Toby handed round the tea like a man distributing relief supplies.

There were five mugs, none of them matching, and a plate of Imelda's day-old pastries that had begun to look like geological samples. Kaveh took his without comment, sat on the lab's single good stool, and did not drink. Liesel sat on the floor with her back against the cabinet, her ruined coat around her knees, still holding the folded pocket square. Sol leaned on her mop in the corner and ate a pastry with the grim concentration of a woman who had earned it.

Nadia sat at her own desk, on the chair Odalys had warmed, and put the memory stick in the lap of her tunic where nobody could see it.

"Number eight," said Kaveh.

"It's what the man at Liesel's said. Bastian. He's Dov's field liaison, he's a boy with a beard and a frying-pan concussion." She kept her voice flat. "Okoro-Lund says the Director keeps a register in his safe. A list of people who can't be read. Seven names, perhaps eight. Wren Castellanos-Boyd was on it. Crossed through in red. Three weeks ago."

Kaveh's eyes went to Liesel. "You knew this."

"I didn't. Not until tonight." She spoke to the floor. "I knew about Saoirse's skin. I've always known. She's the only person I've ever met whose face I could read and whose air I couldn't. It's why I liked her. It was *restful*." A thin, strained laugh. "I thought she was the only one."

"She's not."

"No."

"There are, by the doctor's count, at least eight of us," said Nadia, "and the Director knew about every one."

"Us," said Kaveh.

She hadn't meant to say it. She looked at the desk.

"I suppose," she said, "it's a thing you can say once you've been told it's a number."

Toby, hovering by the kettle with the lid of the biscuit tin in his hands, had gone into the particular silence that precedes a Toby opinion, and Nadia braced. "So that's what it means," he said. "The nothing. I thought it was soap. I thought you were just a really, like, hygienic person."

"I'm sorry I never told you."

"No, I get it, it's, I'm just. It's quite a lot." He sat down on a crate, holding the lid. "Are there more? Is it genetic? Do I have it? Because I smell like a person. I checked. I asked my cousin, she said I smell like Lynx and sadness."

"It's rare," said Nadia. "It's not catching."

"Good. That's good." He considered. "Sort of a shame."

She took the stick out of her pocket.

"This," she said, "is what Odalys put in my hand. It belonged to Wren. The label says *Register*." She turned the laptop on the desk toward them. "I haven't opened it. I wanted it to be the five of us. Four of us, and a courier."

"Three and a half," said Sol. "I'm mostly a mop."

The machine took a long time to wake. Nadia plugged the stick in and heard it chirp. A single folder appeared on the desktop. One file inside, spreadsheet format, password-protected, with a prompt that read, in a wry grey font, *the thing you said at the Christmas party*.

"Do you know what that is?" said Kaveh.

"I never met her."

"Try the biscuit tin," said Liesel from the floor, faintly.

They all turned.

"Odalys keeps a ledger of the biscuits. Everyone knows. Wren used to leave her notes in the tin." Liesel shrugged, sniffed. "At the Christmas party, there was a, someone said something about shortbread. Odalys told me once. It was the only time Wren was ever funny in public. She said she didn't smell like shortbread, but she'd eat it anyway."

Nadia typed *shortbread*.

The spreadsheet opened.

It was a small sheet and a plain one, a header row, eight lines, thirty columns of tidy data in Wren's hand: name, date of birth, address, last known location, *response to approach*, *placement*. Her eyes went down it quickly, the way she read a mass spectrum, looking for the shape before the detail.

There were eight names. The first was Wren's, and beside it, in a new cell, someone had typed *DECEASED* in red capitals. The second was a man named Osgood Fairweather-Lin, last known in Aldermoor, *declined, relocated*. The third, a girl, thirteen years old, whose surname was blacked out. The fourth and sixth were adults, each with the same terse note: *placed, Tether pilot*.

"Placed," said Kaveh, reading over her shoulder. "In Tether. The verification app. Dov's project."

"What would you need a scentless person for?"

"A control. For testing the sensor. The app reads a bond by chemistry instead of by nose. To calibrate it, you'd want subjects with no baseline." He stopped. His hand, on the back of her chair, had gone white. "You'd want people who couldn't be smelled. Who'd register as pure signal. People you could stand next to a bonded couple, and the sensor would tell you what's *theirs*."

"Employees," said Sol.

"Or prisoners," said Nadia, "if they said no."

She scrolled. The seventh line was her father's. *QUISPE, P., deceased,* a date three years back. *Father of #8.* And the eighth line was hers, with a note she had to read twice before it meant anything: *Chemist. Approach declined 2x (2022, 2023).* Her stomach went cold. "I didn't decline anything. I've never been approached."

"Your father was," Kaveh said slowly. "He'd have been approached for you. He'd have said no on your behalf."

"He didn't tell me."

"He was protecting you."

"He was *lying* to me." She heard her voice rise and pushed it down, but not quite in time. "My whole life, every time I wondered, he said it was nothing, he said I was fine. He was the same as me. He *knew*."

Nobody said anything. Toby slid, quietly, from his crate and pressed one of the mugs into her hand. It was lukewarm and tasted of nothing. She held it anyway.

"Nadia," said Liesel.

She was staring at the screen. Her face had become a color Nadia had seen on corpses. One slim finger came out and touched the third line, the girl with the blacked-out surname, then moved, almost against its will, to the fifth. Nadia leaned in to read it.

*WHITCOMBE-NAIR, S. DOB 11/03/92. Landscape architecture. Partner of Ostergaard heir (L.O.B.) 11 yrs. Approach declined 4x. Note: DA-N adds: do not engage while heir unbonded. Leverage.*

"Saoirse," said Liesel.

"She's number five."

"He's been watching her for eleven years." Liesel was on her feet. She had not seemed to stand. The pocket square lay on the floor. "He *knew*. He knew about my mother's plan before I did. He knew about the forged bond. He let it happen. He wanted me unbonded, so that she could be held over me, so that he could..."

"Liesel."

"I left her with a man on the floor."

"He's out cold."

"He's *out cold* in a flat in Glassrow with a woman whose name is on the Director's list with the word 'leverage' next to it, and the Director's last message to him said he'd go and look for Okoro-Lund himself." She was pulling out her phone, thumb shaking. "He said he was coming. He's on his way. He's probably already there."

The phone rang. It rang. It went to voicemail.

*"Hello, you've got Saoirse. I'm probably up a tree. Leave a message and I'll call you back after the aphids."*

Liesel dropped the phone.

It hit the lab floor with a flat plastic crack.

Kaveh moved before anyone else. He took Liesel by both shoulders, very gently, the way a man steadies a table in an earthquake, and said, "Look at me."

"I left her."

"You did what you could with the information you had. That's all anyone has ever done." His voice was quiet and absolutely level. "Is her building secure? A buzzer, a door lock?"

"A buzzer. And Bastian had the door open, we left it on the latch, Saoirse said the chain was—"

"Then the Director will not break in. He will ring the buzzer and be admitted by a woman who believes she is talking to a friend. That gives us twenty minutes, perhaps twenty-five." He released her, turned, and began to give orders in the tone of a man who had spent six years learning how and one week learning why. "Miss Aguirre-Tan, the van. Mr. Eze, you will remain here with the doctor and put the kettle on and lock the door behind us, and if anyone knocks who is not me, you will tell them you are a very boring soap manufacturer. Dr. Quispe-Halloran."

"I'm coming."

"I was about to say that you should remain here."

"I know. I'm coming."

He looked at her. The ugly strip light made his eyes very dark, and there was something in the set of his jaw that she had begun, to her annoyance, to be able to read: the effort of a man negotiating with himself, and losing, and being glad.

"If the Director is at that flat," said Kaveh, "he will know your face by morning. He may not need a nose to find you."

"If the Director is at that flat, he's looking at a woman in cactus pyjamas who has no idea what's about to happen to her." Nadia stood, and slid the memory stick into her sock, a habit she had picked up in her twenties and never explained. "I'm the only person in this room he can't smell coming."

For one second nobody breathed.

"That," said Kaveh, "is the most irritating true thing anyone has said to me this week."

"Do you want to argue, or do you want to drive?"

"I want," said Kaveh, "to have a different job." He picked up his jacket, and held the door. "Go."

They went. Behind them the lab went dark, and the last thing Nadia heard as she took the stairs three at a time was Toby's voice, thin and loyal, calling after them, "I'll keep the kettle on! It's a thing I can do!"

And in the walls, quite clearly, the laundromat's last cycle shuddered and stopped.