The pan made a sound like a church bell dropped on a pavement, and Bastian Nkemelu-Frost folded onto the welcome mat with a surprised sigh, one hand still clutching his phone.

Saoirse looked at the pan. She looked at the man. "I've never done that before," she said, in the voice of someone reporting a rash. "Is he all right? I used the flat side."

Liesel had her hand over her mouth. Nadia dropped to her knees and pressed two fingers to his neck, found a pulse like a drummer on a fast train, and nodded.

"He's breathing. He'll have a headache you could build a house on. Shut the door."

"Shut the door," Saoirse repeated, and did, and then stood with her back to it and her eyes closed. "Nadia. Is this normal? In your line of work?"

"Not usually. Usually it's more paperwork."

From the street below, Sol's voice rose in a long and creative tirade about parking. It seemed to be addressed to nobody. Nadia realised she was keeping the neighbourhood's attention fixed on the van, and had to admire it, as she would a clever piece of glassware.

The phone had slid from Bastian's fingers. It lay face-up on the doormat, glowing. Nadia picked it up, and thumbed it awake.

It was locked.

"Face," Liesel said faintly. "They all use faces."

"He's unconscious."

"Then hold it up to him. It only knows eyes are open." She swallowed. "I've had to unlock Kaveh's. For the crossword."

Nadia thumbed back one of Bastian's eyelids, held the screen at the right height, and felt it give. The home page was a neat grid of boring apps: a bike-share map, a recipe book, an assay-rota tool, something called Tether Preview, version 0.9. She went to messages. The thread at the top was labelled *DIR. A-N.* The last entry, composed and unsent, a draft in grey, read: *6B Glassrow confirmed. Chemist here. Scentless. She's #8.*

The send button sat blue and waiting. Saoirse's frying pan had arrived about a half second before his thumb.

"He didn't send it," Nadia said. Her knees were shaking. She put her free hand flat against the floor. "He didn't send it."

"Delete it," said Liesel.

"If I delete the draft, that's all it takes for the Director to wonder. He'll have a status update missing. He'll ring, he'll message, he'll send somebody else. We need Bastian to *answer*." She scrolled back, quick, through the thread. It was short and dull and horribly clear. A list of times. A series of addresses. *Ms. O-B, Rim, 6:40 pm, nothing.* *Chemist's lane, observed, laundromat, nothing.* *Cleaners at Halcyon? Check.* At the top, three days old, a single instruction from Dov: *Do not touch the girl. When you find her, I want to see her first.*

"He's very polite," Nadia said. Her voice came out odd. "The Director. He types full sentences."

"He always has," said Liesel, with sudden bitterness. "He sends my mother a card at Christmas."

Nadia read the thread twice, found Bastian's rhythm, the short flat sentences, the full stop on every line, the way he never used a greeting. She deleted the grey draft, and typed, thumb steady, *False alarm. 6B is Ms. O-B and her partner, no one else. Chemist not here. Heading home.* She looked at it for a moment, and then, because Bastian was a man who did not use adjectives, she took out *False*.

She sent it.

Nobody spoke. Out in the street, Sol's rant went on, with feeling.

The phone buzzed in her hand eleven seconds later.

*Understood. Thank you, Bastian. Return to the office; leave Ms. O-B undisturbed. I will see her at the Founders' dinner on Saturday.* A beat, and then, a second message: *I wonder if you've heard anything from our friend at Halcyon.*

Her mouth went dry. She typed, *Nothing.*

A third message came. It was not a long one. She read it twice without breathing, then a third time, and then she held the phone out to Liesel, because she could no longer do it alone.

*Then I shall go and look for him myself. By the way, I've asked the day team to take a look at the laundromat on Cutbank Lane. I thought it best not to wait.*

Liesel's lips went white. "He's going to your lab."

"Toby's there."

"The man who does the sink?"

"The boy who does the sink." Nadia was already up. "He doesn't know. I told him to go to his mother's. He said he would, he swore he would, and he never does what he's told if there's tea and a standing desk, he said he'd *just tidy* the..."

She stopped. There was a stillness in her limbs like the stillness on a frozen pond.

Her phone, in her tunic pocket, buzzed. Once, twice, again, the exact rhythm of Toby having a thought, the rhythm that had said *panic, don't panic* for two solid years, and she pulled it out, and the first message had come in at 11.41.

TOBY: ok so TOBY: dont freak TOBY: theres two men in the lab TOBY: theyre being SO nice TOBY: they say theyre from the day team TOBY: nadia whats the day team

A pause, and then a final line, and she knew by its lack of punctuation that his hands had stopped working properly:

TOBY: they asked me to put the kettle on and then one of them stood on the autoclave tablecloth and i think he knows

"I need to go," said Nadia.

"Go," said Saoirse, immediately. "We'll deal with Bastian. We'll put him on the bench downstairs with a blanket and a note, I've got a lot of notes, I make them for the neighbours."

"I'm coming with you," said Liesel.

"You can't. They'll see you."

"I'm not their problem tonight. I'm the Director's favourite." She was on her feet, shaking, wrapping her creased coat around her shoulders. "He told Bastian to leave me alone. Which means I can walk into a lab full of his men and say, 'Dov sent me,' and they'll have to listen. Nadia. I owe Kaveh three years of tea. I owe you a father. Please. Let me start with something small."

Nadia looked at her, a woman who had been raised to be the most polished object in any room, standing in a flat that smelled of toast and cocoa and earth, in somebody else's borrowed slippers.

"Fine," said Nadia. "But you say nothing. Not one word. And if anything goes wrong, you run."

"I'm very good at running."

"She's terrible at it," said Saoirse, kissing her on the temple with great affection. "Go. Take the last of the toast."

They went down the stairs together, past the man in the bomber jacket's abandoned tulips, past a neighbour peering out of a door who closed it again with a click. The night was cold and sharp and smelled of rain. In the street, Sol had abandoned her tirade, and the van stood idling with its door ajar, and in the back, among the flour sacks, Dr. Okoro-Lund had fallen asleep with his head on a sack of rye.

"Cutbank Lane," said Nadia, climbing in. "Now. And Sol?"

"Yeah?"

"Whatever you were shouting about the dent. Do it again."

Sol grinned, with a savageness Nadia hadn't seen in her before, and put her foot down.

The van went down through the Strata like a dropped coin. Liesel sat wedged between Nadia and the door, because there were only two seats and the sacks of rye had claimed the rest, and for a mile or so she said nothing at all. The windscreen wipers ticked. A tram, lit up like an aquarium, slid by on its rail with three sleepy faces pressed to the glass.

"I should explain," Liesel said at last, "about the proposal."

"You don't have to."

"I'd like to. I was a bit abrupt. I'm told I do that when I'm frightened. I decide what needs to happen and then I talk very fast so no one can say no." She was looking at her hands. "Saoirse says it's why I'm good at boardrooms and hopeless at breakfast."

"It was a good idea," said Nadia. "That's what annoyed me."

"Was it?"

"A bonded human takes on her wolf's scent. A scentless woman on a Registry auditor's arm is invisible. It's elegant. It's practically a proof." She kept her eyes on the road. "But it's not mine to decide. It's his. Kaveh has been told for three years that his life was real, and then in the space of a week he found out it was a forgery and that he drank his own forger's tea, and now you want me to turn up and offer him another one."

"I wouldn't want you to *offer*." Liesel's voice was small. "I'd want you to ask."

"Ask a man to fake a love?"

"Ask a man," said Liesel, "who has never once in his life been asked."

The van went over a pothole. In the back, the doctor muttered in his sleep about goats.

"He's not what you think," Liesel said. "People think he's stiff. He's not stiff. He's very, very careful, because he decided at about nine years old that if he was precise enough, nothing could go wrong. His father was a gambler. Did you know? Lost the family flat on the Strata and they spent four years in a rented room on the Floor. Kaveh did his homework on the kitchen table and learned the Registry rules by heart, because he thought if he knew them well enough, he could keep everyone inside the lines." A small, helpless noise. "I fell in love with the Assay, you know. The way it made things simple. I thought if I could stay inside it, with him, I'd be safe."

"And?"

"And I'd have been safe. And he'd have been decorated, and I'd have lived on the Rim in a glass house, and neither of us would ever have known what it was to be wanted." She turned. In the light of passing street lamps her face came and went, like an old photograph being shuffled. "I'm sorry. I'm not usually this open. It's the, it's the hour."

Nadia thought, with an exact and dispassionate surprise, that she liked her.

It was the strangest sensation. Liesel Ostergaard-Banda was beautiful and rich and had been bred like a racehorse, and she had unknowingly put a man's whole life in a tea strainer for three years, and Nadia liked her anyway. She filed the observation next to several others she had made this week and decided not to examine.

"We're nearly there," said Sol.

Cutbank Lane came up out of the dark, orange and wet. The laundromat sign flickered. Every window on the street was black except one: the lab's, on the second floor, burning cold white, with a long shadow moving back and forth behind the blind. Parked outside, half on the pavement, was a silver saloon with Assay plates.

"That's his car," said Fenwick, from the back, waking with a start. "That's the Director's car. He's here. Oh God. Oh God, he's *here*."

"No," said Liesel quietly. She was looking at the plate, and the fine, hopeless lines of her face had set. "That's the day team's. Dov's is the other silver one. There are three." She reached for the door handle. "Remember. Not a word. He told them to leave me alone. I'm going to walk in as if I were afraid of nothing."

"Are you?"

"I'm afraid of *everything*," said Liesel Ostergaard-Banda, getting out of the van. "That's what makes it a performance."