The freight lift at Halvard Tower was the only lift that remembered it had once been a machine.

It lived at the back of the building behind a roller door, and it was wide enough for a piano and slow enough for a funeral. The walls were sheets of dented steel, scored all over with the initials of couriers, and the floor was painted a green that had gone grey in the footprints. A small camera in the ceiling blinked a red light. A sign over the buttons said: NO PASSENGERS. NO EXCEPTIONS. NO, REALLY.

Nia stood in it at 6:50 in the morning with a bag of sesame buns, because Rafi's message had said only, *Freight, Level B1, six-fifty. Alone. Please eat something first.*

She hadn't eaten. She'd bought buns at the stall on Adelaide. It had felt like a small defiance.

"You came," said Rafi.

He had stepped in behind her without a sound. The roller door descended with a rattle. He was in the charcoal jacket, a shirt unbuttoned at the collar, and his hair was damp as if he'd come straight from a shower. He held a key card and pressed it against a small grey panel, and the lift lurched, climbed, and stopped between twelve and thirteen with a groan that went through the soles of her feet.

The light in the ceiling stopped blinking.

"Ninety seconds," said Rafi. "The camera loop plays the last ninety seconds of nothing. Then it resumes. I'd like us to be quick."

"You're allowed to do that?"

"No."

"Then why?"

"Because I've something to tell you and it can't be on a log." He glanced at the ceiling. "Eat the bun. You look like a person with a plan and no breakfast."

She ate it. It was warm and sweet, and he watched her chew with the polite attention of a man who has decided to wait out a particular silence. For a moment neither of them said anything. The lift ticked. The walls sweated gently.

"Vivienne Okoro-Lasch," said Rafi, "has asked for your file."

Nia swallowed. It went down hard. "What file?"

"The full one. Contractor background. Employment history, references, previous addresses, and next of kin." He said the last two words flatly. "She sent the request through legal, Wednesday afternoon, on a form with her initials. She's never asked for a contractor's file in the eleven years I've worked here."

"What did you tell her?"

"That it's pending verification."

"Is it?"

"It is now." The corner of his mouth moved. "I can hold a legal request for two business days under the security protocol. Beyond that, I need a reason, and I'll have to give her the reason in writing. So you have until five o'clock on Friday. After that, she gets your mother's name."

The lift swayed in its shaft, the barest amount, a sailor's tilt.

Nia put the bun down on the floor. She did it slowly. She did not trust her hands with it.

"Why would she want my mother's name?"

"I was hoping you'd tell me."

"I don't know."

"You've gone a very odd colour for someone who doesn't know."

"It's the freight lift. It's green in here."

"It's grey," said Rafi, quietly.

Sixty seconds. She could feel the minute count itself off along her spine. This was a man who, if he wished, could end her in a sentence; who'd found the guest log in the pre-migration archive; who'd had her name in his head for ten days and not said it to a soul. And the strangest part was the next one: he'd chosen to bring her to a freight lift, to give her a deadline, and then to wait.

"Why are you telling me?"

"Because you asked me for a trade," said Rafi. "And because I'd like to know what I'm protecting."

"You don't know that you're protecting anything."

"I know I just risked my job to stop a camera." He leaned against the wall. His left hand rested on his thigh. He was left-handed, she noticed, and wore the plain steel watch with its face turned inward, toward the pulse, the way people did who wanted time to be a private matter. "I don't have a long list of reasons, Nia. I'm a man who checks doors. I'm paid to protect the Halvard family, and I take that seriously, because Mrs. Halvard keeps my mother in a very good care home in Mississauga that I could not afford in three lifetimes. I owe her. That's the whole of my politics."

"That's a lot to owe somebody."

"It's the only debt I have." He let it sit. "So understand that I'm not on your side. I'm not on anybody's side. I'm on the side of whatever is *true* in this building. And someone is lying in it. Your file isn't the lie, I think. But it's close to it."

Forty seconds.

She picked up the bun. She put it down again. The honest thing and the dangerous thing were so close together that she could have taken them both in one hand.

"There's a microphone," she said.

His whole body changed. Not in movement but in attention, the way the air changes when a bell stops ringing. "Where?"

"Under the table in the Wellness Suite. Thirty-four. Glued to the left corner with blue putty. Cheap. Consumer-grade. It has a SIM." She kept her voice level, as though reading him an invoice. "It wasn't there on my first day. I found it on Tuesday."

"And you left it."

"I did."

"Why?"

"Because it's more useful there than in a bin."

He regarded her for what felt like a very long time. She had a feeling she was being measured and found longer than expected.

"Who put it there?"

"I don't know. The SIM will say."

"The SIM will say a shop in Markham and a prepaid card," Rafi said. "But the *server* will say something else. If it's pushing audio anywhere, it's using a mobile data plan, and I can trace the tower it pings." He nodded slowly, as if he'd just been handed a very small and very precise key. "Don't remove it. Don't tell anyone you found it. Not Ms. Sandhu. Not Pruitt. Not the cleaner. I will have it traced by Monday."

"I'd planned to leave it."

"Good." Pause. "It's not on any security register. That means it isn't mine. It means someone is listening inside my building without my knowing." The red had not returned to the ceiling light, but she could see something like it in his face, a hard, quiet anger, the anger of a man whose own house has been picked. "Thank you."

"That's the trade."

"It's a start." He glanced at the ceiling. "Twenty seconds. I'd better restore the loop."

"Rafi."

"Yes?"

"You didn't tell her." Nia heard her own voice drop. "About the guest log. N. Boateng, 2008. You didn't tell Vivienne."

"No."

"You haven't told anyone."

"No."

"Why not?"

He took a breath, and seemed to consider the question as if it were a stair and he wasn't sure of the weight. "Because I don't know what it is," he said. "It's a name on a list. If I say it to the wrong person it becomes a fact. I don't like making facts out of things I haven't checked." He met her eyes. "I also found," he said, "that I didn't want to."

The words fell into the dented, humming steel box between them and lay there.

She didn't know what to do with them. She'd spent twenty-nine years learning what to do with a threat and ten days finding out what to do with a kindness, and she had no practice at all with the third thing, the one which was neither. A man in a shirt unbuttoned at the throat, who was wearing a watch backwards and had risked a camera to feed her breakfast and say *I didn't want to.*

"That's very unprofessional," she said.

"I know."

"You should probably stop."

"I'm trying to." The corner of his mouth went up, helplessly. "It's a bad habit. I do it when I'm interested."

Ten seconds. The ceiling light began to blink. Rafi put his key card back against the panel, and the lift groaned and shuddered and resumed its slow climb, and the numbers on the display ticked: thirteen, fourteen, fifteen.

"Friday," he said.

"Five o'clock."

"I'll be on thirty-eight. In case you've a question."

"I'll have several."

"I'm counting on it."

The doors opened on twenty-six, a service corridor with a trolley of cleaning fluids. She stepped out. She did not look back until she was three paces away, and when she did he was standing exactly where she'd left him, hands loose, the lift's pale light on his face. He looked younger. He looked like a man who had just done something he couldn't take back.

"Rafi."

"Yes?"

"The bun. You didn't eat any."

He looked down at the white paper bag on the floor of the lift. After a moment he bent, picked it up, and took one out. He ate half of it standing there, with a grave and deliberate air, like a scientist tasting something he suspects is poison.

"It's good," he said.

"I know."

The doors began to close. Behind the steel, the last thing she saw was Rafael Mizrahi-Dube chewing, thoughtfully, with his eyes on her, and the slow, small, unwilling smile of a man who has discovered how very much he has to lose.

She walked the length of the corridor and into the service lift. In the empty car, she took out her phone and opened her notes. She wrote one line.

*Friday 5 p.m. — Vivienne gets Ines.*

Under it, after a moment, in smaller letters:

*Do not like him. Do not like him. Do not.*