At nine on Monday night, the Quiet Floor was quiet in the way a church is, after the service, when you can hear the building think.

Rafi had sent her one line. *Thirty-eight. After the cleaners. Bring nothing that beeps.* She had come up in the lift with her phone left in a drawer at Kestrel and an empty bag swinging at her hip, and a feeling in her stomach that was neither fear nor hope but the plain tired apprehension of a person walking into a surgeon's room.

The corridor was dim. Where Ciara Whelan-Osei and the day crew had been, the desks were empty and the monitors had been turned to a low blue. Only the Dot Wall was awake, a faint spill of lights on the ceiling. A handful of white sparks drifted across the dark: the night cleaners, the guard in the lobby, a lone dot up in the penthouse that did not move at all.

"You came," said Rafi.

"I said I would."

"People say."

He was at the small table in the corner, with a laptop open, a mug in front of him, and a second mug on the other side. The tie was gone. His sleeves were rolled, and in the weak light the lines of his face seemed, if anything, more precise, as though he had spent the day sanding off what wasn't necessary. She sat.

"Tea?"

"Is it black?"

"With honey."

"It always is."

"It's a good habit." He pushed the second mug across. "It's the one thing in the building I can trust to taste the same."

She drank. He turned the laptop. On the screen was a plain white window, a list of file names, and a column of numbers.

"The microphone," said Rafi. "Eleven days ago it was glued under your table. A prepaid SIM in a cheap handset, running on a data plan that costs eleven dollars a month. It sends its audio in short pieces, every few minutes, to a server." He tapped. "The server is not on any list of mine. It's not in the building. It's not on any registered vendor. It's a cloud folder. A bucket, in the jargon. Called hearthly-staging-qa-03."

"Hearthly."

"Theo's company. His engineers keep a set of test servers, to try things before they go live. This is one of them." He scrolled. "The test servers are supposed to be empty. Nobody checks. Somebody found one that nobody checks, created a folder, and hid it behind an ordinary-looking name. A bucket nobody would think to look in. It's quite elegant."

"Theo?"

"I don't think so. He barely knows how to reset his password." He said it without malice. "His staff don't know about it either; I asked a very careful question. Someone with credentials to the test environment made it. Someone who understands how companies are lazy."

"And the audio's in it."

"Eleven days of it. Five hundred and nineteen files." His voice was quite steady. "I've copied the log. I have not opened a single recording."

She looked up.

"I could," he said. "It's my building. I can open anything. But it's your voice in there. Your calls, your conversations, the private minutes of a woman eating lunch at her desk. I didn't think it was mine to hear." He turned the mug a quarter turn. "I thought I'd rather listen with you in the room. Or not at all."

It was a very small thing to say, and she found, absurdly, that her eyes had begun to sting. She looked at the dots on the wall until it passed.

"Thank you."

"I haven't done anything yet."

"You haven't done a lot of things," Nia said. "I'm beginning to think it's your gift."

His mouth twitched. He pulled the laptop back toward himself.

"The part I wanted you to see is here. Who reads the bucket." He opened another window, a long list of lines, each with a time and a number. "Every time someone opens a file, the server writes it down. I found three sources. One's a house in Rosedale. Eleven-fifty at night, mostly. That's an ordinary home broadband line, registered to a Gerald Pruitt."

"Pruitt listens from his kitchen."

"At midnight, with a glass of something, I'd guess. Second source is a commercial VPN, which could be anyone, and is probably meant to be." He tapped a third. "And the third is the building. The internal network, a fixed address. It reads in the early mornings, six or seven, and again at lunchtime. It never uses the VPN. It's not careful. It doesn't think anyone's watching its own floor."

Nia went very still.

"Which floor?"

"Sixty-one."

The chair seemed to tilt. She put a hand on the table's edge.

"I haven't a camera on sixty-one," Rafi said, softly. "Everyone knows that. I have never had a camera on sixty-one. But I have a network, Nia. The network is mine. There is not a wire in the building I haven't seen the end of." His eyes were on the screen. "Someone on the General Counsel's floor has been listening to the Wellness Suite every morning for eleven days."

"Vivienne."

"Or Cosmo, or someone with her permission. It's her floor."

"She heard the day Devika and I —"

She stopped.

The day Devika had sat on the carpet with the archive box. The day Nia had said, *the countersignature is careful, it's too careful.* The day she had said, *I'll put it in my locked drawer.* The ghost message, *Now watch what Pruitt does when she finds the hat,* and her own hushed horror, *I didn't say anything about a hat.* The whole of it, on a server in a bucket, in a clean hour of audio. Typed in a log, with a time.

"She knows about the page," said Nia.

"Yes."

"She knows where it is."

"Yes."

"And she knows what it is." She heard her own voice go thin and strange. "Rafi. She knows I know the signature is forged. She has *known* for a week. She hasn't done anything."

"That's what worries me," said Rafi.

The old, comfortable fear that had lived in her stomach for ten years sat up and stretched. It was almost welcome. It had a shape. "Because a woman like that doesn't wait out of kindness."

"No."

"She's waiting for something."

"Or for someone." He ran a thumb along the edge of the mug. "What's in the drawer?"

"A page."

"And you want to keep it."

"I want to keep it more than I want to keep my hand," Nia said, and the words were out before she had weighed them.

He nodded. It was not a gesture of agreement so much as of acknowledgement, a man registering the size of the thing on the table. "Then it's not staying in the building. Not in your drawer, not in my evidence cage, not in the archive. If she has your drawer, she has the hallway. She has the key to the door with the lock." He closed the laptop gently. "Is there somewhere that nobody in this tower has ever heard of?"

---

It was a quarter to eleven when the cab dropped them on Spadina, and a quarter past when Mr. Lau, in a vest and slippers and a state of deep, stately outrage, let them in by the back door of the dumpling shop.

"Rafael," said Nia, "this is Mr. Lau. Mr. Lau, this is a man I'm working with."

Mr. Lau looked at Rafi. He looked at the suit. He looked at the nose, and the hair, and the posture, and Nia could see the old man's mind file it under *police.* "You marry her?" he said.

"No," said Rafi.

"Shame. Good girl. Pay on time."

"I'm aware."

The safe lived under the back stairs, behind a stack of rice sacks and a pile of damp folded cardboard. It was an iron thing the shape of a small refrigerator, older than any of them, green paint flaking in long strips, with a brass dial the size of a saucer. Mr. Lau had acquired it from the previous tenant's estate in 1991 and had been using it to store lottery tickets, a jade bracelet, and his late wife's wedding certificate.

"No one will ever look here," Nia murmured.

"I'm looking," said Rafi, "and I don't understand how I'm meant to find it."

"That's the idea."

She had the plastic sleeve in her hand, flat between two sheets of cardboard. Rafi had photographed it in the cab: the page, front and back, under the phone's torch, with a timestamp and a signed hash that he'd run in thirty seconds on a small device. *Insurance,* he'd said. *If anything happens to the paper, the record stays.* She'd watched him do it with the unfussy tenderness of a man handling a bird's egg.

Mr. Lau spun the dial. Thick iron clunked. The door opened on a crowded interior of envelopes and small gold boxes. He took the card, weighed it in his palm with an air of deep suspicion, and laid it on the topmost shelf, beside the wedding certificate.

"No tell," he said. "Not police. Not mother. Not wife."

"Neither of us has a wife," Nia said.

"Then easy."

The door swung shut. The dial spun. In the cramped airless space under the stairs, with the smell of rice and old grease and the hum of a freezer through the wall, she stood shoulder to shoulder with a man she was supposed to be deceiving, watching a safe close on the only proof she had.

"It's done," said Rafi.

"It's not."

"No." He looked at her sideways. The light was a bare bulb on a cord, and it made hollows under his cheekbones. "It isn't. But you've bought yourself a week. Whoever is listening has to guess where it went."

"And you?"

"I know where it is."

"You do."

"You'd like to know who I'd tell?" He waited. "Nobody. That's all. Nobody." He glanced at her again, and something in the line of his shoulders gave, as if he had set down a bag he had carried a long way. "I should ask you one thing. It's the question I've wanted to ask since the lobby."

Her stomach dropped. She kept her face still.

"Who are you protecting?"

It was the right question. It was the only one. She stood in a stairwell that smelled of fried dough, between an iron safe and a man who had lied to Hedda Halvard on her behalf, and for the first time in her working life she could not find the shape of a decent answer.

"My mother," she said. It was true. It was a corner of the truth, as small and sharp as a tooth.

Rafi studied her face. He had a way of looking, she thought, that was almost the opposite of Hedda's: not weighing, but waiting, like someone letting a kettle come to the boil.

"Right," he said at last, and she realised he was not going to press. That he had, quite deliberately, taken the corner of the truth and chosen to be satisfied with it.

"Right," said Nia.

"Mr. Lau," Rafi called, over his shoulder. "Is there any chance of a dumpling?"

"Kitchen close."

"I'll pay double."

"Sit," said Mr. Lau, with enormous dignity. "Sit. I make."