The radio-frequency detector had been a joke. Pinky had bought it two birthdays ago, for nineteen dollars on the internet, wrapped in a pink ribbon, with a card that said *For the girl who is always being followed*.
It lived in the bottom of Nia's work bag among the pens and the mints. Now she took it out in the Wellness Suite at ten past seven in the evening, when the finance floor was empty and the cleaners were two corridors away singing along to a phone, and held it up in the half-light like a priest with an unlikely relic.
It looked like a TV remote that had lost an argument. A green light. A row of red ones. A small grey speaker that, as she moved it along the table's edge, began to give a soft, discouraged chirp.
She moved it slowly, left to right. The chirp became a purr. At the left corner, directly under the lip of the table, the purr became a whine so high it made her teeth ache.
She lay on her back on the carpet. She was wearing her good trousers. She put her phone's torch under the table, and there it was, stuck with a dab of blue putty: a small black disc the size of a thumb joint. No logo. No cable. A pinprick hole. A tiny flat battery strip taped to its side, and, under that, the notch of a SIM.
"Hello," she said, to the disc.
It said nothing.
She did not touch it. She had thought about touching it all the way up in the lift, and each time she'd thought, *you do not take something out of the water until you know what's biting it.* A thing that is found is a thing that stops working. A thing that is left alone goes on telling the truth about the person who put it there.
And it was cheap. That was the telling feature. Floor 38 did not buy things like this. Rafael Mizrahi-Dube's department spent more on a single door than this device cost to make; if he'd wanted to listen to her he'd have done it through the smoke detectors, with her badge on a log, and a form signed, and a reason. This was something else. A thing bought with a card from a shop by a person who wanted to do something quietly and did not trust the people who made the tower's silence.
*Now watch what Pruitt does when she finds the hat.*
Whoever wrote that had known the room was being listened to. Perhaps they'd put the thing there. Perhaps they had found it, as she had, and had left it, as she would.
Nia sat up. Her heart was tapping, quick and clear. It was not fear; it was the thing she felt before a good negotiation. It was a hunger.
She took a breath. Then she stood, smoothed her trousers, picked up her bag, and spoke to the empty Wellness Suite in the clear, unhurried voice of a woman rehearsing alone.
"All right. Thursday."
She paced a little, in the narrow space between the table and the air shaft. "Thursday. Ten past nine. Marguerite Adeyemi-Thorne. Audit committee chair." She lifted the grey archive box's lid, empty now, and laid it down again with a decisive tap. "If I take the journal entry to her myself, before Pruitt knows, there's no way to explain it as a clerical mistake. A countersignature that wasn't written by the man who's supposed to have written it. That goes straight to the committee. That doesn't need a lawyer's blessing."
She waited. In the walls, the building breathed.
"And I'll bring the page in person," she said. "In a folder. No scans. Nobody here is touching it before then." She picked a pen up off the table and clicked it twice, the sound of a woman who has made a decision. "Right. Home."
She walked out and shut the door behind her. The click of the latch was loud in the silent corridor, and in the elevator she let out a breath she hadn't known she was holding, and leaned her head against the cool steel wall.
"I can't believe that worked," she said to her own reflection. "It was hammy."
---
"It was hammy," said Pinky, "and I love it."
They sat in a booth at the back of Golden Wrapper, under a poster of a smiling dumpling in a chef's hat. It was Pinky's rule: no plan was made inside the tower. Plans had to be made in a place where the only listening device was Mr. Lau, who was seventy-eight and deaf in one ear and loved Nia because she tipped.
Between them was a steamer basket of pork-and-chive dumplings, a bottle of black vinegar, and a copy of the Halvard Group organisation chart, printed from the intranet and heavily annotated in a purple gel pen.
"You told the microphone," said Pinky.
"I told whoever's listening."
"You said a time and a name and a place."
"I said Thursday, nine ten, Marguerite Adeyemi-Thorne, her office. All of it false. The committee chair doesn't have an office on this tower; she works out of her law practice on Bay. I checked." Nia dipped a dumpling in vinegar. "It's what we call a canary. If the information turns up in the wrong place, we know the pipe it went down."
"And if it turns up in the wrong *place*?"
"Then I know who's listening."
"And if no one does anything?"
"Then it was a hammy speech to a disc, and I've lost two minutes and a little dignity."
Pinky ate. She ate the way she did most things, fast and with enormous satisfaction, and between bites she traced the organisation chart with her gel pen, a purple track across the boxes of the Halvard family tree. Hedda at the top, Konrad beneath. Beside them, a small box with a dagger beside it. *Alexander (d. 2008).* And another. *Emil (d. 2015).* Pinky had drawn a tiny skull next to Emil and then crossed it out in embarrassment.
"So," she said. "Who do you think is listening?"
"If I were Pruitt and I had a guilty page in a basement box, and someone had just got in my building who knew about it, I'd want a mic. But the mic's cheap and the message to Devika was too clever. Pruitt isn't clever. He's careful. That's a different thing."
"So it's two people."
"At least two. One who listens, one who steers."
"And one of them is a ghost."
"Maybe both."
Pinky sat back. Her face did the thing it did when something troubled her too much for jokes. "I don't like it, Nia. I don't like that someone knows about the hat."
"Nobody knows about the hat."
"Somebody *wrote* about the hat."
Nia tore a dumpling in half and didn't eat either piece. She had not told Pinky how she'd known: that she had sat on her father's knee and held a pen that smelled of ink and aftershave, and that the hat was not a secret in the way of a locked door but a secret in the way of a joke. Something said once, on a lap, in a voice she could still hear when she was tired.
"Whoever sent that message," she said, "knew my father."
"Or knew about you."
"They can't know about me. Nobody knows about me."
"Ines knows."
"Ines doesn't know about the hat."
"How do you know that?"
She didn't. That was the trouble with everything now. The things she'd been sure of were coming loose one by one, as in an old house when you begin to pull the wallpaper.
"Eat," said Pinky. "It's getting cold. And look." She tapped Nia's phone, which had lit on the table.
An email. From Gerald Pruitt. 8:12 p.m.
Nia looked at the time. She had left the Wellness Suite at 7:17. Fifty-five minutes.
*Nia — apologies for the hour, I know you're a diligent soul and that you probably haven't eaten. I realise I've been unhelpful this week, and I'd like to put that right. Lunch tomorrow, at one? The Albion Club — I'll send a car. I think we should speak frankly, like adults, about what Brightwater is and what it isn't. I'm sure we can find a position we're both comfortable with. Warmly, G.*
*P.S. Bring the page.*
The booth was very quiet. At the front, Mr. Lau dropped a ladle and said something to it in Cantonese.
"The page," said Pinky.
"I didn't say a page. I said a *folder*." Nia could hear her own voice, level and slow. "I said 'I'll bring the page in person, in a folder.' To a microphone, in a room, an hour and a half ago."
"So it *is* Pruitt."
"Or it's somebody who works for Pruitt, and Pruitt gets the audio." Nia put down her chopsticks. A small, bright, vicious satisfaction was moving through her chest like a wire. "He listened. He took the false Thursday and the false chair and he did not rush to Marguerite Adeyemi-Thorne's practice or burn a box. He panicked about the *page*. He wants it before it leaves the building. He wants it before Thursday."
"Because it's true."
"Because he's afraid of it. Because if it was nothing he'd laugh." She drank the last of her jasmine tea. "He wants to buy it. So I'm going to let him make an offer."
"Nia." Pinky's hand shot out and caught her wrist. "Be careful. He signed that thing, and the person who forged the countersignature isn't going to be cheap."
"I know."
"And the steerer."
"I know."
"And the hat."
"I know about the hat, Pinks." She took her friend's hand in her own and held it a moment on the table, between the vinegar and the organisation chart. "I'll take someone with me to the lunch."
"Who?"
"A witness."
"You don't have a witness."
"I'll get one," said Nia. She looked down at the purple line leading from Pruitt's box on the chart to the little dagger beside her father's name, and she drew one more line from it, without hurrying, until it reached a box she had not yet marked. "Somebody who needs to hear what the man says when he thinks he's winning."
