Toby had cleaned the lab.

This was how Nadia knew it was serious. In two years she had seen him clean exactly three times: once for a fire inspector, once for his mother, and once on the morning after a date he refused to discuss. Now every bench gleamed. The pipette racks stood to attention. He had hidden the autoclave under a tablecloth, as though a tablecloth made it a table, and he had put on a shirt with buttons.

"He's a Registry wolf," Toby said, to the mirror above the sink, adjusting his collar. "He'll smell the fear. I need to project calm. I need to project a man who's never been afraid of anything, except maybe geese."

"He can't smell fear through a hood and two doors."

"You don't know that. You're not a wolf." Toby glanced over his shoulder. "No offence."

"None taken."

"Is it a kind of cologne? Should I buy cologne?"

"Toby. Breathe."

Down in the lane, a bell rang on the laundromat door. Heavy footsteps came up the stairs, unhurried, and stopped outside the lab. A knock. Three raps, evenly spaced, as if the knuckle had been measured.

Toby said, very quietly, "Oh, he knocks like a man with a clipboard," and went to open it.

Kaveh Dastgheib stood in the doorway in a charcoal suit and a look of courteous bewilderment, holding a small paper bag.

"Good evening," he said. "I was told there is a punch card."

Nobody spoke.

"I brought pastries," said Kaveh, and held out the bag. "I wasn't sure of the etiquette."

"They're from Imelda's bakery," Toby whispered to Nadia, with the horror of a man seeing the cutlery reorder itself. "He went to Imelda's. He walked into a bakery owned by the most dangerous woman on the Floor and *bought pastries*."

"Pilar vouched for me," said Kaveh mildly. "She says you are the one who tells people to stop checking their wrists."

"She told you that?"

"She told me quite a lot. She seemed to want it on record that your employer is, quote, a menace, and that I should be kind to her anyway." He stepped inside and looked about him with a still, absorbed expression, as though entering a church in a country he'd studied. Nadia watched his nostrils flare once and then hold. "That is a very strong smell."

"It's sodium hypochlorite," said Nadia. "And acetone. And Toby."

"I'm very clean," said Toby faintly.

"I can tell." Kaveh turned to him and, with grave formality, offered his hand. "Mr. Eze. I read your Chirrup account for most of Sunday. The sink photographs are very good. The lighting is considerate."

Toby shook the hand. He seemed to be deciding whether he'd been insulted or praised. "Thank you?"

"You should take them down."

"Yeah. Obviously. Right now." Toby grabbed his phone and fled to the far end of the room, where he could be heard, in a low continuous hiss, deleting eleven months of work.

Nadia took the pastries and put them on the bench beside the balance, which was against her rules, and a thing she'd stopped noticing herself doing around him. She took a small stool for him and a larger one for herself. She pulled a tray of sterile vials from the fridge and a notepad, and turned to face him, and found him looking, not at the equipment, but at the wall behind the bench, where a hand-lettered sign said NO FOOD OR DRINK IN LAB and below it, in Toby's handwriting, *this means you, Nadia*.

"You are very orderly," said Kaveh.

"I'm a chemist."

"I know. I was commending it." He sat. His back was straight and his hands rested on his knees. "I brought the other thing."

He drew from his inside pocket a flat tin, no larger than a deck of cards, painted with faded roses. The lid was dented. He set it on the bench.

"I took this from her kitchen on Sunday. A teaspoon. I told her I wanted to make the tea myself for once, so that I'd know the ritual." A pause. "She said, of course. She was very pleased. She told me where the strainer was."

Nadia felt the quiet in the room. Even Toby had stopped typing.

She opened the tin. The leaf was dark, curled and crumbly, with a faint scent of smoke and orange peel, nothing remarkable, a thing you'd find in a hundred Strata cupboards. She tipped a pinch into a clean dish, added solvent, swirled, drew a drop off into a vial, and ran it.

It took forty minutes. Toby made tea. Real tea, in mugs, which Kaveh accepted without comment and drank slowly. Nobody said anything particularly clever. Toby asked whether Kaveh's job was exciting, and Kaveh considered the question and said, "Last year I audited a bakery in Glassrow that had been registering imaginary employees. One of them was a cat." Toby asked how it ended and Kaveh said, "He was very well paid," and Toby laughed so hard he spilled his tea on the autoclave tablecloth.

It was, Nadia realised with a start, the most pleasant forty minutes she'd had in her lab in two years.

The machine chimed.

She got up. The peaks came up on the screen in their usual grammar. She read them the way she read most things, quickly, expecting to be unsurprised.

"Well?" said Kaveh.

"There's Braid." She tapped a peak. "Second-stage compound, the one that raises the note. Same impurity shoulder. It's my father's route, it's in the leaf. Very small dose, but in a hot infusion it'd be enough."

He nodded. He had been expecting this, and still she saw him take it in, a very small settling of the shoulders, as though a heavy case had been lowered onto a bench.

"And?" he said. "Your voice says there's an and."

"There's something else. Here." A second peak, smaller, with a long tailing foot. "I don't know it. I mean, I know what it is. Not the exact compound, the family. It's a mild olfactory suppressant. The sort of thing they use in hospital pharmacies for wolf staff on sensitive wards. It dulls the sense of smell. Not completely. A bit more than a heavy cold."

"For how long?"

"A dose this size? Two hours. Three at most."

"Two or three hours after the tea," he said slowly.

"Which is when you walk into an Assay room and a wolf stands over you and tries to read the note." She looked at him. "Kaveh. You're an auditor. You're the best nose in the building. The one person who could smell if your own bond was wrong. For three years, on the morning you're tested, you've been drinking something that makes you less able to notice."

He did not move. The sun had gone down behind the canyon wall and the laundromat sign outside threw orange light across his face, and for several seconds it was only that, light, on a man who had stopped breathing.

"Noted," said Kaveh.

Toby, who understood nothing about wolves but a great deal about people, stood up, went to the fridge, and quietly brought back the last of the pastries. He put one in Kaveh's hand. Kaveh looked at it as though it were a legal document.

"Eat it," Toby said. "It's a coping strategy."

Slowly, without ceremony, the Registry's best nose took a bite.

"It's very good," he said, hoarsely. And then, as if he'd been waiting to be given permission to be hurt, he put the rest down on the bench and looked at his own hands.

Nadia had spent her whole life learning not to touch people she couldn't read. It occurred to her that she could not read him either, not by smell, not by any instrument she owned, and that she knew exactly what he felt anyway.

"I'm sorry," she said.

"It is not your doing."

"No. It's just still a thing to be sorry about."

He nodded, once. Then he picked up the pastry again and finished it, in two neat bites, with the terrible dignity of a man refusing to waste food in a time of war.

He left at nine. Toby went with him as far as the stairs, in the manner of a host seeing off a diplomat, and came back with his eyebrows in his hair.

"He said thank you for the tea," he reported. "He said it to me. Like I made it. Like I'm a person who does hospitality."

"You are."

"I'm a person who deletes his own sink." Toby sank onto a stool. "Nadia, I need to ask you something and I need you to not do the face."

"What face?"

"The one where you say 'this is business' and shut like a shop." He picked up a pipette tip and turned it over. "You like him."

"I can't read him."

"That's not what I asked."

"It's the only thing I know how to answer." She began pulling the used vials into the waste tray, hands busy, ears hot. "He's a mark in a job and a witness in a case. I'm making him a dose. When it's over, he'll go back up the lift to someone who actually smells of something."

"Okay," said Toby. He did not look convinced. "Fine."

The street door banged below. Both of them froze.

Not the heavy, measured tread of Kaveh. These steps were fast, and then they stopped, and then there was a long wait. Nadia crossed to the window as quietly as she could and looked down into the lane.

Kaveh was standing under the laundromat sign, his head lifted, nostrils wide, in the stance of a hound that has caught a thing in the wind. Across the street, in the doorway of a closed shoe repair, stood a man in a dark jacket, entirely still. He raised one hand in a lazy salute and stepped back into the shadow. When Kaveh crossed to the doorway, it was empty, and the only trace was the faint rustle of a cat on a bin.

Kaveh came back to the laundromat door. He looked up, found Nadia in the window, and shook his head once: *gone*.

She was about to turn away when she saw the paper.

A small card, stuck in the laundromat door at eye level, just under the notice about lost socks. Kaveh peeled it free and read it. His face did not change at all, which was how she knew. He held it up for her to see, but the light was bad.

He came up the stairs again and handed it over without a word. It was cream stock, heavy, unsigned, printed in a clean modern face.

*Dr. Quispe-Halloran. Your father left more than nine notebooks. Tomorrow, ten o'clock, the glasshouse café on Marl Terrace. Come alone, or bring the auditor. Either way, come.*

Beneath it, in the corner, stamped in tiny gold foil, was a ring.