Glassrow was the Strata's cheapest address, and it showed. The buildings were all balconies and satellite dishes and laundry strung between them like bunting, and the pavement was patched with yellow tarmac the council had laid in a hurry sometime in the last decade. Nadia had been here three days ago, in a rented suit's shadow, delivering a lie to a man named Gus. Tonight the street looked like another country.

The man was easy to find. He was leaning against a bus shelter opposite number forty-one with his hands in the pockets of a black bomber jacket, the kind that cost more than it looked, and a phone held at hip height, thumb idle. A wolf. She could tell by how he stood: weight on both feet, chin slightly raised, a stillness that wasn't tiredness but waiting.

"Don't look," said Sol through the van's open window. She had parked three doors down, behind a skip. "He's been there since before we came. He hasn't moved, which means he isn't a drunk, and he hasn't looked at his phone, which means he isn't a person."

"I'm going in the front."

"Past him?"

"He can't read me."

"He can still see you, Nads. You're a woman in a cleaner's tunic with a chlorine habit."

"Then I'll walk like I live here."

She got out, shut the van door softly, and crossed the street at the pace of a woman who was cold and late and owed the world nothing. She did not look at the man. She went up to forty-one's entry panel, found the button for flat 6B, and pressed it. Behind her, thirty feet away, she felt his attention shift the way the weather shifts, a fractional change in the air, and she waited for the sharp little inhale of a wolf finding a stranger and getting nothing.

It came. A pause. Then, quite distinctly, the sound of him pushing away from the shelter and taking two steps forward, and stopping.

The door buzzed. Nadia went in.

The stairwell smelled of curry and floor polish. She took the stairs two at a time and found 6B at the end of the landing, a green door with a hand-painted number and a welcome mat that said *Go Away (Politely)*. Before she could knock it opened, and a woman stood there with a slice of toast in one hand and a look of enormous, tired calm.

"You'll be Nadia," she said. "I'm Saoirse. I'm the sleeping one. Come in, it's freezing, and she's in the kitchen having a breakdown in a very elegant way."

Saoirse Whitcombe-Nair was thirty-four and human, with cropped silver-blonde hair, ink-stained fingers, and the unhurried manner of someone whose whole job was waiting for trees. She wore a man's cardigan over pyjama trousers printed with small cartoon cacti. The flat behind her was a single long room made homely by effort: plants in every window, architectural drawings pinned to the wall, a table stacked with seed catalogues and a kettle with a fraying cord.

At the table sat Liesel Ostergaard-Banda.

She was not what Nadia had imagined from the photograph. The photograph had been joyful. This woman was drawn, grey about the mouth, her pale coat creased from being wrapped round her knees. She had stopped trying to be beautiful. It made her look, strangely, like a cousin Nadia hadn't met in years.

"You came," said Liesel, and began to cry again, politely, into a cup of tea. "Oh God. I'm sorry. Saoirse says I do that."

"She does," said Saoirse. "Sit, Nadia. You take sugar?"

"I take whatever you've got that isn't tea."

"Cocoa," said Saoirse, and went to the stove.

A few minutes passed in the sort of quiet that settles when strangers are trying to be kind. Liesel wiped her eyes with the heel of her hand. Nadia sat across from her, and did not know where to put her gloves, and finally put them in her pocket.

"I've told her," Liesel said. "While I was waiting. I couldn't wait. I told her about the bond, about the forgery. All of it."

"I made a very good face," said Saoirse, from the stove. "I thought it was the right moment."

"She said, 'Well, that explains why you always came home smelling like him and looking like you'd been to a funeral.'"

"I was being supportive."

"You were being accurate." Liesel took a breath. "My mother's plan is to leave things as they are. She's very good at that. Kaveh has been told to attend a Founders' dinner on Saturday, where the Director will congratulate the happy couple, and in nine days we both go to the Assay, and I make the tea, and nobody says anything. For ever. That's the plan. I'm to spend the rest of my life drugging a good man so my mother can keep her seat."

"And you want to stop."

"I want to be *excused*." She said it simply, and it landed harder than shouting. "I can't leave the bond without ruining him. If I walk away, the Registry audits us both. His record, his career. And if it comes out that it's forged, he's finished. They'll say he knew. They'd say a man with his nose couldn't *not* know."

"So you came to me."

"I came to you because you can fix it." Liesel set down the cup, and the saucer rattled. "You can make a bond that holds. For anybody. For six weeks, or longer if you adjust it. I know you can. Odile told me. And I thought, if Kaveh were bonded to someone else, someone real and decent, a bond the Registry would accept, then I could dissolve ours by mutual consent. Quietly. No audit. Margit would be furious, but there'd be nothing she could do. Our names would go back into the pool, and Saoirse and I could..." She glanced at the stove, and a bit of the old light came back into her face. "We could try to live like people."

Nadia put her hands on the table, very flat.

"You're asking me," she said, "to forge a bond between Kaveh and someone else."

"Yes."

"Someone *real*?"

"Someone who could stand beside him at the Assay and not be noticed." Liesel's eyes held hers. "Someone he trusts. Someone whose scent the Director could not read."

The cocoa spoon clattered in the saucepan.

It was Saoirse who spoke first, with her back to them, quite lightly. "Oh," she said. "Oh, that's rather clever."

"No," said Nadia.

"Hear me out. A bonded human smells like her mate. It's the one thing the Director's list can't penetrate: a woman with a registered wolf takes on his scent in a matter of weeks, it's a known effect. If you were bonded to Kaveh, no wolf in the city could tell you from any other happily claimed human. You'd be hidden in the open." Liesel leaned forward, hands clasped. "You're on a list, Nadia. The best protection a scentless person has is to look like she belongs to someone. My sister has been telling me for years. It's practically a custom among the Rim."

"A custom of fraud."

"A custom of survival."

Nadia opened her mouth to say a hundred things, one of which was *Kaveh would never*, and the other of which she did not look at.

Down in the street, outside the window, a car door slammed.

Saoirse switched off the hob. "That's him," she said. "The one from the shelter. He's on the doorstep." Her voice had not changed at all. "I'd advise you both to get up, since he's pressing every buzzer in the building, and in about eight seconds, somebody's going to let him in."

The intercom chimed. Once, then three times, fast.

And over it, from somewhere below, came the unmistakable low rumble of a man's voice, saying clearly, calmly, to the stairwell: "Ms. Ostergaard-Banda. The Director sends his compliments."

Nobody breathed. Liesel had gone the colour of the tablecloth.

"Stay there," Saoirse said, and put the toast down on the counter. She walked to the door in her cactus pyjamas, took the chain off, and opened it three inches. "Yes?"

The man in the bomber jacket stood on the mat. Up close he was young, twenty-five perhaps, pleasant-faced, with a neat beard and a lanyard half tucked into his collar that read ASSAY OFFICE - FIELD LIAISON - B. NKEMELU-FROST. He held a bunch of supermarket tulips like a man bringing flowers to a first date he knew was going badly.

"Evening," he said. "Sorry to trouble you, Ms. Whitcombe-Nair. It's Bastian. I was asked to look in on Ms. Ostergaard-Banda, who isn't answering her messages. The Director was concerned. Her mother, too."

"She's fine," said Saoirse. "She's having cocoa."

"I'm sure she is." He smiled, and smelled the air, politely, the way a person checks the weather. "And she's not alone, is she? There's someone else in there. A guest."

"A friend."

"Of course."

He leaned, ever so slightly, to look past the door. His eyes took in Liesel at the table, red-eyed and rigid, the two cups, the cocoa pan on the hob. Then they came to Nadia in her baggy Brightline tunic, standing against the bookshelf with her hands loose at her sides, and stayed on her.

She watched him do it. The small tilt of the head. The slow, careful draw of breath, the one every wolf in Tessarine took a dozen times a day without noticing. She watched him find the room full of people, the cocoa, the tulips in his own hand, the cactus plants, the heat from the radiator, Liesel's fear, Saoirse's calm.

And between them, a tall quiet blank.

His smile didn't fade. It changed, grew thinner and more delighted, like a collector's who has turned over a stone and found the missing piece of a set.

"Well," said Bastian Nkemelu-Frost. "Look at you."

"I'm the cleaner," said Nadia.

"You are not." He put the tulips down on the doormat, gently. "The Director said you'd turn up eventually. He's kept a place for you. Number eight, in the book. He'll be thrilled." He raised his phone, and in the small blue glow she saw that he'd already begun typing. "I'll just let him know where you are. It'd be rude not to."

There was a crash from the stairwell below, loud as a dropped piano.

Then a voice, gloriously, floated up from the street, shrill with outrage: "Oi! Whoever parked this car on a bakery van's dent! That's *my* dent!"

Bastian's thumb paused over the screen.

And Saoirse, who had spent a career teaching trees to survive in bad soil, picked up the cast-iron frying pan from the hob and hit him with it.