The lift to thirty-eight did not stop at thirty-eight unless it was told to. It required a card, a code, and a small, humiliating pause while a camera made up its mind about your face.

Nia was escorted. That was the word on the email Rafi had sent, which had arrived four minutes after the clip hit fifty thousand views. *Ms. Boateng, a housekeeping matter. Floor 38, 11:15. Please bring nothing but yourself.* She had read it three times, looking for a threat, and found only the precision of a man who wanted her to know that he'd looked up the time.

The doors opened on a corridor the colour of a held breath.

No windows. A grey carpet with a faint stripe in it. The air had a different taste here, cooler and drier, with the faint ozone of machinery running day and night. At the end of the corridor, a woman in her fifties with cropped silver hair and half-moon glasses was waiting by an unmarked door.

"Ciara Whelan-Osei," she said. "Deputy. He's expecting you. Don't touch the kettle."

"Which kettle?"

"All of them," said Ciara, and opened the door.

It was a room the size of a small cinema, and the first thing she noticed was how many screens there were: sixteen, in two arcs, each showing a different slice of the tower. A loading dock. A stairwell. The lobby, seen from forty-one angles at once, as she had counted. Nine people sat at desks beneath the light of them, none talking, each with a headset, each as relaxed as a pilot in a long flight.

The second thing was the wall.

It filled the far side of the room, floor to ceiling, black. A pale blue diagram of the building lay across it in thin lines, floor on floor on floor, the whole tower laid out like a ribcage. And in it, drifting, slow, pulsing: hundreds of small white lights. Each one a person. Each one a badge.

"The Dot Wall," said Rafi.

He stood beside it with a mug in one hand, and the dots moved across his shoulders like a weather system. "It doesn't know who anyone is. It knows where. A dot is a badge on a floor. If a dot goes where its owner has no reason to be, the dot goes amber. If it goes somewhere it shouldn't, red."

"And who's that?" Nia pointed at a white dot in the lobby, moving slowly toward the lifts.

"A courier. Delivering lunch to someone in legal."

"How do you know it's lunch?"

"The dot's carrying something warm. The badge reader for the bag logs temperature." He shrugged. "I'm joking. I don't know. It's a courier. Dots are boring, Ms. Boateng. That's how you know the building is safe."

She looked at the wall for a moment longer. Thirty-four, her floor, had a cluster of four white dots in one corner, Devika's department, probably. The twenty-second floor was a noisy cloud around the Hearthly studio. She found the thirty-eighth, a tight clump of nine, all within the room, all still.

And on sixty-one, in the top left of the diagram, one single dot, white, motionless. It didn't pulse. It didn't drift. It just sat there like a pearl.

"That one's not moving," she said.

"No."

"Whose?"

"Nobody's. It's an artefact." His tone didn't change. It was a very careful absence of change. "There's no badge reader on the General Counsel's floor. The dot is a placeholder."

*The only floor I don't have a camera on.* He'd told her so in the lift. She understood now what the dot was for: not to watch, but to remember that there was something he couldn't.

"Tea?" said Rafi.

"What kind?"

"Black. With honey. It's the only kind I make."

"Then yes."

He crossed to a console beneath the wall, where a small white kettle sat with the absurd dignity of a thing that has been allowed to stay. He poured water over two bags without comment and stirred a spoon of honey into each. She watched him do it, and the whole movement was a shock of ordinary: the loosened tie, the cuffs rolled once, the small habitual glance at the dots as he waited for the water to cool.

He gave her the mug. It was warm. She wrapped both hands round it, because it gave them something to do.

"Sit," he said.

There was a small table in a corner, with two chairs. A laptop was open on it, and on the laptop was the clip.

She watched herself for the fifth time that day. A charcoal coat. A green notebook. A woman in the doorway of a studio, looking at a man on a couch the way weather looks at a field. The caption, in white: *who is the woman in the coat and why does she look like THEM.*

"It has two hundred and six thousand views," said Rafi.

"It had forty when I left."

"That was an hour ago. It's gone to the other side of the internet." He turned the laptop slightly. The comments ran down the side like a waterfall of small cruelties. *cold queen*. *she's a repo woman, calm down.* *I swear I've seen her before.* *the HAIR. the CHEEKBONES. the TOWER.* "People like a mystery. They've decided you are secretly a Halvard."

She took a mouthful of tea. It was excellent. She hated that it was.

"I'm a contractor," she said.

"I know."

"I'm here to collect receivables."

"Also true." He sat opposite, elbows on knees. "I'm not here to accuse you of anything. I'm here to do housekeeping, which means I ask the dull questions, so that when something goes wrong in this building, I can say I asked." He smiled slightly. It didn't reach any part of the room. "Where were you born?"

"Scarborough General."

"Parents?"

"My mother, Ines Boateng. A tailor. My father —" She paused. It was not hard; she'd practiced it. "I don't have one. I mean I never knew him."

"Siblings?"

"No."

"Previous addresses?"

She gave him the list, from memory, lightly: the flat on Kingston Road, the rented room at university, the building on Danforth with the landlord who kept ferrets. He did not write anything down. She understood, again, that he didn't need to.

"Thank you," said Rafi. "That matches."

"With what?"

"With the file I ran when you were hired." There was no apology in it. "Kestrel put you forward. HR checked your references and your credit. I checked everything else. I check everyone who goes above twenty."

"And?"

"And you're immaculate. Your school records are in order. Your tax history is dull. Your hospital visits are two broken wrists and a tonsillectomy. You've never had an unpaid parking ticket." He turned his mug a quarter turn on the table. "I distrust perfectly ordinary."

"That seems like a flaw in your method."

"It's the whole method. Nobody is that clean. Real lives leave lint." He met her eyes. "Yours leaves none. Every document is in order and every document starts when you were eleven. Before that — nothing. Not a scrape. A school with a fire, which destroyed all its records. A doctor who retired and moved away. It's a very neat childhood."

The heat of the mug reached her palms and stopped there.

"It was a long time ago," said Nia, "and my mother moved house a lot."

"Yes. She did." He nodded slowly. "It happens."

He didn't press. That was the worst of it. He let the words go into the cool air of the room and stay there, like a coin left on a counter, and waited for her to pick it up and pocket it. She refused. They sat in silence, with the quiet machinery humming beneath them and the dots going by on the wall.

"Why did you bring me here, Rafi?" she said. "You could have emailed this."

"Because of this." He tapped the trackpad and the clip paused, and he enlarged a small box in the corner of the screen: a time stamp and a source. "The livestream on Hearthly has a thirty-second delay, so Theo's team can cut things. It ended at 11:09, when he pressed stop. This clip was posted by @towertea at 11:13." He let it sink. "Someone took a recording of the stream, cut a thirty-second clip, captioned it, wrote a hashtag, and published it. In four minutes. That's faster than a person could do it for fun."

"It's fast."

"It's prepared. They weren't just hoping someone would be interesting. They were hoping it would be *you*."

She said nothing.

"@towertea has been in the building for two years," said Rafi. "It posts about us. Promotions. Fights. Who sleeps with whom in procurement. It's not malicious, mostly. It's just very well-informed. I've been trying to find it for about eighteen months. It has never once been wrong. And it has never, until this morning, posted a woman it didn't know."

"You think it knows me."

"I think," said Rafi, "that it wanted me to look at you."

Something small cracked in her chest, a fine dry sound. Not fear. Not quite. A recognition: the click of one lock turning inside another.

Someone in the tower wanted the head of security to take an interest in Nia Boateng. Someone had planned it.

"Rafi."

"Yes?"

"If I hear who @towertea is — in the course of my work — I'd like to know too."

His eyes flicked up. "Why?"

"Because it's using my face," said Nia. "I like to know who's billing me."

For the first time that day his mouth did the thing she'd half expected: it softened, a little, at one corner, a thin line yielding to something nearly warm. "A trade, then," he said. "You tell me what you learn. I'll tell you what I learn. Both of us stay honest."

"Both of us."

"I'll hold you to it."

"I know," she said. "That's the problem."

She stood. He rose too, awkwardly, as if standing up with another person in the room was a thing he did by instruction. At the door, Ciara Whelan-Osei had reappeared with her glasses pushed up on her silver hair.

"All good?" said Ciara.

"All good."

"Excellent," said Ciara, in the tone of a woman who had listened to every word. She stepped aside to let Nia through, and as Nia passed, Ciara added, so quietly that it might have been a thing said to herself: "Your dot's the only one that hasn't gone amber today. Funny. Everyone else did."

Nia stopped.

She turned back toward the Dot Wall. Hundreds of lights, drifting, tiny and white. But one, thin and hard in the corner of the blue ribcage, on the thirty-fourth floor, in the Wellness Suite, glowed a very small, very steady amber.

"That's mine," said Nia.

"No," said Rafi, behind her, with an odd stillness. "Yours is the white one beside it. The amber one is somebody else's. Somebody sitting in your room, using your door."