The Rim did not have streets. It had approaches.

Nadia learned this on the private funicular up from Marl Terrace, a glass car with leather benches and a screen that welcomed her to Cormorant Rise in six languages. Below them, the canyon dropped away in tiers, the Floor a brown thread, the Strata a spill of orange light. Above, the cliff-top gleamed like a row of expensive teeth. She had spent her whole life looking up at this. It had never occurred to her that it would look back.

Kaveh sat opposite her with his hands on his knees. He had changed his shirt. He had not slept more than four minutes since the sofa, and he held himself like a man carrying a glass of water through a crowd.

"Odile said she would meet us at the gate," he said. "She said Margit will receive us in the orangery. She will serve tea. It will be very good tea. You must not drink it."

"Because of the leaf?"

"Because it is a house where one learns, early, not to accept things." He considered. "Also the biscuits will be excellent. I recommend one."

The car slid into a station of polished stone. The doors opened onto a gravel drive, a row of clipped lime trees, and a house the colour of fresh cream with long windows and a roof like a folded hand. At the gate stood Odile in the same pale linen coat, one hand pressed hard against her ribs.

"They took it," she said, before either of them spoke. "I came down at six to check. The safe was open. Volume ten, my passport, and a box of her grandmother's jewellery. Gone. Whoever it was knew the combination."

"Who knows it?" said Nadia.

"Me. My mother." Odile's eyes were very bright. "And Liesel. It's our grandmother's birthday. Everyone in the family knows it. Nobody ever thought to change it."

Kaveh closed his eyes.

"She has taken the book," he said.

"I think she has taken it to the one person she believes can protect Saoirse."

Nobody said the name.

The orangery was a long glass room at the back of the house, hot and damp and bright, crowded with lemon trees in tubs. A table had been laid under the nearest of them: white linen, silver, a three-tiered stand of small cakes, and a pot with a thread of steam rising from its spout. Behind the table, in a high-backed cane chair, sat a woman of about seventy-two, small and straight, in a suit of dove-grey tweed, with a face like a closed fan.

Margit Ostergaard did not rise. She looked at Nadia for a long, steady, courteous moment.

"You are younger than I imagined," she said. "And taller. Your father was short. He had a stoop, from leaning over benches. I noticed it when I went to see him, though I was quite sure he did not notice me. Sit down, Dr. Quispe-Halloran. Kaveh, you too. Odile, bring a chair for yourself; do not hover. I have never cared for hovering."

They sat.

"You went to my father's clinic," said Nadia.

"I did. Twice. Once to ask, once to beg. I do not make a habit of the second." She lifted the teapot. "Milk? No. You are right to refuse. I have only the one pot, and I drank half of it before you arrived, so you may be sure of it. I am not, I assure you, in the habit of poisoning guests. It is bad for the lemon trees."

Kaveh said, evenly, "Mrs. Ostergaard. Where is your daughter?"

"I thought she was with you."

"She has been missing since two this morning."

"Then she is with her young woman, or she is in the arms of a drink." Margit set the pot down with exquisite care. "Liesel has always been theatrical. She disappears when she is distressed. She did it at nine, in the boathouse. I had the lake dragged."

"Mother," said Odile, "she took the notebook."

For the first time, Margit's composure moved. It was a tiny thing: a tightening of the hands on the napkin. But it ran through her like a crack through ice.

"I see," she said quietly. "She went to the safe."

"Yes."

"She was never any good at secrets. She cannot lie to herself and keep it up." The old woman looked, suddenly, a hundred years old. "I did not do this to hurt her, Kaveh. You will not believe that. But I wished you to know I did not."

"I believe you wished her safe," said Kaveh. "That is not the same thing as not harming her."

"No. It is not." Margit inclined her head, with a dignity that was somehow worse than defiance. "You have always been precise. It was why I chose you."

Nadia put her cup down. It was empty; she had not noticed.

"You put a fifty-thousand-dollar bounty on me."

"I put a fifty-thousand-dollar *invitation* on you. Anselm is not good at invitations." A thin, dry glint of humour. "I wished to meet the person who had inherited Pablo's work and could be induced to complete it. I wished to know whether you were a danger. I have decided you are not. You are, I think, a young woman in a very large room with a great many doors, and only just beginning to read the signs."

"Is that supposed to be kind?"

"It is supposed to be accurate." Margit leaned forward. "Dov Albrecht-Nwosu has been collecting people like you for thirty years. I have known it for twenty. I have not stopped him, because I benefited from his silence, and because the last time I asked for help against him, a man who loved me died." She did not blink. "Pablo did not have a stroke, Dr. Quispe-Halloran. He had a visitor. I saw the man go in. I did not see him leave."

The lemon trees breathed. A bee, lost, bumped slowly against the glass.

"Who?" said Nadia.

"I cannot prove it. A tall man in a coat. He had a key." Margit's hands lay flat. "I know that the week before, Pablo refused the Director a thing he had asked for. A counter-dose. A way for the Director to be able to unmake a bond as easily as he could make one. Pablo wrote it down and then refused to give it to him. That is volume ten. It does not defeat Tether. It *controls* it."

"Controls," said Kaveh.

"Whoever holds the counter-dose may decide, at any Assay, which bonds hold and which break." The old woman's eyes were hard as flint. "If my daughter has taken that book to Dov, she has given him the Council."

Odile made a small, strangled sound.

"Then we must find her," said Nadia, "before the renewal."

"At nine tomorrow, in front of the whole Registry." Margit nodded. "Dov will arrange it. He has always been a man for ceremony. He will have Liesel give him the notebook in front of her mother and her mate, and he will announce your bond, Kaveh, as renewed. And then in front of the same witnesses he will quietly offer Dr. Quispe-Halloran a place in his pilot." She smiled, thinly. "I should know. It's what I would do."

"What would you suggest we do?" said Kaveh.

"I? I would suggest," said Margit Ostergaard, "that you let me host your chemist at my house tonight. Under my roof, my Tenancy's protection, my staff. Dov cannot touch her on Ostergaard land. In return..." Her eyes flicked to Kaveh. "...she makes me a bond. A real one, as real as she can manage. Between my daughter and a woman named Whitcombe-Nair."

A long silence.

"You would allow it," said Odile slowly.

"I would allow anything that keeps my children alive." The old woman's voice cracked, a hairline, and was mended at once. "I have had thirty years of being right. I am tired of it."

"There is one more thing," said Margit, and from the pocket of her tweed jacket she drew an envelope, cream, creased at the corners, soft as cloth from handling. "I went into that clinic after the man had gone. I told myself I was looking for a witness. That was a lie. I was looking for the notebook, and I did not find it, and I found this on his desk instead, with your name."

She slid it across the linen.

Nadia did not touch it. On the front, in a small slanting hand she would have known at the bottom of the sea, were two words: *Para Nadia.*

"I should have given it to you three years ago," said Margit. "I did not, because I was afraid, and because I thought that the Quispe girl who had stopped speaking to her father would rather not have it. I was wrong about the second thing. I have been right about the first for a long time."

"You've had this for three years."

"Yes."

"You *read* it."

"I did not." The old woman's eyes met hers. "I am a monster, Dr. Quispe-Halloran, but I have limits."

Nadia picked up the envelope. The flap was not sealed. Inside was a single sheet of the clinic's headed paper, folded in three, and six lines of blue ink.

*Mija. I should have told you. You are not broken, you are not alone, and it is not a hole. I made a mistake and I am going to put it right. If I cannot, find the people who tell you plainly when they cannot do a thing. Those are the ones to trust. I am sorry about the money. I was always better with molecules. Your loving, stupid, Papá.*

She read it twice. Then she folded it along its old creases and put it inside her jacket, next to the page from the glasshouse, and kept her eyes on the lemon tree until the shape of it came back.

"Thank you," she said. It came out ragged.

"Do not thank me. Thank me when it is over." Margit looked away, to the glass, giving her, with great tact, the privacy of a woman studying the weather. "Kaveh, pass her a biscuit."

Kaveh passed her a biscuit. It was a very good one. She ate it, in four bites, with tears running down her face and not a sound.

A footstep sounded on the gravel. Then a second, a man's, running. Anselm Quigley-Osei came through the door of the orangery without knocking, hat in hand, breathless, his face for once undone.

"Madam," he said. "The taxi that took Miss Liesel from Glassrow. It has been found."

"Where?"

"The Assay Office annex. The service bay at Marrow House." He swallowed. "It was empty. There was a coat on the back seat, and a note. It said..." He looked at Kaveh. "It said, *Tell Kaveh I'm sorry about the tea.*"