLOSEOUT.

“Back,” the supervisor said, catching her looking.

“My friend's ankle—”

“A doctor will see her.”

“When?”

“Back.”

Anna returned with the cups.

Mireya listened, tore the corner from an empty food wrapper, and worked a blunt staple free of the seam.

“Write it.”

Anna pressed the words into the foil. The letters weren't ink. They stayed visible when she tipped them toward the light.

Twenty-three. Locked lower room. Need doctor. Anna. Sofía.

Then the company, the district, the time.

Sofía showed her how to fold it into her palm, hidden even with her fingers open. A card trick Elena had taught her years ago.

Anna practiced. Dropped it. Practiced again.

A man came through the service door carrying empty bottles. Beyond his shoulder she saw a short corridor, a heavy metal hatch, a coil of rope. Cool air moved through the opening. She could hear water.

A way out, perhaps. Or a way to get Sofía into dark water with nobody knowing they'd gone.

Anna let the door shut.

It felt like failure. She folded the foil once more to give her hands something to do.

Outside, a boat engine started. Inside, the supervisor counted them again.

Twenty-three.

Anna watched her make the mark.

Mike had found the floating platform.

Not the actual one. One of three, tied beneath a shelter behind the Triton gate. The transport cases stacked on it matched the broken clip from the reeds.

He showed Don the photographs on the drive back from the farm.

“Public path,” he said before Don asked.

“Good.”

“Didn't climb anything.”

“Better.”

“Thought about it.”

“Keep that out of the report.”

The inspector met them at the municipal garage with a chart of the pump station's discharge. She had spent six weeks requesting access and three writing letters she suspected nobody read until she put a regional official's name at the bottom.

“Sunday,” she said. “Four. They confirmed in writing.”

“Any chance of today?” Don asked.

“Not without another delay while they claim I changed the appointment.”

He disliked the answer. It was still an answer.

She showed him warm-water spikes at night, twice a week. Too much heated water for a building licensed to store equipment. Cooling something, maintaining something. Then a flush of the channel.

Mike pointed at the flats.

“Flush would raise this water.”

“And carry a platform through the trees,” Don said.

“If someone wanted.”

The inspector looked between them.

“You're bringing the good camera.”

“Yes.”

“And enough people.”

Don thought of his deputy, the outpost, Sandra's one examination room, and the children who waved at the truck.

“We'll have help.”

She waited as though she'd heard claims before.

At the old boat ramp, he stood on the public side of the fence. The gate's sign threatened prosecution for unauthorized entry. Behind it, a hospital transport case sat on a pallet in the sun.

Mike held the original ticket.

“Public easement,” he said. “They put the gate six feet over.”

“Six feet gets us where?”

“Past the guard hut. To the discharge path.”

“Not inside.”

“No.”

Don looked toward the low building. Fresh white paint, tinted windows, a small planted bed beside the office. Somebody had chosen the plants. Somebody had watered them.

There were people in that building with all the ordinary habits of work. Complaints about shifts. Opinions about lunch. He wondered how many knew what the rooms contained and how many had decided not to find out.

His phone rang.

Reese.

“The regional prosecutor wants the full chain. Video, equipment certificate, Max's records, witness statements. We're getting there.”

“Tomorrow's late.”

“I know.”

He heard the sharpness and stopped himself from adding another complaint.

She said, “Don, if you find people confined, that's different. But don't manufacture the finding. I need what you actually see.”

“I know the job.”

“Yes,” she said. “Then let me do mine.”

She ended the call first.

Mike pretended to examine the padlock.

“Anything you'd like to add?” Don asked.

“She's right.”

Don put the phone away.

“Not what I was hoping for.”

“I gathered.”

They drove to the channel behind the flats. Mike showed him the reeds and the approach from the water. On foot, looking down, the distance seemed awkward. From a small barge, with the channel flushed, it would be easy.

Don could see it now. He wished that felt better.

They found the boy who'd discovered the body sitting with his father near a bicycle. He'd come for the crashed drone. He wouldn't look toward the sheeted-off patch.

Don crouched so the boy didn't have to look up.

“You did right,” he said.

The boy studied him.

“Dad said if I'd gone earlier—”

“Your dad wishes somebody could've helped. So do I. You told us when you found her. That's what you could do.”

The father looked away. Don stood before the conversation became something nobody wanted to finish in public.

Back in the truck, he rubbed both eyes.

Mike gave him the map. The deputy had marked the shallow water, the willow cover, and a bend where a larger boat would ground.

“You've got a lot of detail,” Don said.

“Summer job. My uncle did drainage.”

“You never mentioned.”

“You never asked about the most interesting summer of my life.”

Don looked at the little measurements.

“Think a launch could get through?”

“With somebody who knows the channel.”

“That's you.”

“Some of it. I can ask about the rest.”

Don almost said he'd do it himself. He had half a dozen calls left, too little time, and a deputy holding a map he'd drawn better than Don could have.

“Ask,” he said.

Mike folded the paper and took out his phone.

Don started the engine. For the first time since Jen's apartment, he didn't try to carry the entire plan in his own head.

The trolley squeaked in a way that made nobody want to inspect it.

Leila let it.

She wore a gray work shirt and a temporary contractor badge Max had issued against the real cooling ticket. Chez wore coveralls that looked better on him than she wanted to admit. He'd tied his hair back. For once he wasn't carrying anything that announced he was a person with ideas.

At the tower's service entrance, a guard scanned the work order.

“Cooling fault?”

“Bracket's on backward,” Leila said.

“Again?”

“Someone's consistent.”

He waved them in.

The lobby ceiling projected moving water. A cleaner worked around a flower display while guests for tomorrow's event took pictures of the test lighting. Leila watched a man step into her path, look at her badge, and step away without meeting her eyes.

She'd expected to be frightened. She hadn't expected to feel at work.

They found the plant corridor beyond the recycling. Max's hand-drawn note was right about the smell. A service lift stood open. A cleaner parked a cart in it and held the door while Leila and Chez pushed the trolley inside.

“Late one?” the cleaner asked.

“Always,” Leila said.

The woman nodded and got off on two.

At the plant room Leila took photographs, isolated the faulty circuit, and changed the bracket. It had worn through the cable sheath in exactly the place the report predicted. She replaced the damaged section while Chez held the lamp.

“If we get arrested,” he murmured, “can we still bill this?”

“Keep the receipts.”

The real repair steadied her hands. Here was a thing she'd been trained to do. She didn't have to guess whether kindness would make it worse.

She requested a diagnostic authorization through the service terminal.

A side door opened. An engineer in a white shirt came out with a red case.

“You're new.”

“Your last contractor put this on backward.”

He looked at her photograph.

“Fair.”

He opened the case with his thumb. Inside lay a heavy metal service key and a reader with a copper plug. Leila had expected something more impressive. The key resembled the ones that opened service lifts in every badly maintained building she'd worked in.

“The kit logs local maintenance,” the engineer said. “Use the reader for the test. Don't take the key out of the plant area.”

“Of course.”

He connected it, signed the work sheet, and went back through the door.

Chez looked at Leila.

She connected her isolated drive to the diagnostic terminal.

Kate spoke through the wired earpiece under her collar. “First page. Copy it. Don't search the whole system.”

The first page showed live equipment by location. Kate had described the file she needed, and for once it appeared where somebody competent had left it.

Leila read the count aloud.

“Annex. Forty-six people.”

Kate said, “Breakdown?”

“Twenty-three connected patients. Twenty-three unconnected new arrivals. Those are the forty-six, not another group.”

“Tower?”

“Eighteen Canvases.”

Chez pointed at the movement schedule.

The time Max had found was crossed out. Monday's transfer had been brought forward.

SUNDAY 21:30. RESET AND SITE CLOSEOUT.

Below it, a note recorded the reason.

SAFETY COMPLAINT. ACCELERATED CONSOLIDATION.

Leila stared at the words.

Her report. Not her theory of what her report might do. Here it was, converted into a time at which other people would be moved.

“What's the reset?” she asked.

Kate was quiet for a moment.

“The old system clears patient links before transport. It assumes they're on independent care. If they aren't, it's unsafe. The same fault we discussed. We have to get them off before nine-thirty.”

“Why move it?”

“Because somebody's asking questions.”

Leila copied the schedule and the current patient register. On another page she found an incident log.

THURSDAY 06:12. DEMONSTRATION LINK TEST. SOURCE 19 COMMUNICATION LOSS.

The note beneath was short.

THREE-MINUTE TIMEOUT. SOURCE RELEASED.

“Copy that,” Kate said quickly.

Leila did.

The side door opened again.

The engineer stood in the doorway. His eyes went to the patient register on her screen.

“That's not the cooling report.”

Chez took his hands off the keyboard.

Leila looked at the key in its case, the open door, and the man who could close it.

“No,” she said.

He stayed where he was.

“Who sent you?”

“Nobody.”

He looked behind him before shutting the door.

“That,” he said, “is not reassuring.”

The engineer asked to see her hands.

She held them up. Chez copied her a second later, then looked annoyed with himself for the delay.

“You've got someone's file,” the engineer said.

“We've got a room full of people.”

“Patients.”

“Are they free to leave?”

He looked at the screen.

“I've seen consent forms.”

“Have you seen them sign?”

He didn't answer.

Outside, a trolley rattled past. Leila could hear a loose caster making regular little knocks. Her mind offered to diagnose it, desperate for a smaller problem.

The engineer shut the service window on her screen. She reached toward the keyboard, and he caught her wrist.

“Don't. They'll see the session.”

Leila froze.

He let go at once, then seemed to realize that wasn't the important part.

“Who are you trying to reach?”

“The people in the beds.”

“There's a procedure.”

“We've got the plan. The key. Somebody at the isolation handle. Doctors changing local support.”

He looked at the red case.

“Not an app,” she said. “We know.”

For the first time, he seemed to listen rather than decide how to explain her mistake.

His pocket vibrated. He checked the message, and the color changed in his face.

On the earpiece, Kate said, “Somebody's opened the audit window. Get out.”

The plant-room handle moved.

The engineer slid the manual bolt across.

“Aiden?” a woman called.

Leila learned his name at an inconvenient moment.

“Just a minute,” he answered.

“You didn't report visitors.”

“Contractors.”

“Open the door.”

He pointed toward a high inspection hatch. Leila followed his finger and saw the ladder behind a rack of ducting.

The woman tried the handle again.

Chez unplugged the drive. The copied page count held. Enough. They had what they'd come to get except the part it would be hardest to explain carrying.

Leila reached for the red case.

Aiden put his hand on it.

She looked at him.

“If I leave it,” she said, “you get a quieter weekend.”

He held the handle one second longer. Then pushed it toward her.

“The tower isolation control is below the theatre. Old plant room. It has a mechanical stop. If somebody opens the cover, the system sends an alarm. You won't have long.”

He pulled a folded diagram from the maintenance drawer, marked the handle and a test point with his pen, and pushed it into the red case.

“We'll be there.”

“I can tell you where—”

“Then come.”

His eyes moved to the door. The woman outside had stopped speaking.

He shook his head.

Leila hated him for it, unfairly and without time to be fairer.

She climbed.

The duct above the room was warm, concrete-lined, just wide enough for a person willing to regret it. Chez followed, pushing the case ahead of him. Halfway through he caught a sleeve on a screw. The fabric tore, followed by a sharp breath.

“Keep going,” Leila whispered.

“Doing a wonderful impression of that.”

Below them the door took a heavy blow.

They dropped into the next plant room. Chez landed on his knees and pulled his sleeve down over blood. Leila took the case and headed for the service stairs.

Kate directed them away from the lift. “Security's stopped it. Loading bay. Then the street.”

They reached the bay and found the outer door shutting.

A row of small delivery carts waited beside folded linen for tomorrow's event. One had a floor lever instead of a sealed dashboard. Chez saw it too.

“No,” Leila said.

Footsteps hit the stair door behind them.

“I am becoming persuaded,” she added.

They climbed into the cart. Chez hit the service brake while Leila pressed the loading-door switch. The door stopped, reversed, and left them a gap.

The cart moved down the ramp at walking speed.

Then the slope changed.

Leila grabbed the side. Chez discovered the steering had very strong views about going straight. A man carrying two coffees stepped aside as they shot onto the pavement. Leila shouted an apology, ducked beneath a safety bar, and jumped.

She hit wet concrete on one hip, rolled, and got up because standing still seemed worse.

Chez came after her. The cart continued across the lane, struck a bollard, and announced, very happily, that the delivery was complete.

White tablecloths slid out across the road.

A security guard stopped to avoid stepping on them. Leila would treasure that for the rest of her life, if she got much more of one.

She hauled Chez toward a moving bus. They crossed behind it, went down the steps into a public passage, and came out through a shopping arcade with its shutters half closed.

In a doorway Leila stopped long enough to check his arm. Torn skin, more blood than she wanted, no obvious deep damage. She gave him a clean cloth and made him press.

He looked at the cloth, then at her.

“That was a bad idea.”

“Which one?”

He laughed. It didn't sound steady.

The red case had a dent in one corner. The key was still inside. So was the reader.

Leila checked the drive. Patient register. Movement time. The incident at six-twelve.

They'd got it.

Her hands wanted to shake now. She put them around the case handle and held on.

Kate's voice returned, much quieter than before.

“Where are you?”

Leila gave the nearest street.

“Don't go back to the farm.”

Something in the way she said it made Leila stop feeling relieved.

“Why?” Leila asked.

Kate didn't answer immediately. Leila stood in the mouth of the passage, the red case knocking against her leg, and waited for a reason that wouldn't make her feel worse.

“There's a tracker in your tool bag,” Kate said.

Chez stopped pressing the cloth against his arm.

“Before you left. Under the handle.”

Leila switched the call to speaker. Her hand found the bag's seam, the little ridge she'd assumed was a repair patch. She worked a nail beneath it and peeled out a black wafer.

“What does it do?”

“Burst location. No sound. It woke when you left the building.”

“Did you put it there?”

“Yes.”

Leila looked at the wafer. It wasn't much bigger than the one she'd bought for forty clips. She was beginning to hate things that fitted in a palm.

“Who?”

“Ava. She contacted me yesterday. My brother's treatment. She had the transfer papers. Said if I wanted his care to continue where it was, I'd help recover the kit.”

“So you didn't mind us getting caught.”

“I thought—”

“Do not say you thought.”

Chez looked away. That infuriated her too, though she knew he hadn't done this part.

Kate said, “I told Don. He's moving everybody. I told the clinic. We're trying to get my brother transferred somewhere independent.”

“Now.”

“Yes.”

“While we were crawling through their ceiling.”

A long silence.

“Yes.”

Leila dropped the tracker into an empty drink can and crushed it beneath her heel. It took two attempts. The second felt necessary for reasons that had nothing to do with electronics.

She ended the call.

Chez stood beside her, pale and bleeding. A tiny piece of tablecloth clung to his boot.

“Well,” he began.

“Don't.”

He shut his mouth.

They took the tram in opposite ends of the carriage. Leila watched every person who looked at her. She couldn't stop imagining Kate fixing the tracker beneath the handle while Leila stood nearby trusting her with things she didn't understand.

At the edge of D11, Mike met them beside a bus shelter.

“Hall,” he said. “Not the house. I'll walk.”

Leila followed him through the municipal building's side entrance. Folding chairs, floor polish, a serving hatch. Don's wife was making sandwiches. Chez's mother was carrying blankets as though she could personally organize the disaster out of existence.

Kate stood by the far wall with a pale teenage boy in a wheelchair. The boy wore headphones around his neck and was reading a paper transfer form.

Leila put the red case on a desk.

“She doesn't touch this.”

Don looked at Kate, then back at Leila.

“All right.”

Kate's face tightened. She said nothing.

“Write down what she said,” Don told Leila. “Where it was. Where you took it out. I'll need the can.”

“In a bin.”

“Which one?”

She stared at him.

“Are you seriously—”

“Yes.”

The calm almost made her shout. Then she saw his hand. A faint tremor as he picked up the pen. He wasn't calm. He was putting the fear somewhere it could be used.

She took the pen.

Chez went to the kitchen for water. When he returned, his mother took one look at his arm and led him toward the first-aid cupboard by the good sleeve. He didn't object.

Leila wrote. Her first line slanted down. The next was steadier.

When she finished, Kate approached and stopped at the far side of the desk.

“She's still going to move them,” she said.

“I know.”

“I can help.”

“That's what you said.”

Kate nodded as if she'd expected it, which made Leila want to say something crueler. She folded her hands around the pen instead.

The boy by the wall put down his form.

“Kate.”

She turned.

“You should have told me.”

“I couldn't ask you to—”

“You didn't have to ask. You had to tell me.”

Leila didn't stay to hear the rest. She went outside, sat on the step, and pressed both palms against her eyes.

The night smelled of cut grass. A moth worked at the municipal light. People nearby were having a Saturday, ordinary enough to complain about.

She had helped bring the trouble forward. Her report. Her decision to go in. Her insistence that she could manage the parts she understood and find people for the rest.

Now she didn't trust the people.

The door opened. Chez sat down two feet away. His arm was clean and bandaged.

“Mum says if I damage the other one, she's changing the locks.”

Leila didn't laugh.

He stayed.

After a while she said, “Did you ever tell anybody where I live?”

“No.”

“You're sure.”

“Yes.”

“Sour knew. My report used my account. They probably know anyway.”

“I can go check—”

“No.”

He looked at her.

She heard herself. The speed of it. The certainty she couldn't justify.

“Not alone,” she added.

He nodded.

Through the open window came the boy's voice, irritated and young.

“I'm allowed to be scared and still make decisions, Kate. Stop spending me.”

Leila looked at the crushed grass between her boots.

For once, she had nothing to add.

Max's mother had left the company apartment.

He told Liz while she was washing mugs at the hall's little kitchen sink. His wrist had a fresh ink stain. He'd written his statement by hand, started again, written another. He wanted her to ask about it. She could feel him trying not to want it.

“She's staying with her sister,” he said.

“Does he know?”

“Not yet.”

“Will he?”

“Yes.”

She dried a mug carefully. Cheap pottery. A crack in the glaze near the handle. She had never washed anything in the apartment because somebody always arrived before she thought to.

“I told her what I knew,” Max said.

Liz turned off the tap.

“What did you know about me?”

He leaned against the opposite counter, leaving the doorway clear.

“Recovery program. New start. Some memory issues. He said the agency needed somebody trustworthy around you. I was flattered he asked.”

“Of course.”

He accepted that.

“Did you think I was stupid?”

“No.”

“Easy?”

“No.”

“Then why didn't you think I'd want to know?”

He looked at the floor.

She almost told him to stop doing that. It made him look like a boy being scolded, and she didn't want the job of being the person who restored his confidence.

“I wanted the conversations to stay what they were,” he said eventually. “If I told you, they'd stop.”

“Yes.”

The plain agreement hurt him. She saw it and refused to apologize.

Then she remembered something from the donut shop. He'd noticed her shifting in the booth and asked which shoe hurt. Nobody else that evening had asked whether she was uncomfortable without looking at the clock.

Had that been part of the job? Perhaps. Had he meant it? Perhaps that too.

She resented how little satisfaction there was in being angry when you still liked the person's hands.

“What happens tomorrow?” he asked.

“I go in. I find the other Canvases. I make it difficult for them to pretend this is what we chose.”

“It's dangerous.”

“I've noticed.”

“I can help with the stage access. My card still works.”

“And if it stops?”

“Then I tell you. Before it makes you unsafe.”

She looked at him.

That was the first useful promise he'd made.

Don came to the door with a piece of paper.

“Jen's number. Only if you want it.”

Liz took it.

Max moved aside and let her leave without asking where she was going.

She called from the small office. Sat on a chair with one broken arm, stared at a poster about fire assembly points, and nearly hung up before the ringing stopped.

“Hello?”

The voice was the one from the memo.

Older. Tired. Real on the other end of a line.

Liz couldn't speak.

“Liz?” Jen asked.

“Yes.”

A pause long enough that Liz began to regret everything.

“Don said you might call. I don't know what to say.”

“Me neither.”

“I saw you on the advert. Before. I thought—”

She stopped.

Liz held the receiver tighter.

“I'm sorry.”

“No. I didn't mean that.” Jen breathed unevenly. “You looked happy.”

The words landed badly. Liz waited until she could answer without making them worse.

“I was doing what they told me.”

“I know. I'm sorry.”

They both stopped apologizing because there wasn't anywhere useful left to put it.

Liz looked at the poster. A little drawn person stood beside an arrow, perfectly sure how to get out.

“I remember the counter,” she said.

“The burn?”

“Yes.”

“She was furious with me for being upset. Said it added value.”

Liz laughed before she meant to. So did Jen, briefly.

Then the silence returned with something slightly different inside it.

“I don't remember all of her life,” Liz said. “I don't know what I'm allowed to ask you.”

“I don't know what I'm allowed to answer.”

“Maybe we can do it badly.”

Jen made a small sound that might have been a laugh.

“I'm very qualified.”

They spoke for six more minutes. Nothing important enough for a report. The recipe. A shop that used to sell the good flour. Jen's sister, who had brought too much bread. Liz said she'd always preferred the burned cookies, then wasn't sure whether that was her preference or Ellie's and became quiet.

Jen let it happen. She didn't tell Liz what she was.

When they ended, Liz kept the paper number instead of adding it to her managed phone.

In the hall, people had begun laying tables for dinner. Chez sat with a bottle of water while his mother lectured him about the price of glazing. Kate was beside her brother, both looking exhausted. Leila stood at a noticeboard pretending to read a poster she must have finished ten minutes earlier.

Liz went over.

“I called.”

Leila turned.

“Was it—”

“Complicated.”

Leila nodded.

“Good food here, at least.”

Liz looked at the serving hatch.

“That's your answer?”

“I don't have a better one.”

For some reason, that was exactly enough.

The hatch to her room hung crookedly from one hinge.

Leila stopped in the corridor. Chez, coming up behind her, stopped too.

Inside, the mattress leaned against the wall. The locker stood open. Her work shirt lay on the wet floor, soaking up the leak she'd meant to fix.

She didn't go in at once.

“They were looking,” Chez said.

“Yes.”

He shut his mouth. She was grateful for that and didn't know how to tell him.

The cassette player was inside the dead microwave. Still there. She took it out, checked the buttons, and put it in her pocket. The photograph had been knocked from the locker. She found it under the bucket, face down.

Her mother's beach shoes showed at the edge.

Leila wiped the plastic cover on her trousers. Tried to straighten the bent corner. Made it worse.

“Here.” Chez held out a clean cloth.

She took it without looking at him.

The filter had stopped. Its silence bothered her more than the noise ever had. She touched the casing. Cold. It hadn't been dead long.

She'd spent months making this place livable. The hotplate, the shelf at exactly the right height, the second chair she'd kept for company and never used properly. Someone had walked in, turned it over, and left without learning what any of it had cost her.

“I liked it here.”

“I know.”

“It wasn't much.”

He looked around, then at her.

“I've been in much worse. Frequently mine.”

She laughed once and then found she was crying. Angry little tears she couldn't stop by wiping them harder.

He stayed where he was.

When she could move, she collected tools, clothes, the photograph. Chez carried the bag downstairs. He didn't offer to fix everything before dinner. She might have hit him if he had.

At the hall, Don's wife had made soup in a borrowed kitchen and was making the borrowing look regrettable for its owners.

“Bowls there. Wet coats away from the bread.”

Leila put down her bag. Her room could not be solved this morning. There were forty-six people in a building that wasn't theirs at all.

The doctor from the independent clinic was on a call with Sandra. Portable support units, staff, transport, receiving beds. She refused the first vehicle plan before Leila finished describing it.

“You cannot put patients on a freight floor and call it evacuation.”

“We'd secure them.”

“With what?”

Leila pointed at the map instead of answering.

The doctor waited.

Chez's mother came over with a union dispatch sheet.

“Medical transport contractors. We move their staff on strike days. Two buses with stretcher fittings. Not free.”

“How much?” Chez asked.

His mother named a deposit.

He looked at her.

“I can sell the chair.”

“And the second monitor,” she said.

He swallowed.

“Right.”

“You're not buying forgiveness, Chester. You're renting a bus.”

“Understood.”

The doctor accepted the revised transport plan with conditions Leila couldn't negotiate away: trained crews, safe routes, space for equipment, and a receiving team for every patient. They would not all travel at once. The first four old beds could be changed locally; their transport could begin while the tower team got into position. The other nineteen would stay on working support until the physical isolation control was held.

Leila repeated it back. The doctor made her repeat the last part again.

Then Ava's morning countermeasure arrived.

Max's contractor account had been suspended. The cooling ticket was locked. New security staff had taken over the tower service entrance. A photograph from the annex showed a metal grille fitted across the channel hatch.

“She saw the stolen kit,” Kate said. “She's closing the routes.”

Leila stared at the grille.

“Can we cut it?”

“Not near active oxygen equipment,” Sandra said over the phone. “Find something else.”

Silence settled over the map.

This was the part a plan never admitted to. People could say no. Metal could go where it hadn't been yesterday. Doing a thing once didn't mean the world would let you do it again.

Liz put down the launch schedule.

“My invitation still works. They checked this morning. Fitting at five.”

“Different entrance,” Max said. “The performance crew uses the theatre loading bay. The security team won't know every subcontractor.”

Leila looked at Chez. He had once spent three nights installing video for a concert nobody paid him enough to attend.

“Who runs the booth?” she asked.

“I can find out.”

“No pretending. An actual person who'll answer you.”

“Yes.”

He took out the emergency phone and went to the far end of the room.

Kate stood near the window. Her brother had left with the clinic driver for the independent facility. She held a paper copy of his transfer receipt, folding and unfolding the same corner.

Leila wanted to put her somewhere harmless and finish the plan without her. She couldn't find a place where ignorance became safer simply because Leila preferred it.

“Check the manual instructions,” she said. “Only those. With Sandra watching.”

Kate looked up.

“Okay.”

“You're not getting the case yet.”

“I heard you.”

It wasn't gratitude. Leila preferred it.

By noon they had a plan that cost money, depended on people who were not uniformly pleased to help, and contained two routes instead of one good arrow drawn on a map.

Mrs. Vu arrived with a pot of noodles large enough to change the plan's center of gravity. Ajax and Bonz carried it between them, arguing over whose end was heavier.

Sour came in wearing borrowed sunglasses and told everybody to lower their personalities.

They ate at folding tables. Someone found an old farm game in a cupboard. Half the pieces were missing. Mike became the fence post. Chez was given a yellow bottle top because the chicken was gone.

“Why am I the chicken?”

“Face,” Sour said.

Liz laughed so hard she had to put down her cup.

Leila tried to read the rules. Bonz mortgaged the cracker packet they were using as a barn. Don objected that the cracker packet wasn't his to mortgage. Mike began charging rent for leaning on the fence post.

“It's meant to teach cooperation,” Leila said.

“It's teaching property,” Liz said.

Across the table Chez caught Leila's eye.

He looked tired, worried, and briefly delighted to be part of something stupid that wasn't his fault.

She smiled before she remembered not to.

Later, washing dishes, Liz said, “Tomorrow used to be something they planned for me. I want this one.”

“It's today.”

“I know. I'm trying not to think about that.”

Leila took the cup from her and set it on the rack.

“I keep thinking I can put everybody somewhere safe.”

“Can you?”

“No.”

Liz dried her hands.

“Then you might as well let us choose where we stand.”

Leila didn't answer. She looked through the hatch at the map, the red case, and the people finishing their lunch.

Then she called Kate over and opened the manual.

The inspector read the visit scope aloud in the municipal garage.

Pump-house access. Discharge sampling. Public easement. Don listened without interrupting, though she'd already given him a copy.

“This isn't a general search,” she said.

“I know.”

“Then don't look offended when I say it.”

Mike checked the camera's time against his watch. The older camera was in the bag as a backup. He'd put new batteries in both and marked them with tape so nobody could mistake the spent ones for the useful ones.

Don had spent enough years calling him thorough that he'd nearly forgotten thorough was a skill.

His wife called while he was loading the truck.

“Going now?”

“Yes.”

“Then stop checking that phone in the road.”

“I'm parked.”

“Stay that way until we've finished.”

He smiled despite himself.

She didn't tell him to be careful. She told him where his sandwich was and reminded him that Mike had a radio too.

“It's not all yours,” she said.

After the call, Don looked at the passenger seat. His deputy was reading the route, lips moving faintly as he matched the bends to the map.

“Anything else we need?” Don asked.

Mike looked up.

“A better truck.”

“Within the next ten minutes.”

“Then no.”

At the Triton gate, the guard examined the inspection notice as if the paper had done something personal to him.

“Manager isn't here.”

“Call her,” the inspector said.

“Restricted facility.”

“Then you should have mentioned that in the six weeks I requested access.”

Don waited while she handled it. When the guard looked at him for a different answer, he nodded toward the notice.

The gate opened after twelve minutes.

Inside stood the low white building, the pump house, and a loading shed. Two medical transports waited under a shelter, both empty. The channel hatch now had the grille they'd seen in the photograph. New metal against old concrete. Somebody had paid for speed.

The supervisor came from the office carrying a clipboard. Don recognized her job before her face: she would be the person who made everyone wait while establishing she could decide whether they did.

“All care is licensed.”

“Show me,” he said.

“Office.”

She turned. He followed, expecting Mike to stay with the inspector at the outlet.

Instead his deputy paused by the loading shed.

A girl stood beside a wheeled bin. Hair tied back with white thread. Blank expression, too carefully kept. She watched the vehicles beyond the gate and then looked at Mike's badge.

“Water's this way,” the supervisor said sharply.

Don almost called Mike after him.

Then he saw the girl's hand.

Something pale flashed between her fingers and disappeared. She shifted the bin toward a broken drain cover. A wheel caught. Mike bent to lift it free.

The girl's hand touched his sleeve.

The supervisor stopped.

“She's supposed to be indoors.”

Don looked at the lower door. No handle on the inside edge he could see. A keypad mounted outside.

Mike straightened with a small piece of foil in his palm.

He read it. Didn't look at the girl immediately. That small delay told Don more than an exclamation would have.

“Sir,” Mike said.

The guard took one step toward them.

Don put his hand beside his holster, not on the grip.

“Stay there.”

The guard stopped.

Mike held out the foil.

Twenty-three. Locked lower room. Need doctor.

Names. Anna. Sofía.

Don looked at the girl. Her eyes had become very wide, but she didn't move away.

“Are you free to leave this place?” he asked.

The supervisor laughed, a short offended sound.

“She doesn't understand—”

“I do,” the girl said.

Don waited for her answer.

The deputy had read it.

Anna saw the foil open in his hand and felt a terrible urge to take it back. Until this moment it had been a plan. Now somebody could decide what the words meant.

The man in the brown hat asked whether she was free to leave.

The supervisor began explaining her before Anna could answer.

“No,” Anna said.

The word came out hoarse. She hadn't spoken above a whisper in hours.

The man waited.

“My name is Anna. I'm nineteen. They brought us in a container. There are twenty-three of us downstairs. My friend's sixteen.”

The guard reached for his radio.

“Hand where I can see it,” the man said.

Anna had seen guns since the day she was taken. She had not seen a man make room around one like this, giving everyone a second in which something worse didn't have to happen.

The guard hesitated. Then raised his hand.

The supervisor moved toward the office. The deputy stepped into her path.

“You can wait.”

“I'm in charge of patient welfare.”

“Then you'll want to stay.”

Anna almost laughed. The feeling frightened her more than crying would have.

The sheriff asked her to show him the door.

Inside, Sofía stood beside the bench with both hands pressed flat against her legs. She saw the badge through the window and didn't move.

“Key,” the sheriff told the guard.

“Manager code.”

“Get it.”

The supervisor said the code wasn't hers to release.

The deputy went to the truck and returned with a bolt cutter. The sheriff looked at the little chain on the emergency latch, then at the supervisor.

“Last chance to save the hardware.”

She said nothing.

The chain broke with a small sound. Much less noise than Anna expected the end of the room to make.

Nobody moved toward the opening.

Mireya stood first.

“Are you taking us somewhere else?”

“To medical help,” the sheriff said. “You can speak to someone independently. You don't have to get into a vehicle without knowing where it goes.”

He sounded as if he wasn't sure which words people here would believe.

Anna went to Sofía. The girl caught her sleeve and held on.

“Elena,” she whispered.

“I'll ask.”

“Now.”

“Now.”

People rose in stages. Mireya organized the ones who needed help. The inspector, a woman carrying a sample case, put it down and brought water instead. The deputy called for ambulances while cutting the last length of chain away from the doorway.

Outside, the air felt too big.

Anna could see past the gate. Trees, a road, a parked utility car. An empty crisp packet moved against a curb. Nothing about it looked arranged for them, which made it harder to trust.

The supervisor began speaking into her phone. The sheriff took it and gave it to the deputy.

“Not that call.”

Sofía went toward him.

“My sister. Elena Vargas. She's here.”

He crouched a little.

“Where?”

“I saw her. Uniform. They wouldn't let her talk.”

The supervisor said, “Staff aren't part of—”

The sheriff looked at her. She stopped.

“I'll find out,” he told Sofía.

Anna disliked the answer until she saw how carefully he didn't add a promise.

A woman with an injured ankle was the last to reach the stairs. Mireya stayed at her side. Anna took the other arm, and they moved one step at a time while the others waited in the light.

Twenty-three.

They counted at the door. Counted again beside the buses. Anna answered whether the number included Mireya and began to understand that these people were trying to make sure none of them disappeared between places.

A medic offered her a clean blanket.

She took it. A pale green one, warm from a cupboard. She held it against her face without meaning to.

The sheriff went back into the building. Mireya followed, having heard there were more patients inside. Anna wanted to call her back. She didn't.

Sofía sat on the edge of a folding chair and stared at the door.

A man appeared near the gate with a camera.

“Can you tell me—”

Anna pulled the blanket higher.

He moved to keep her face in view.

“It'll help people understand.”

“No,” she said.

He kept talking. Sofía put down the water cup.

“She said no.”

The deputy came over, looked at the camera, and pointed to the boundary cones. He didn't raise his voice. The man argued, but moved.

The medic returned.

“Would you like a quieter place?”

Anna nodded.

They moved the chair behind a screen. She sat with Sofía, drank water she'd been told she could have more of, and found her hands would not stop trembling.

“Are you cold?” Sofía asked.

“No.”

“Me too.”

The girl leaned against her. Anna held the empty cup until a medic replaced it.

From the building came a mechanical noise, loud enough that everybody turned.

Metal shutters were coming down over the windows.

The deputy ran toward the door.

Anna pulled Sofía back before she realized she'd moved.

The sheriff was still inside.

The shutter stopped because Don put a chair beneath it.

It wasn't a good chair. One leg bent and the seat cracked. Don added a folded blanket over the frame and stepped away before the mechanism could persuade him to keep his fingers involved.

Six inches of daylight remained.

The wall screen lit up.

SAFEGUARDING INTERVENTION. PLEASE REMAIN WITH PATIENTS.

“Well,” he said. “That'll be easy.”

Mireya stood at the inner door with a trolley full of blankets.

“I thought you went out.”

“You thought wrong.”

He looked at the trolley, then at her.

“Fair enough.”

Twenty-three people lay under the clear lids. Don had counted twice. New arrivals outside, connected patients inside: twenty-three each. He would not let the numbers drift now that he could see the people they belonged to.

He put the names from the register beside the bed numbers on a sheet of paper. Elena Vargas was number twenty-seven. Small scar above the eyebrow. Sleeping so deeply she might not have heard her sister calling through the wall.

He took out his phone. No signal. The radio gave him a broken burst of Mike's voice, then nothing.

Jamming, probably. He didn't need to know how it worked to dislike it.

On the screen, a woman appeared in a neat dark jacket.

“Sheriff Raines. I'm Ava Serrin. You've entered a restricted medical area.”

“Open the shutters.”

“We've had a security breach.”

“You'll have another if I find the motor.”

Her expression barely changed.

“The patients are vulnerable to interference. Please don't touch their equipment.”

He looked at the girl in bed twenty-seven.

“Your supervisor wouldn't open a locked room with twenty-three women in it. One's sixteen. You'll forgive me for not treating this as routine.”

“I can arrange an independent inspection.”

“You're speaking to it.”

“The current process is unsafe.”

“Then open the shutters.”

She paused. He could almost hear her sorting him into the kind of problem somebody else ought to have handled.

Behind him, Mireya was checking that the blankets hadn't trapped any lines. She touched nothing she didn't understand. He was grateful for her caution and ashamed of how much it relieved him to have somebody who knew even a little more.

Ava said, “The building's being cleared tonight. You're delaying that work.”

“What happens at nine-thirty?”

“The scheduled reset.”

“Are the patients ready?”

“They will be, if you'll let us—”

“Are they ready now?”

She didn't answer that one.

Don took a clean sheet from the trolley and hung it over the camera.

Mireya looked at him.

“Won't stop the microphone.”

“I'm prepared to let her be disappointed by my conversation.”

He found the manual shutter crank in a red housing beside the wall. The coupling behind it was missing. Two empty bolts showed where it should have fitted.

He photographed it with the old camera, carefully enough that the scale marker was visible.

The key on his belt wouldn't open any part of this problem. His gun wouldn't either. He had forty years of being the person people expected to know what to do, and a roomful of equipment that might kill somebody if he made the wrong guess.

He put both hands on the desk until the urge to guess passed.

“Don!”

Mike, outside the shutter.

“Here.”

“Gate's shut. We've got pedestrians coming through the path. Road barrier's locked. Loader coming.”

“Patients outside?”

“Twenty-two accounted for. Mireya?”

“With me. That's the twenty-three.”

“Good. Four old beds can be changed with the kit when it arrives. Sandra's bringing the crews. Leila's coming by water.”

“New grille.”

“We saw. She'll come round to the loading apron. Need you inside for the shutter controls.”

Don looked at the broken chair.

“I've given it something to think about.”

Mike made a sound that was almost a laugh. It helped, absurdly.

“Also, Reese has the statement. Regional people are moving. They're not waiting for Monday.”

“How soon?”

“Soon enough if we stop asking and keep the route clear.”

His deputy using his own voice on him. Don would have to decide whether to be proud or offended later.

He went back to the beds. Mireya had found a name on the underside of a transport label and added it to his sheet.

“Can we talk to them?” she asked.

“I don't see why not.”

She began, quietly, with the first person on the list. Their name. Who was here. That there were doctors coming. She didn't promise they would wake up, didn't tell them to fight.

Don joined her at the next bed.

“I'm Don,” he told the sleeping man inside. “Mike's getting the door. He's better at this bit than I am.”

For a moment he felt foolish.

Then he moved to the next name.

The dress was beautiful.

Liz was annoyed to discover that this still mattered. She had expected revelation to improve her priorities. Instead she stood in front of the fitting mirror wondering whether freedom would look better with a slightly lower neckline.

Then the dresser asked her to lift her arms.

She couldn't.

“Needs room here,” Liz said.

“The movement is programmed.”

“I sometimes use my arms independently.”

The dresser looked at the manager, who stood by the door checking messages.

“Whatever she needs,” the manager said without looking up.

Liz asked for a side slit as well. The dresser hesitated, then got the scissors. More room to walk, sit, perhaps run. The dress became less perfect and much more useful.

At five-thirty she was alone in the bathroom, listening to the laughter outside.

Leila had sent a message through the emergency number.

New arrivals out. Don inside with the23 connected. Elena Vargas is one of them. Alive. Source Elena. If you see the other Elena, she's a Canvas.

Liz read the last lines twice.

Two people with the same old history. She knew what that meant in theory. The theory did very little to prepare her for telling a girl she had two sisters now.

She put the phone away.

In the mirror, the small interface behind her ear looked more ordinary than it ought to. She'd spent months letting people tuck hair around it. Leila had shown her the maintenance drawing: the conditioning receiver was a small outer module, removable for clinical checks. Removing it did not stop the body working. It stopped the messages reaching the learned responses. Any drug changes still needed a doctor.

Liz had asked whether they could all just pull them off.

“Not while the tower's sending,” Kate had said. “It complains. It hurts. They designed you to stop trying. When the isolation handle's held, the receivers go quiet. Then you can disconnect.”

That was the plan. Wait for a signal. Help people who chose help. Hope the person at the other end didn't let go.

She hated how much of the plan was hope.

A knock.

A woman in a pale uniform held a tray of water glasses outside. The scar over her eyebrow was unmistakable now that Liz was looking for it.

“Elena?”

The woman nodded.

“Come in.”

“I have a round.”

“Then give me two. I'll be thirsty.”

Elena stepped inside. Liz moved the door enough to block the corridor camera without closing it completely.

“Do you remember cards?” she asked.

The tray trembled.

“Why?”

“Someone asked me to find you. Your sister.”

Elena looked at her with such sudden hunger that Liz nearly lost the words she'd prepared.

“Sofía. She's sixteen. She's safe.”

“She was fourteen.”

“Eighteen months ago.”

Elena set the tray on the table. One glass tipped and rolled. Neither picked it up.

“I saw her yesterday,” she whispered. “I thought I was having another episode. They said I couldn't have family outside. That I remembered things from therapy.”

“No.”

Liz disliked the naked certainty of it. She had very little to offer with certainty. This one she would keep.

Elena pressed her hand against the back of her head. A small tightening crossed her face.

“Don't say more,” Liz said. “Not yet. The recovery room before the performance. I'll be there.”

Elena nodded, breathing shallowly.

The manager's heels sounded in the corridor. Elena lifted the tray. The fallen glass stayed beneath the chair.

“You'll miss the medical check,” the manager told Liz.

“I'm getting my shoe.”

“It's beside your foot.”

“The other one.”

She disliked lying badly. Tonight it would have to do.

At the medical room, a technician adjusted the interface beneath her hair and told her to watch a colored dot. She watched instead the reflection of his tablet in a metal cupboard.

A time appeared in the corner.

06:12. TEST LOG.

Thursday morning. She remembered the lights in this very room flickering. A gap in the music. Her manager saying the system had lost her for a minute. Liz had been scolded for wandering even though she'd stayed in the chair.

“Was something wrong on Thursday?” she asked.

“Routine test.”

“I remember it.”

“Then it wasn't anything serious.”

She kept her eyes on the dot because she could feel how much they wanted her not to.

Outside, the gala staff began opening reception doors. Somewhere beneath them, Leila would be looking for a handle that controlled whether the woman in a bed could safely be moved.

Liz let the technician finish. She did not say thank you by habit. He noticed. She hoped it bothered him all evening.

On the way back she passed Max by the staff lift. He wore a black work shirt and looked exhausted.

“My card's still good for the theatre,” he murmured. “Not the plant rooms. I've told Chez.”

“Your stepfather?”

“In his office.”

“What does he think you're doing?”

“Helping.”

Liz looked at him.

He gave a small, unhappy smile.

“For once, he's not wrong.”

She wanted to touch his hand. It frightened her that the wish could arrive so easily after everything she'd learned.

She put her own hands in the altered dress pockets instead.

“Tell me if anything changes,” she said.

“I will.”

She walked to the recovery room without looking back to see whether he watched.

The white launch sat at the tower's private dock beneath a sign forbidding nonessential access.

Leila had begun to suspect essential was whatever a man with a gate wanted it to mean.

Ajax sat in the freight van with the window down. Bonz drove. He had spent half his working life shifting equipment along the river and the other half claiming the river was less aggravating than clients.

Big L stood beside the boat.

The coffee stain was still visible on his cream suit.

“Oh,” Leila said from the back of the van.

Ajax looked in the mirror.

“You've made a friend.”

“I'd like fewer.”

“Keep down.”

The shorter man in pointed boots sat on a crate with a phone. He looked at the van, then at Big L, then back at his phone. Leila couldn't decide whether he was lazy or simply careful about volunteering.

Ajax got out holding a delivery slate.

“Catering,” she said.

“Closed,” Big L told her.

“Then you can explain the soup.”

He looked past her into the van.

There was no soup. There were folded stretcher frames, two medical equipment cases, and Leila beneath a blanket that would not survive serious scrutiny.

He stepped closer.

Ajax moved between him and the door.

“Your boss can have the argument. I'm billing for waiting.”

“Move.”

The shorter man got up slowly.

A voice behind the van said, “Nobody needs to move quickly.”

Reese stood on the ramp with two uniformed officers. Leila hadn't expected to find a police badge comforting. It improved when she recognized who was holding it.

Big L's hand went into his jacket.

The next seconds were untidy.

Ajax caught his wrist. He shoved her backward. Bonz turned the wheel, moved the van a foot, and pinned Big L's hips against the dock rail. Big L shouted, Ajax took his weapon, and Reese found herself accepting it while trying to tell three people to stop improving the situation.

“Reverse six inches,” she told Bonz.

He did.

Big L sat down hard.

The man in pointed boots held both hands in view.

“I was about to leave.”

“Terrible timing,” Reese said.

Leila emerged from under the blanket. Big L saw her and started saying things about the coffee.

“Leased pot,” she told him. “They'll probably invoice you.”

She was shaking too much to enjoy it properly.

Reese had officers check both men and move them into the dock office. A medical crew examined Big L's leg. The man in boots offered the boat keys without being asked twice.

“Fuel under the rear seat,” he said. “Watch the bend past the willows.”

“We've got a map,” Leila said.

“Maps are optimistic.”

Reese took his phone and wrote down his name. For Leila, he remained the man with the keys. She was full.

“You have the order?” she asked Reese.

“For specified records and detentions here. Annex witness statement changed things. More officers are coming.”

“Then take the tower.”

“I'm not raiding a room full of patients without a medical plan.”

“We have one.”

“Then keep doing your part. I'll keep doing mine.”

Leila almost argued. She'd become very good at that recently and not noticeably better at getting doors open.

She helped load the boat.

Ajax climbed in first. Bonz took the wheel after examining the controls. Leila sat on a folded stretcher and discovered she strongly preferred land before they'd even left it.

Kate arrived down the ramp carrying a bag of cable and the printed manual. She stopped at the boat, waiting.

Leila held the red case against her knees.

“You'll work with Sandra,” she said. “Every change read out. She agrees before anything moves.”

“Yes.”

“And Don keeps the paper.”

“Understood.”

Leila looked at the case. She could go to the annex and stay. Touch every cable herself. Refuse to trust Kate until the patients were safe.

Then somebody else would have to go into the tower with the knowledge she had gained at the cost of her own room, her friend's arm, and the bracket she'd fixed. Somebody who knew less about the physical control. She could not stand in both places by wanting it harder.

She put the case into Kate's hands.

“This isn't us being fine.”

“I know.”

Kate got into the boat without saying thank you.

Bonz started the engine.

The city moved backward. The dock office, the tower flowers, Big L visible through the window gesturing angrily at a person who didn't care about his suit. Leila watched until the turn hid it all.

Then the launch entered the narrow channel and scraped something beneath the water.

“What was that?” she asked.

“Old fence,” Bonz said.

“Can we avoid the new ones?”

Ajax laughed. Kate held the case with both hands.

Ahead, through the trees, the annex showed a strip of light beneath its closed shutters.

The grille across the water hatch was very new and very firmly attached.

Leila studied it from the boat. Yesterday's route, closed in a hurry. Through the metal she could see the rope Don had lowered before discovering it was useless for anything wider than a hand.

She had wanted an enemy who made mistakes. Ava appeared willing to disappoint her.

Bonz brought them around to the loading apron. The front shutter stood six inches above concrete, supported by something that had once been furniture. Mike crouched beside it with a radio.

“Can we get it up?” he asked.

“Depends what's wrong.”

“Wouldn't that be nice to know before asking.”

She set down the bag.

The outer control box was hot. Inside, the motor controller had been told to close against the jammed chair, failed, and tried again until something gave up. The manual coupling had been removed. Somebody had made two separate decisions about keeping people inside.

Leila photographed the empty bolt holes.

Don's voice came through the gap.

“Good.”

“I haven't fixed it.”

“Photograph. They'll claim it was there.”

“Can I charge you for evidence?”

“Bill the city. They collect it as a hobby.”

She smiled despite herself.

She isolated the damaged door circuit. Checked the labels twice to make certain it wasn't medical power. Then she connected her test battery through a fuse to release the motor brake.

Nothing.

She checked again. A second break, heat damage under a terminal. The wire crumbled when she touched it.

Behind her, Kate stood with the case. Sandra waited beside Leila with two medics. Their equipment lay in cases along the public path, carried past the locked road barrier by people who were starting to sweat.

Leila wanted to say she'd have it in a minute.

She'd used that promise at work too often. Sometimes customers believed it. Sometimes she did.

“Five,” she said. “Maybe more. Bring the props, not your fingers.”

Mike fetched two steel supports from the loader crew. The municipal loader had reached the first road barrier and was discussing it with considerable engine noise.

Leila replaced the burned section. One of the fuses in Max's forgotten bag matched the test lead. She remembered his face in the donut shop, his earnest bag of supplies, and gave him a brief promotion in her private assessment.

The brake clicked.

“Now.”

Don and Mireya lifted from inside. Mike pulled from outside. The shutter rose a foot, stuck, rose another. Leila added her shoulder. The counterweight took over, suddenly enough that everyone staggered.

Mike slid the steel props into place.

Daylight entered the room.

Leila leaned against the wall, breathing hard. For a few seconds she could enjoy having fixed the thing before remembering how many things remained.

Sandra was already unpacking.

Don opened an old cupboard beside the console. A hardwired handset hung inside, its cloth-covered lead repaired in two places. Kate checked the echo-line number against the plan and left it ready.

Kate put the service key into the local console. The lock turned with a heavy, reassuring clunk. No password, no permission request traveling to a woman who wanted them to stop.

The four old beds could be changed now, exactly as the diagram said. Sandra's team checked the independent support, read the names, and worked through one patient at a time. Don recorded each transfer on paper. Mireya went with the first patient to show the receiving crew the route.

Leila stayed away from the medical controls. It took effort. The screens were right there; her hands wanted a job. She found one securing cables clear of the path.

The patient in bed twenty-seven was the source Elena. Sofía had asked about her twice from the triage area. Don had sent back the truth he could offer: alive, receiving help, not awake yet.

Leila looked at the scar above her eyebrow. The same woman, in one sense. A separate body from the person serving water at the tower. She understood why Liz had wanted to keep her name. Understanding didn't make the two beds, or the one sister waiting outside, any easier to think about.

Her phone rang from the first clear patch of signal by the open loading door.

Chez.

“Sound crew can't get us in as contractors,” he said. “Ava's checking every changed name.”

Leila shut her eyes.

“Alternative.”

“Max. Genuine access. He's still family until they decide otherwise.”

“They'll recognize us.”

“Eventually. We don't have to stay respectable long.”

“How long from the entrance to the control?”

“Two corridors, one flight. His map says four minutes. I walked the route with him from the public side. Five if you swear.”

“I'll budget six.”

He laughed, then went quiet.

“You okay?”

She looked at the open shutter. The first green transfer light. A medic carefully repeating a name she didn't know how to pronounce.

“I'm at work.”

“I know.”

There was something warm in his voice she didn't have time to deal with. She put it aside, poorly.

“Meet at the river entrance. Eight-forty.”

“Got it.”

Before she left, Leila went to Kate.

Nineteen connected patients remained. Nineteen independent controllers sat ready. The four old-bed patients were on their way to receiving care. The twenty-three new arrivals were safe outside, including Mireya when she wasn't helping inside. Clear numbers, on Don's sheet.

“Once we hold the isolation handle, you'll see the local lights go amber,” Leila said. “That's when Sandra can start.”

Kate nodded.

“If I don't get there—”

“Don't plan for that by making me stop now.”

Leila looked at her.

It was irritating. It was also the first thing Kate had said all day that didn't sound like waiting to be forgiven.

Leila handed over her good meter.

“I want it back.”

Kate took it.

“I'll put my name on the debt.”

Outside, the road barrier gave way with a metallic bang. The loader driver surveyed it and said it had been badly installed.

Mike waved the first ambulance through.

Leila went back to the boat with Ajax.

“Hungry?” Ajax asked.

“No.”

“Terrible. I've got snacks.”

She opened a packet and held it out anyway. Leila ate one because her hands were shaking and she didn't want to talk about why.

Then they left the roomful of people she couldn't personally keep safe.

There were eighteen chairs in the recovery room.

Liz counted the people instead. Seventeen others, plus her. She had learned to distrust a number that didn't say what it included.

Elena sat near the door. A woman in a coat with silver embroidery was reading a paperback. Two young men argued quietly beside the water dispenser. Someone had put out plates of fruit no one seemed to want.

For several minutes, Liz couldn't begin.

These people had seen her campaign. They knew her face. She was expected to be charming, reassuring, better informed than the others because she occupied the center of the poster. She wanted desperately to deliver the version of herself that made a room relax.

Instead she walked to the door and tried it.

Locked from outside.

The woman with the book looked up.

“It does that.”

“I know.”

“Then why check?”

“I hoped tonight was special.”

The woman folded one page corner, regretted it, and flattened it with a thumb.

“Elena,” Liz said. “Your sister's out. I had confirmation.”

Elena stood halfway and sat again.

“Where?”

“D11. With medics. There's something else I need to tell you. All of you, if you want to hear it.”

A young man by the dispenser shook his head.

“If this is publicity, I'm not doing it. They said there were no interviews.”

“It isn't.”

Liz showed them the two fountain photographs. The identical water. Her own source record with the identifying fields covered except her name. The copy of Ellie's kitchen picture she'd chosen not to use; that stayed in her pocket.

Then she told them what she knew.

The first interruption was disbelief. The second was an angry demand to know why she'd waited until now. The third was a woman asking where the source people were and whether they were all dead.

“No,” Liz said too quickly. “Some are alive. People are helping them now.”

“Some?”

Liz swallowed.

“I don't know everyone's record. Mine died.”

The room fell quiet enough to hear someone breathing through an open mouth.

The man by the dispenser stood.

“I'm calling the manager.”

“She's one of them,” Elena said.

“You don't know that.”

“I know what she told me about my family.”

“Maybe she was trying to help.”

“Then let her open the door.”

He picked up the wall handset. Liz didn't stop him. She wanted to, which made her grip the chair back hard enough to hurt.

The manager answered. The young man began asking questions. At first he sounded apologetic, as though a sensible conversation would clear it up. Then he stopped apologizing. He listened for a long time.

Finally he said, “I asked whether I can leave.”

He put the handset down.

Nobody asked what the answer had been.

The woman with the book moved to make room beside her. Liz sat because her legs had gone unreliable again.

“I'm Noor,” the woman said.

“Liz.”

“I'd worked that out.”

Liz laughed once. She hadn't expected to.

Noor looked at the page in her hand.

“What if I remember things someone else did?”

“I do.”

“Then what belongs to me?”

Liz looked at the book.

“Where did you get that?”

“Stall by a station. It was raining. The man selling it told me the ending was terrible, which made me curious.”

“Was that you?”

Noor stared at the cover, then opened it. Her name was written inside, along with the date.

“Yes,” she said, more softly. “That was me.”

Liz didn't add anything. Noor was still looking at the ink.

Elena came over and sat on the floor by their chairs.

“There are two of me.”

Liz looked down.

“My sister saw me in the annex. But your message said somebody with my name is in a bed.”

“Yes. The source Elena. She's alive.”

Elena rubbed both hands over her face.

“I wanted to be the one she got back.”

The sentence hurt to hear. Liz was glad she had said it where nobody could turn it into a symptom.

“What do I say to her?”

“I don't know.”

“Everyone keeps saying that.”

“I hate it too.”

They sat while the room did several different things with fear. One woman cried. Another became brisk and began asking practical questions. Two people said they wanted nothing to do with leaving until a doctor explained what it would do to their bodies. The young man who'd called the manager sat with his head in his hands.

Liz showed them the drawing of the receiver behind the ear.

“The body support is separate. Outside doctors have checked the design. They're expecting us. The signal will stop when someone holds an isolation control downstairs. That's the window to disconnect the receiver, if you want.”

“Does it hurt?” someone asked.

“Trying while it's active hurts. When it's quiet, it's a clinical release. Like they do at checks. We shouldn't force it.”

“What if the signal doesn't stop?”

“Then we don't do it.”

Noor looked toward the locked door.

“And the door?”

“I go onstage. The others wait for the performance call. When it opens, you can go toward the public lobby instead. Police will be there. Cameras. Doctors.”

“Cameras,” Elena repeated, unhappy.

“Not in the treatment area. I'll tell them that part myself.”

Liz realized she'd been promising things again. Not a perfect rescue, just particular things she could try to do. She could tell Tom where not to point the camera. She could step into a doorway first.

She wished it felt like more.

The intercom chimed. Five minutes to performance positions.

The door clicked open.

A supervisor looked in and saw a roomful of people sitting much as she'd left them. Her eyes passed over the fallen water glass, the book, Elena on the floor.

“Ready?”

Nobody answered at first.

Then Liz stood.

“I'd like to walk out before you close that,” she said.

Max's access card worked.

It was the last easy part.

At eight-fifty, he brought Leila and Chez through the theatre loading entrance with a case of lighting equipment borrowed from a technician who would be furious if it wasn't returned. The guard saw Max, nodded, and began checking the case.

Then he looked at Leila.

“Wait.”

Max put a folder over the equipment label.

“My stepfather's corrections. We're late.”

“I need their names.”

“Put them on mine.”

“That's not—”

Max leaned closer and lowered his voice. Leila couldn't hear the words. She watched the guard's expression instead. Irritation, calculation, then the familiar look of an employee deciding whether challenging the boss's family would pay his rent.

The guard waved them through and immediately reached for his phone.

“We've got minutes,” Max said.

They walked until the door closed behind them. Then they ran.

No lift. One flight down, left at the laundry return, past the recycling drums. Leila recognized the old pipe colors from the plan. Chez carried the case awkwardly, favoring his bandaged arm. Max left them at the theatre corridor.

“I'll hold the staff route as long as I can.”

“Don't get caught doing something heroic,” Leila said.

He looked startled, then smiled without much pleasure.

“I'll try something bureaucratic.”

He went upstairs.

At the plant-room door, Leila found a fresh lock.

Of course.

“Plan?” Chez asked.

“Door frame.”

He looked at it.

“That's not a plan. That's part of a building.”

“Help me move this.”

They shifted a cable trolley against the wall. The lock was new, the door old, the frame older. Someone had fitted the latest security into wood that had been painted too many times. Leila loosened the strike plate with a driver while Chez leaned his weight against the door.

The first screw turned. The second didn't.

Footsteps sounded above.

Chez looked at her.

She pressed harder, slipped, and took skin off a knuckle. Swore. Tried a wider bit instead of continuing to hurt herself with determination.

The screw moved.

Inside, the plant room smelled of warm dust and machine oil. The isolation control sat beneath a transparent cover beside a mechanical status gauge. It looked like an old fire-door lever. Nothing about it announced nineteen lives.

Leila checked the label against Kate's photograph. Checked the cable route. Found the same test point Aiden had marked on the diagram he'd slipped into the case.

“Right one,” she said.

Chez put the lighting case against the door.

“That won't hold a determined person.”

“Then let's hope they're busy.”

She lifted the control cover.

An alarm began immediately. Not a siren. A hard, persistent beep that would be impossible to mistake for something else's problem.

She had known it would happen. It still made her flinch.

Leila pulled the handle into maintenance position.

The gauge moved from red to amber. The little receiver Kate had put in the service kit would show the same change at the annex. Support still running. Remote instructions isolated. The two jobs connected now by something they could see.

Chez fixed a clamp around the handle and rail. Leila tested it before letting her hand leave the grip.

It held.

She called the annex on the hardline she'd connected through the service terminal, an ordinary local link Aiden's diagram identified. The network could scream at the rest of the building; this cable stayed in the plant system.

Kate answered at once.

“We see amber. Sandra's beginning. Nineteen waiting.”

“Go.”

Leila set the handset where she could hear it without holding it.

The lighting case shifted against the door.

“You're in a restricted area,” a man called.

Chez looked at her, then at the empty tool bag.

“Very popular announcement.”

Leila added a maintenance trolley behind the case. The man tried harder. The door moved an inch, caught, and stayed.

Above them, through the duct, came the muffled sound of applause.

Liz had walked onstage.

Leila checked the clamp again. Her bloody knuckle left a little mark on the metal. She wiped it on her trousers so she wouldn't mistake it for something breaking later.

Chez watched her.

“You're doing the thing.”

“What thing?”

“Checking something until you're not really checking it anymore.”

She wanted to snap. Instead she looked at his bandaged arm.

“You need to sit?”

“After the crime.”

“Repair,” she said.

“After the repair with door barricades.”

The guard outside stopped pushing.

That was worse.

Leila looked toward the other door, the one on the old plan marked TECHNICAL ACCESS. She'd checked it on the way in. Locked from this side. No fresh screw heads.

Her phone vibrated.

Unknown number.

A message, four words.

I know you're there.

Ava.

Leila put the phone on the floor, screen down.

“She's coming,” she told Chez.

He drew a breath, then nodded.

The old handle stayed amber between them.

The audience applauded the woman on the posters.

Liz smiled because she knew how. It bought her the length of the walk to the middle of the stage.

Kazimir met her beneath the lights. Silver hair, dark suit, a warm hand offered for the cameras. Max's stepfather looked exactly like someone a roomful of people might trust with money.

She took his hand for one second, then let go.

Beyond the lights sat investors, clients, journalists, people whose invitations other people had worked hard to obtain. Tom stood near the back with his old camera. He tipped two fingers against the lens housing when he saw her find him.

She had spoken to him before fitting. Her own face was hers to show. The treatment rooms were not. He had agreed, a little gruffly, as though she were asking whether he knew his job.

Now she needed him to do it.

Kazimir spoke about loneliness, care, choice. Liz had heard the speech in rehearsal. It seemed uglier now, but it was mostly the same words, arranged for people who liked to think purchasing something expensive made them generous.

A screen showed her portrait.

A LIFE THAT KNOWS YOU.

She looked at it until she could almost see the retoucher's work around her eye.

“Liz,” Kazimir said, turning toward her, “would you tell us what this opportunity has meant?”

The prepared answer waited in her mouth.

A new beginning. Safety. People who believed in her.

She could say it very beautifully. She could make the woman in the third row dab her eyes. Afterward there would be food, compliments, perhaps a magazine cover. Some part of her still wanted all of it.

She gripped the microphone.

“I'd like to ask a question first.”

His smile changed very slightly.

“Of course.”

“If I say no to the next part, what happens?”

A few people smiled. They thought this was a demonstration.

“Choice is central to the program.”

“Then I'm saying no.”

He gave a small laugh for the audience.

“We can discuss the details—”

“Here. Where you've told everyone the program works.”

She felt a familiar tightening behind her eye. Not pain yet. A warning her body had learned before she had words for it. The manager stood beside the stage with a tablet.

Then the pressure faded.

A light on the little backstage monitor changed to amber.

Leila had reached the handle.

Liz had the wild urge to cheer. She used the breath instead.

“There's a woman named Ellie Dalton. She disappeared eighteen months ago. She's dead now. My memories came from her.”

The audience became very still.

Kazimir moved toward the lectern.

“You've been unwell.”

“Yes,” Liz said. “You kept telling me that.”

Her microphone dropped in volume. Tom's camera kept recording.

She spoke louder.

“People were taken out of your annex in District Eleven today. Twenty-three new arrivals. There are twenty-three more receiving medical help right now. You know where they are.”

“Clinical confidentiality—”

“Then don't show their pictures. Tell these people whether they consented.”

The stage screen went blank.

In the front row, a woman lowered her glass without drinking.

Kazimir turned toward the side of the stage. Security began to move. Liz stepped toward the audience instead of the curtain.

She had spent months learning her marks. Which angle caught the light. Which side let the camera see her face without the microphone hiding it. She used every lesson now.

“I was assigned a boyfriend,” she said. “I was given photographs of a childhood that didn't happen to me. I asked for my mother's number and was told to call my therapist.”

Someone in the room said, “Is this part of—”

“No,” Liz answered, too sharply. “It isn't.”

The sharpness felt better than the smile.

At the side door, Noor appeared with Elena and the others behind her. Not marching neatly. Hesitating, stopping, choosing whether the open space was safer than the room they'd left. A supervisor reached for Elena's arm. Elena pulled it away.

Liz moved down the stage steps.

Kazimir caught her elbow.

“You don't understand what you're doing.”

She looked at his hand.

“Let go.”

For a second she thought he wouldn't. Cameras turned. Somebody stood. He released her with the sort of care that made the anger in his face look worse.

Liz went to the others.

Noor had the little outer receiver in her hand.

“It released,” she whispered. “While it was quiet.”

Elena touched her own interface, afraid to begin.

“We can get help,” Liz said. “You don't have to do it here.”

A police officer entered from the public lobby. Reese followed, showing her badge. More officers moved around the room without running. The security supervisor began talking at once. Reese pointed him toward a colleague and kept walking.

“Medical access,” she said. “Clear this route.”

The manager took a step toward Liz.

“Darling—”

“No,” Liz said.

It came out smaller than her stage voice. It mattered more to her.

The manager stopped.

From somewhere beneath them, a hard mechanical alarm kept sounding.

Liz looked toward the floor. She had got people into the light. She didn't know what was happening to the people keeping the amber signal there.

Ava used the technical-access door.

Leila saw the handle move and had time for one furious thought about old plans before the woman stepped through.

Dark jacket. Neat hair. Small gun held low. She looked at the clamp, the amber gauge, the barricaded main door.

“You've put a lot of effort into being in the wrong room,” she said.

Chez went still beside the trolley.

Leila kept her hands visible.

“Patients are being moved.”

“By people using stolen equipment.”

“Your key. Your procedure.”

“Then you understand who can be held responsible if it goes wrong.”

Leila thought of the doctor refusing unsafe vehicles, Don writing down names, Kate taking the meter without pretending they were friends again. She thought of her own thumb on SEND CONCERN.

“Quite a few of us,” she said. “You included.”

Ava glanced at the hardline handset. A faint voice came from it, calling a bed number. Sandra's team had begun.

“Move away from the control.”

“No.”

The word sounded foolishly small in the plant room.

Ava lifted the gun.

Chez said, “If you shoot her, the clamp stays where it is.”

Leila wanted to tell him not to help like that. Ava looked at the clamp again and went to it, keeping the gun aimed at Leila.

For a second the woman was close enough that Leila could smell rain in her coat.

“Let the clinical team finish the scheduled process,” Ava said.

“The reset?”

“They were supposed to be clear by then.”

“They aren't.”

Ava put her free hand on the clamp screw.

Leila moved.

She shoved the lighting case into Ava's knees, caught the gun wrist with both hands, and drove it toward the edge of the workbench. The shot went into the ceiling. Dust fell. Ava twisted, swore, and hit Leila hard across the face with her free hand.

For one white second Leila didn't know where the handle was.

Then Chez struck the woman's arm with the empty trolley.

The gun fell. Leila kicked it under a grated floor section before anyone could improve their position.

Ava shoved her backward into the rail. The clamp took the impact. A brittle metal piece snapped.

The isolation handle began to return.

Leila caught it.

Her injured knuckle struck the grip. Pain went up her arm. The gauge flickered toward red, then amber as she pulled it back.

From the handset came Kate's voice, suddenly louder.

“Hold. Hold where you are.”

“Doing that,” Leila said through her teeth.

Ava looked at her hand on the handle. At Chez blocking the path to the fallen gun. She was calculating again, and Leila couldn't spare a thought to admire how quickly she did it.

Ava tore the hardline cord from its wall socket.

The handset went silent.

Then she ran through the technical door.

Chez started after her.

“Stay!” Leila snapped.

He stopped so abruptly he nearly fell.

They looked at each other. Her grip hurt. The broken clamp lay between her boots.

“Sorry,” she said. “Can you take this?”

His eyes moved to the handle.

“Yes.”

He came beside her, put his good hand over the grip, and took the weight slowly. She kept her hand there until he nodded.

Then she let go.

Nothing happened. The world did not collapse because someone else was holding the thing.

She rubbed her knuckle against her trousers and went to the technical door. Ava had left it open. Leila dragged the spare cable drum across the threshold, wedged the door with a driver, and shut it against the drum. It wouldn't stop anybody with tools. It would require them to go and get some.

The main door shuddered. The guard was back, with help.

Chez watched the gauge.

“How long?”

“I don't know. The line's out.”

“Great.”

She checked her phone. One bar. Tried the annex number. Nothing. Tried Mike. Connecting, then dropped. The building and the channel were having their usual opinions about coverage.

She sent a message instead: HANDLE HELD. LINE CUT. NEED ALL-CLEAR.

It remained pending.

From above, shouting replaced the muffled music. Something heavy struck the floor, followed by a burst of applause or panic. She couldn't tell which.

Leila took the photograph of the incident log from her phone and looked at it again.

Thursday. Six-twelve. Three-minute timeout. Source nineteen.

A small automatic process in a room like this had killed a woman somebody was still looking for. No villain had needed to stand at her bed. People had run the test, accepted the report, gone to lunch.

She put the phone down before anger made her careless.

“We stay until they tell us,” she said.

Chez shifted his shoulder under the strain.

“Okay.”

“No clever—”

“Leila.”

She looked at him.

“I said okay.”

For once, she believed the whole word.

She found a length of insulating sleeve and wrapped it around the grip beneath his hand so the edge wouldn't cut him. His fingers brushed hers. She became inconveniently aware of his warmth, his breath, the little line between his eyes when something mattered enough to make him quiet.

He looked at her.

She pulled her hand back.

“We're discussing your taste in trouble after this.”

“I've heard it's poor.”

“From several reliable people.”

The door moved half an inch. A voice demanded they step back.

Leila dragged another drum across the floor.

Chez stayed at the handle.

At nine-twenty-three her phone chimed once.

Not the all-clear. Mike: NEARLY. KEEP HOLDING.

She read it aloud.

Chez nodded. His good arm had begun to tremble.

She put her hand beside his and took part of the weight.

They waited together.

The four old-bed patients were already at receiving care.

Don wrote the time beneath their names and drew one line under the group. Twenty-three new arrivals outside. Four connected patients transported. Nineteen still to change. He would not let a screen turn those numbers into victory before people had reached the other side of it.

At nine, the local indicators changed to amber.

Sandra checked the first portable unit, looked at Kate, and said, “Read it.”

Kate read the bed number, the patient name, the setting. Sandra confirmed. Only then did the control change.

One.

Mireya held a lead clear of the stretcher wheel. Mike checked the label on the transport sheet against Don's paper. A medic repeated a name carefully, got it wrong, and accepted correction without becoming embarrassed enough to stop working.

Don carried cases.

It wasn't the job he'd imagined for himself when he put on his badge. It was the one he could do without making someone else slower.

At nine-ten a patient failed the first stability check.

Kate looked at the instructions. Sandra lifted one hand.

“Wait.”

They waited.

The woman in the bed breathed against the support rhythm. Don stared at the monitor, willing the numbers into shapes he didn't understand well enough to want.

“Don't stare at that,” Sandra told him. “Tell me where the receiving unit is.”

“First ambulance.”

“Bring their senior medic here.”

He went.

Outside, Mike was arguing with a transport supervisor about reversing a bus down the ramp.

“Too tight,” the driver said.

Mike looked at the wheelbase, the angle, the empty strip by the loading shed.

“Then don't reverse. Bring the other one out first. We'll use the long way.”

“It takes time.”

“So does getting stuck.”

Don almost stepped in. Mike was already moving a cone and clearing the route. The driver nodded, grateful to have a choice that wasn't merely try harder.

Don fetched the medic and went back inside.

The patient had settled. Sandra changed the sequence. They would keep her on the original support with the independent receiving team standing by while the others moved, then complete her switch and reassess transport. No drama, no speech about sacrifice. Just a plan that allowed a person to take longer than a schedule wanted.

At the console, Kate held the receiver close to her ear.

“Leila?”

Static. Then nothing.

She tried again.

Don looked up.

“Line cut,” she said. “Local indicators still amber. Handle's held.”

He wanted to call. Wanted to ask whether the young woman had heard. Instead he pointed to the next bed.

“Then we keep the agreement.”

Mike came in with a radio. Don told him to get a message through to the theatre by any route that worked. His deputy went outside without asking whether he should stay.

More green indicators.

Elena Vargas came near the end. Don recognized the scar before the name. Her sister was waiting at the gym, holding a piece of paper with the receiving location written on it. That paper would have become the most important thing she owned in about ten minutes.

Sandra checked Elena. The new controller steadied. Kate read back the instruction and made the change.

Green.

Don put a tick beside her name.

One patient remained on original support. The woman whose receiving team was staying with her. Sandra crouched beside the bed and asked the medic to confirm two things Don couldn't follow.

He looked at the clock.

Nine-twenty-five.

The reset time was nine-thirty. Five minutes was a long time to make a cup of coffee and not long enough to move a frightened person through a doorway. Tonight it had become an amount that could be used badly by almost anyone.

Don turned his back to the clock.

“What's needed?” he asked.

“Space,” Sandra said.

He gave it.

At nine-twenty-six the last light went green.

Nobody cheered. The medics were still working. Kate put both palms flat on the desk, then lifted one to check the screen again.

“All twenty-three,” she said.

Don compared the local count to his paper. Four earlier, nineteen since nine. Twenty-three connected patients on independent care. Twenty-three fresh arrivals outside. Forty-six living people accounted for at the annex.

He said it aloud, slowly, so anyone recording could get it right.

Mike returned with the radio pressed to his chest.

“Message route's open.”

“Tell Leila they can let go. All twenty-three changed. Tell her that exact part.”

Mike repeated it and went back to the loading door.

At nine-thirty, the console announced the scheduled reset.

It found no connected patients to release.

Don watched the report print. Took it by the clean edge. Put it with the other records.

Then he sat on a transport case, discovered it was much lower than expected, and remained there because standing again would require a discussion with his knees.

Mireya gave him a paper cup of water.

“You should drink.”

“Yes, ma'am.”

She looked at him over her own cup.

“I've been waiting all weekend for someone to say that.”

Outside, an ambulance rolled slowly past the broken gate. The road stayed open behind it.

The message arrived at nine-twenty-seven.

ALL23 ON INDEPENDENT SUPPORT. DON CONFIRMED. YOU CAN LET GO.

Leila showed Chez the screen.

He read it twice. So did she.

“Ready?” he asked.

It was a ridiculous question. She'd been waiting twenty-seven minutes for the answer to become yes. Now her hand wouldn't move.

He didn't tell her to trust the message. He stayed beside her, sharing the weight, until she could make the choice.

“Ready.”

They eased the handle back together.

Amber to red. A spring settled. The hard beeping stopped.

No cry from the other end of the cut phone. No last command asking them to start again. Somewhere across the river, clinicians were doing work that no longer needed her hand on a lever.

Leila leaned against the rail and discovered the room had become very quiet.

Chez let go with a small, involuntary sound. His good arm hung as awkwardly as his bandaged one.

“How bad?” she asked.

“Ask me when I can bend it.”

The main door moved. A new voice came through.

“Police. Keep clear.”

She looked at the drums, the case, the screwdriver wedging the other door. It was a very convincing arrangement if someone wanted to argue they were the problem.

“Reese?” she called.

“Officer with Detective Reese's team. She's upstairs. Can you open it safely?”

“Depends how much time you have.”

The man waited while they moved the trolley. No shouting to put hands anywhere until the gap was open, and then a clear instruction, repeated because Chez couldn't immediately comply with the arm he'd been using.

Leila showed her empty hands.

“Gun under the floor grate,” she said. “Not ours.”

“Step outside.”

She stepped.

The corridor looked offensively ordinary. A laundry bag, a fire notice, a mark where someone had scraped paint with a cart. She wanted the whole building to look different. It had nearly killed people. It ought to have the decency to show it.

A medic took one look at her face.

“Sit.”

“There's—”

“Someone else on that job.”

She sat.

Chez lowered himself onto the floor beside the chair, then looked annoyed at the amount of work getting up would require.

“My mother will be thrilled,” he said.

“With?”

“Mostly that the chair isn't mine to break.”

Leila laughed. It pulled at her swollen cheek and she stopped, then started again because he was looking at her as if he might cry if she didn't.

The medic waited with the expression of a professional unwilling to compete with whatever this was.

After the check, they were led through the service corridor toward the public lobby. Nobody applauded. A cleaner was waiting beside a spilled vase while officers crossed her wet floor. She held the mop upright with quiet fury.

Leila moved the fallen flowers out of her path.

“Thanks,” the cleaner said.

Outside, cold air reached the sweat under Leila's shirt. She could see the river, the police vehicles, people behind a press line who wanted a picture. She stopped before the pavement because the distance to the next place suddenly seemed too large.

Chez held out a hand.

Not reaching for her. Waiting where she could take it.

She did.

His grip was warm, tired, less steady than usual. They walked to the medical bus at the same pace.

Her phone chimed with a routine work notice.

LING SERVICE TICKET: COOLING REPAIR PENDING REVIEW.

She stared at it.

Chez leaned closer, read, and made a noise between a laugh and a cough.

“You did fix the bracket.”

“I'm invoicing travel.”

“Both journeys?”

She looked at the bus, the boat downriver, the blood on her trousers.

“All of them.”

She put the phone away. A medic held the bus door while they climbed in.

Noor helped the last person disconnect before asking who would help Liz.

They were in a side corridor with two police officers and a medic. Eighteen Canvases, each frightened in a different direction. The supervisor who'd told them to stay in the room was answering questions at the far end.

“I can reach,” Liz said.

Noor held out her hand.

“So can I.”

Liz lifted her hair and let someone else look at the little receiver. Noor had already removed her own without forcing it. She waited for the medic to check the quiet status, then released the outer module and caught it before it fell.

“That's yours,” she said, placing it in Liz's palm.

It weighed almost nothing.

Liz waited for the world to feel different.

Mostly she felt tired. She still wanted to smooth her hair before anyone photographed her. She still wondered whether the manager was disappointed. She was not going to become a completely new person because something smaller than an earring had stopped sending messages.

Noor watched her face.

“Well?”

“I think I'd like to sit down.”

“Very rebellious. I've been doing it for years.”

Liz laughed. Then the laugh broke, and Noor moved the chair closer without commenting.

The manager appeared with an officer.

“Liz.”

She turned automatically.

That irritated her enough to keep her in the chair.

“Tell them I looked after you.”

The officer let the words stand. He looked as if he'd heard this sort of request before.

“Did you know about Ellie?” Liz asked.

“I managed your career.”

“Did you know?”

A pause.

“Not all of it.”

It might even be true. Liz found she didn't have to decide tonight.

“I need a doctor who doesn't work for you,” she said.

“I can arrange—”

“No.”

The officer moved slightly between them. The manager looked at him with offended astonishment, as if he had stepped into a private fitting.

Liz looked away first.

Beyond the door, the reception had become a roomful of people trying to establish that they had only just arrived. Some were angry. Some were frightened. One investor argued that he had a flight. An officer told him the airport would remain where it was.

Kazimir had gone.

Max came through the staff door and saw Liz sitting beside Noor. For a second relief made his face painfully familiar. Then he looked past them toward the service stairs.

“He's going for the boat,” he said to the nearest officer.

Reese heard from across the corridor.

“Dock's covered.”

“He doesn't know that.”

“Stay here.”

Max started to obey. Then the stair door opened and his stepfather came back through it.

No boat. Police at the dock. The escape route Leila had taken for the annex had closed another door Kazimir expected to own.

He saw Max and changed direction.

“Your mother,” he began.

“She left.”

“Then you'll want to consider what you say—”

Max stood in his path.

Kazimir reached for the staff door. Max held it shut. There was nothing graceful about either of them now. Two men at a door, one trying to continue a relationship through force because persuasion had stopped working.

Reese was already moving.

Kazimir slammed the door against Max's wrist. Max cried out and lost his grip. Liz stood so suddenly the chair rocked backward.

Then the officer beside her caught Kazimir's arm. Reese took the other. Max stepped away clutching his wrist, eyes watering with pain and fury.

For a moment Kazimir seemed unable to understand that hands were on him and they were not waiting for his instruction.

“My lawyer,” he said.

“You can call,” Reese answered. “Stand still.”

Ava came out of the opposite service door a minute later and saw the uniforms. She stopped rather than run into the public room.

“I have records you need.”

“Hands visible.”

“Client records. There should be an agreement—”

“Ask your lawyer,” Reese said. “Hands.”

The woman raised them.

There was dust in her hair and a torn sleeve. Liz saw blood on one cuff and felt a fresh panic.

“Leila?” she asked.

Ava didn't answer.

Liz took out her phone. The first call failed. She tried again and had to stop herself from walking through the room looking for a signal while police were trying to keep a path clear.

Then a message arrived.

ALL23 CHANGED. WE'RE OUT.

Chez's number.

She read it twice before showing Noor.

At the treatment doorway Elena stood with a medic, asking about Sofía. The answers hadn't changed, but she needed to hear them again. Nobody made her feel foolish for it.

The young man who'd called the manager sat beside the water dispenser with his friends. He had disconnected his receiver last, after the doctor explained. He looked frightened and embarrassed, and Liz was glad nobody was asking him to be grateful on schedule.

Tom waited beyond the press boundary, camera lowered.

“Anything you want to say?”

Liz looked at the lens. The old reflex offered her posture, lighting, a sentence that would travel well.

“Not tonight.”

He nodded.

Outside, the night air reached her bare arms. The dress moved where the dresser had cut it. She could walk without holding the fabric or taking someone else's elbow.

Noor came beside her with the book under one arm.

“Bus?”

“Yes.”

“Excellent. I was worried the plan ended at the door.”

Liz laughed, more steadily this time, and followed the medic toward it.

They wrote names on the paper cups at the gym.

Anna stared at hers for a long time. Four letters. Her own. Nobody had replaced them with a number before handing her water.

Sofía sat beside her wearing a donated sweatshirt and holding a banana she couldn't seem to begin. Every time a vehicle arrived, she stood.

“Not yet,” Anna said after the third one.

“I know.”

She stood for the fourth anyway.

That time Sandra came in.

“Your sister's here. She's on independent support. Not awake yet.”

“Can I see?”

“Yes. I'll show you where.”

Elena lay in an ordinary hospital cot behind a screen. Her hair had been combed away from the scar. The portable unit beside her made a quiet regular noise. Sofía held her hand as if afraid a looser grip would let someone claim her again.

“She hates sleeping with the light on.”

Sandra lowered the lamp.

“Like that?”

Sofía nodded.

Anna stood back. She wanted to leave them alone. She didn't want to leave the girl anywhere yet. Those wishes took turns being stronger.

Outside the screen, the doctor checked a list and said something softly to Sandra. Sandra looked toward the entrance, then back at Sofía.

“There's someone else you need to know about.”

They explained before bringing anyone closer.

Not quickly. Not as a surprise Sofía was expected to handle beautifully. There were living copies, made with stolen memories. Her sister had been kept alive to train one. The woman carrying linen yesterday had been that copy. She remembered Sofía, but the memories were older. She had helped by counting the new arrivals because she couldn't get past the man at the door.

Sofía listened. Anna watched the paper with the receiving address crumple slowly in her hand.

“Two?” Sofía said.

“Yes.”

“Which one—”

She stopped.

Sandra waited.

Anna didn't know whether anything she might say would help. She was relieved not to have been asked to solve it.

At the entrance, the woman from the linen corridor stood beside Liz. Same scar, same dark hair. Awake, frightened, clutching the edge of a borrowed coat.

Sofía looked back at the person in the cot.

Then she went toward the door.

Anna followed a few paces behind.

The other Elena took one step down and stopped, giving Sofía the distance to choose.

“You counted us,” Sofía said.

Elena nodded.

“Cards.”

“Yes.”

For a moment they simply looked at each other. The familiar face, the unfamiliar coat, everything a year and a half had changed and everything it had failed to erase.

Sofía pulled at her bracelet. White string, two blue beads. It caught at the knot. She worked it free and held it out.

“I've only got one.”

The woman began to cry.

Sofía did too, angry at first, then unable to care how it looked. The bracelet remained between them while they tried to work out where to put their hands.

Anna turned toward the wall. Liz stood beside her, watching the floor. Neither intruded.

Later, when they had chairs and water and a little more room around the problem, the woman said she might use Lena for a while. Not because Elena had become unavailable. Because she wanted to pick something herself and she didn't want people calling her the other one.

Sofía said she could remember that.

Anna went back to her own cup.

Leila arrived close to eleven with a swollen cheek, a bleeding knuckle beneath fresh tape, and the expression of someone determined not to be examined until everybody else had stopped needing her. Chez walked beside her. His good arm looked as tired as his bad one.

A doctor pointed Leila toward a chair.

She started to object. Chez sat in it first and looked up at her.

“Excellent chair. We've discussed this. You like chairs.”

She glared, then took the one beside him.

Anna laughed. The sound surprised her.

Leila looked over and smiled carefully because one side of her face hurt.

“You're Anna.”

“Yes.”

“The foil worked.”

“Mike read it.”

“He did.”

The medic came to check Leila's face. Chez moved the tool bag from the spare chair without being asked.

Anna waited until the medic finished, then asked whether she could use a phone.

“Private room,” Leila said. “Beside the office. They've got a landline.”

Anna knew the number. She'd repeated it on the ship whenever she was afraid memory might become another thing she lost.

It rang twice.

Her mother's voice said hello.

Anna couldn't make words. She pressed both feet against the floor and tried again.

“Mum.”

The chair creaked beneath her. Somewhere outside, a bus engine stopped. The room stayed where it was.

Her mother made a sound Anna had never heard before. Then Olivia was on the extension, shouting questions over her, asking where, when, who, why hadn't anyone—

“I'm here,” Anna said. “I'm coming home.”

She didn't know when yet. She said it anyway because it was finally a thing she could do.

***

She went home on Thursday with a family advocate and a volunteer driver.

The journey took too long. At every stop her shoulders tightened. She chose her own bottle of water at a service station and held it for the next hundred miles.

Her mother waited outside the building. Olivia stood beside her in the green jacket.

For a moment Anna saw only the jacket. The frayed cuff, the pin her sister had added without asking. Then her mother was at the car door and the hug hurt and she didn't want it to stop.

Olivia hung back until Anna held out an arm.

“You took my jacket.”

Olivia burst into tears.

“I'm kidding,” Anna said, pulling her in. “God. I'm kidding.”

“You said I couldn't.”

“I say lots of things.”

“Yeah,” Olivia said into her shoulder. “You do.”

Inside, the flat smelled of laundry and too much food. The advocate went through appointments and contact numbers. Anna heard half of it. She kept looking at the chipped blue bowl beside the sink.

It was still there. No one had saved it deliberately. It had simply remained.

At dinner, Olivia tried talking about school, stopped herself, started again. Their mother asked whether Anna wanted the curtains open. Whether it was too warm. Then apologized for asking.

“I don't know what you need,” she said.

“Me neither.”

Olivia smiled a little. Their mother smiled back. For a moment they were a family having an awkward dinner, with no obligation to make it a good scene for anyone.

That night Anna left the door open. At two, her mother appeared with a blanket and settled into the old chair.

“Company?”

Anna nodded.

After a while, her mother began reading a hand-cream label aloud.

“What are you doing?”

“Couldn't find a book.”

“It's moisturizer.”

“Dramatic ingredient list.”

Anna laughed into the pillow. Her mother continued until the storage instructions and declared the ending disappointing.

In the morning, Anna sent Sofía a picture of the green jacket on the chair.

Home.

The reply came a few minutes later: three mugs on a windowsill. Sofía, Elena, Lena, written on their bases.

Working on it.

Anna put the phone down and went to help with breakfast.

Jen asked for no cameras at the funeral.

There were none.

Liz sat three rows from the front in borrowed trainers and a black coat she had bought herself. Leila was beside her. No one introduced Liz to the room. No one asked her to say something for the people who weren't there.

The photographs stood near the flowers. Ellie at six, missing a tooth. Ellie at fifteen, holding a fish with an expression that suggested both of them had made poor decisions. Ellie in the kitchen with flour on her face.

Liz remembered the kitchen.

She didn't remember the fish.

She looked at it for a long time, grateful for a piece of life that hadn't been given to her.

After the service Jen found her beside the gate. The rain had stopped. Water ticked from the bare branches onto the path.

“Thank you for coming,” Jen said.

Liz nearly answered with something polished. She caught herself in time.

“I didn't know if I should.”

“Neither did I.”

They stood with the awkwardness instead of improving it.

Don had called two days earlier. The medical comparison confirmed the identification. Investigators had the test logs and the old engineering reports. On Thursday at six-twelve, the demonstration team cut the Canvas communication link to test a new show sequence. The old source controller interpreted three minutes without that message as a completed case. It released Ellie's care incorrectly.

Her body had not stopped because Liz stopped being alive. A message had failed. A machine made a decision it should never have been allowed to make. People had recorded the result, moved the body, and continued preparing the launch.

Liz remembered the flicker in the medical room that morning. The technician telling her it was routine. She'd spent the rest of the day trying to be less troublesome.

The company had received an earlier warning about the timeout. Aiden's report was one of the documents taken from the tower. He was answering questions too. Helping them escape hadn't removed the months he'd kept working after being told not to worry.

Liz looked at Jen.

“I didn't know,” she said, although it wasn't what she'd meant to bring here.

Jen's face changed.

“Don't.”

Liz went still.

“I don't want you trying to take part of it off them because it's near you.”

She said it sharply. Grief, anger, exhaustion. None of it arranged kindly enough to be mistaken for a lesson.

Liz nodded.

“Okay.”

Jen reached into her coat and brought out a folded sheet.

“The recipe.”

Liz took it carefully.

There were corrections in two hands. Oven temperature crossed out, more cinnamon, an indignant note about how long butter took to soften. At the bottom someone had drawn a cookie with eyebrows and labeled it MUM AT SEVEN AM.

Liz laughed. Jen did too, then looked away because both had become difficult.

“You don't have to know the memories,” Jen said. “To visit. If you want to visit.”

“I do.”

“Not to be Ellie.”

“No.”

They stood a little closer after that. Jen touched Liz's shoulder, once, and returned to the others.

On the tram home, Liz unfolded the recipe again.

Leila read the cartoon upside down.

“Strong likeness?”

“Apparently.”

“Are you making them?”

“Yes.”

“Would you like a fire extinguisher?”

Liz nudged her with one borrowed shoe.

The agency had called four times since the arrests. Different people, very sympathetic, explaining that they could protect the career she'd built. Liz had asked who owned the old photographs and why the answers took so long. Then she'd hired someone independent to help her stop answering calls she didn't owe anybody.

She still liked performing. She had worried that wanting it made her part of what had happened. Noor had listened to that worry for three minutes before asking whether Liz thought the company had invented dancing.

They were looking at a small paid job together. An honest advert for a shoe shop. Real shoes, payment stated in advance, no medical supervision of the model's opinions.

The fee was modest. Liz was thrilled and trying not to show it.

At her temporary room, a letter waited.

Max had sent it through Reese, who'd asked before forwarding anything. Liz had said yes on a day she felt brave and then spent two days wishing she'd asked what was in it first.

She made tea before opening it.

He did not ask to see her. He wrote the dates he'd given investigators, corrected one thing he'd said about the first delivery, and described leaving the company apartment. He was working with a lawyer who made no promises. His mother had taken the same advice.

Near the end was a line about the plant.

Still alive. I realize this is a low standard for news.

Liz smiled despite herself.

Then she put the letter down and became angry again, because she wanted the easy conversations back and they had never been easy for the reasons she'd thought.

She let both feelings remain.

The following morning she wrote a short answer.

I read it. Keep telling the truth to the people who need it. I'm not ready to see you.

She did not add maybe. It would have been for his comfort, and she had promised herself to start noticing when she did that.

Later, she baked the cookies.

The first tray burned because she answered a call from Noor about the shoe job. The second was better. She took both to Leila, who inspected them with the professional interest of someone assessing repairable damage.

“Which tray has character?” Leila asked.

“Both.”

“Dangerous amount.”

They ate the less successful ones first, standing by a window that opened onto a roof and a view of someone else's laundry.

Liz took a picture of the second tray for Jen. She looked at her own face reflected in the glass and didn't check which side was more trustworthy.

Then she sent the picture and went back for another cookie.

The landlord called the damp patch historic.

“How historic?” Leila asked.

“Older property.”

“Older leak.”

“There's a lot of interest in the unit.”

Chez crouched beside the wall and touched the plaster. Looked at the pipe above it, then at Leila.

“Rich history,” he said.

The shop stood across the lane from the laundromat. Good light. Narrow front. Enough space for a workbench, shelves, and one chair for customers. The room above had a sink and a window that opened without setting off an alert.

Leila had been inside three times now. This time she had a deposit.

Not the forty thousand clips. She still thought about those sometimes, usually while reading a supplier invoice.

The money came from five weeks of work: a union lift, Mrs. Vu's extractor, three businesses tired of being told to replace things that needed a connector cleaned. Chez's mother had put her in touch with the first client. After that the work had arrived faster than she could finish it.

She had begun saying next week instead of tomorrow. It felt rude. It also meant she slept.

Chez had sold the chair, two displays, and a camera lens he insisted had been a sound investment before he needed to sell it. The money paid the transport deposits and most of the immediate damage at his mother's house. He was still working off the rest.

He had also closed his footage accounts. One buyer offered him enough for a copy of the rescue files to make the room go quiet when he told Leila.

“Did you answer?” she'd asked.

“Yes.”

“What did you say?”

“No.”

She had wanted to be present when he made the decision. Wanted proof, perhaps a screenshot, some way to ensure the choice remained true once she left the room. She'd gone home without asking for any of it.

Now he stood and wiped plaster dust on his trousers.

“You'd have to fix it before putting a bench here.”

“I know.”

“I'm informing the historical department.”

The landlord folded his tablet.

“Ten minutes. I'll make a call.”

He went outside to look busy.

Leila opened the room upstairs. Bare floor. White walls. A working lock. She turned it twice, then stopped because Chez had begun smiling at the sound.

“Don't.”

“Wouldn't dream of it.”

She went to the window. From there she could see the vending machine she'd repaired the night everything started. Someone had stuck a band sticker on its side. She made a note to remove it only if it covered a vent.

Chez remained at the bottom of the stairs.

“We need to write it down,” she said.

“What?”

“You using the network desk. What you pay. What's yours. What happens if either of us wants to stop.”

He nodded.

“No surprise deposits,” she added.

“I've been warned about surprises.”

“Several times.”

He looked at the notebook in her hand.

“I've got a customer Friday. Private local connection. Doesn't want the city remembering every appointment she books.”

“Legitimate?”

“Yes.”

She glanced at him.

“Massage therapist,” he said. “A real one. She made me look at the certificates. I know too much about shoulder anatomy now.”

Leila laughed.

He liked making her laugh. It was one of the things she'd known about him before trusting him with anything expensive. Lately he'd stopped trying when the moment wasn't his. That helped more than the successful jokes.

The landlord returned. Leila showed him the leak, named the failed seal above it, and proposed a lower deposit in exchange for repairing the damage herself and a written assurance about the shared water supply.

He objected. She waited.

He talked about interest in the unit again. She pointed out that water didn't care how many prospective tenants he described to it.

They reached a number.

He spelled Voss wrong on the first form. She made him correct it. He looked irritated, which she accepted as a normal part of renting an actual property instead of hiding in one.

The keys were plain metal. Three on a ring.

She held them while he explained the rubbish schedule.

After he left, she sat on the upstairs floor with the keys in her palm. Chez stayed downstairs, moving the workbench away from the damp wall without asking her to help until she'd had her minute.

She put the beach photograph on the windowsill.

Then she went down.

The bench was heavy and awkward. They argued about which end to lift, agreed badly, put it down, changed grip, and got it into place without flattening either person's foot.

“Excellent partnership,” Chez said, breathing hard.

“We haven't signed yet.”

“I'll keep the receipt.”

She went to the kettle. Turned on the tap. Water, without complaint. A small achievement, disproportionate in the pleasure it gave her.

He stood near the door, looking as if he had a question and was trying not to arrange it too cleverly.

“Say it,” she told him.

“Tuesday. Dinner. Paid for equally if that matters, but I'd like the chance to choose somewhere with chairs and no urgent storage devices.”

She looked at him over the kettle.

“A job?”

“No.”

“Another favor?”

“No.”

He took a breath.

“A date.”

For a moment she could hear the whole block. Laundry extractor, delivery cart, a child complaining about a shoe. She was afraid, absurdly. Not of Big L or a person holding a gun. Of wanting something she couldn't repair in advance.

“Yes,” she said.

His face changed so quickly she nearly laughed.

“Tuesday?”

“Yes, Chez. That's what you asked.”

“Good. Just confirming. Professionally.”

She crossed the room before he could improve it further and kissed him, briefly and with a hand against his uninjured shoulder.

He stayed very still, then kissed her back.

When she stepped away, he looked as though he'd forgotten several useful words.

“Tuesday,” she reminded him.

He nodded.

“And if you bring a business proposition, I'm keeping the food and leaving you there.”

“Fair.”

They made tea in two mismatched cups and wrote down the desk agreement before either of them could mistake one kind of promise for another.

The vending machine told Leila her purchasing history suggested an unresolved emotional need.

She put down the replacement filter.

Chez knelt at the open panel and closed his eyes.

“I can explain.”

“Try a very small explanation.”

“The laundry owner asked for a help button. I reused the old board.”

“And the personality?”

“I thought I'd removed it.”

The machine offered Leila a protein bar at a reduced price.

She looked at Chez.

He reached inside, disconnected a small speaker board, and placed it in her hand.

“Refund?” he asked.

She put it in her pocket.

“Evidence.”

Their shop was crowded before noon. The sign above the window said VOSS REPAIRS. Under it, with permission, Chez had added WE CAN LOOK AT IT. This had brought in a broken toaster, an elderly radio, and a woman who wanted an opinion about her boyfriend.

Leila referred the boyfriend to Mrs. Vu.

The local connection service occupied one desk, one cupboard, and an increasing number of evenings Chez insisted he wasn't working through. It joined the clinic, the repair cooperative, a few shops, and Don's outpost without making everyone sign over their appointment lists to Ling.

Chez called it Echo Line after the old pump-system voice circuit. Leila had objected that the original line got cut during a moderately bad evening.

“Then we'll make this one easier to repair,” he'd said.

It mostly carried unimportant messages. Door codes. Delivery times. A dispute about whether somebody's missing drill counted as borrowing. Leila liked the unimportant ones best.

Today the help button at the vending machine was meant to call the shop when somebody lost money. After the personality came out, it did.

A man pressed it while Leila was still holding the panel.

“Testing,” he said.

The phone inside rang.

She looked at Chez.

“Progress.”

“I'm thrilled you witnessed it.”

They finished the filter and went in before another test became a social event.

Liz arrived carrying two trays of cookies and wearing boots nobody had selected for her. Noor came behind her with a rolled poster for their latest job, which had paid on time and required no one to explain whether the models were people.

“Which tray's dangerous?” Leila asked.

“Both have character,” Liz said.

“I'm getting a spoon.”

They had started a small cooperative with several of the former resident artists. Their work wasn't glamorous every week. Once they'd spent a whole afternoon persuading a client that a chair advertisement ought to show the actual chair. Liz told the story so well Leila almost regretted not being there.

Jen sometimes visited the shoots. Sometimes she couldn't. Liz had learned not to treat either answer as a forecast for the rest of their lives.

Elena, Lena and Sofía came by tram after lunch. They didn't arrive as an explanation. They arrived arguing about who had eaten on the journey and whether that counted as lunch. Elena was still receiving treatment. Some days were hard. Today she wanted the chair nearest the window and the largest bowl of soup.

Lena liked accounting more than she'd expected. Sofía found this embarrassing and useful in equal measure.

Don came with his wife and Mike, carrying a box of tomatoes they'd been told not to bring. He put it under the counter before his wife saw.

“She sees,” Mike said.

“That's an allegation.”

“Witness statement.”

Don had been off cigarettes for three months. He mentioned it seldom, mostly because his wife remembered the exact date and would correct him if he tried to improve the achievement.

The main criminal case was still moving. Kazimir and Ava remained in custody. Some senior people were trying to describe everything as a supplier failure. Reese kept asking the awkward questions in the places they had hoped not to answer them. The order treating the Canvases as free patients while the wider arguments continued had held.

Leila got updates when there was something she needed to do. She no longer called twice because waiting felt like neglect.

Kate came with her brother and a box of repaired connectors for the clinic. Leila checked the labels, asked about the replacement parts, and told her where to put them. Later she moved a chair into the shade near the window. Kate sat there. Neither turned it into a ceremony.

Sour wore the sunglasses she no longer needed as often because, she said, they'd become part of her fee. Ajax brought a pot from Mrs. Vu and instructed Bonz to lift with his knees. He told her his knees had resigned. They moved it anyway.

The shop grew too full. Someone carried chairs onto the pavement. Mike wrote Bonz a parking ticket while eating a cookie. Bonz demanded evidence. Mike pointed at the van.

“Strong case,” Don said.

Anna called from home in the middle of the argument. Her camera showed a ceiling for a while. Olivia could be heard telling her which button to press. Then Anna appeared, laughing and annoyed.

She had gone into town by herself that morning. Bought bread. Came home. She wanted to tell somebody before it became an achievement people made too much of.

“Anything happen?” Leila asked.

“No.”

“Excellent.”

“Bought the wrong bread.”

“Now it's a story.”

They laughed. Anna lifted a bag into view. Olivia corrected her from somewhere offscreen. The call broke when somebody in the house started an enormous download, and the last thing Leila heard was an entirely ordinary sibling argument.

She put the phone down smiling.

Chez stood beside the kettle with two cups.

“Tuesday,” he said.

“What about it?”

“No tools. I've made a booking.”

“You said that last time.”

“A restaurant's extractor is a very intimate thing to fail during dinner.”

She took the cup and leaned her shoulder briefly against his.

Outside, a woman at the vending machine pressed a button. The noodle cup dropped halfway, caught at the rim, and hung there.

The woman looked through the shop window.

Leila sighed.

Chez put down his cup.

“We're closed.”

“We're having lunch.”

“Same principle.”

The woman pressed again. Nothing happened.

Leila picked up the driver.

Chez took the meter and followed her out, protesting mostly for the pleasure of being heard.

A connector had worked loose when they fitted the filter. Small fault, no conspiracy. Leila held the panel while Chez reseated it. At the test command, two cups fell into the tray.

“Am I paying for both?” the woman asked.

“No,” Leila said. “Staff discount.”

She gave her the extra cup and closed the panel.

Inside, someone called that the soup was ready.

Leila put the driver in her pocket and went back to the table.

THE END