The glasshouse café on Marl Terrace had been built inside the shell of a Victorian palm house, back when the Strata was still a rumour and the canyon was a place you went to for the view. Now it sold thirteen-dollar flat whites under iron ribs and ferns the size of cars, and the tables were arranged so that no one could hear anybody else's lie.

Nadia arrived at five to ten with Kaveh a pace behind and a lie ready: that she had come to buy a birthday present. It was a bad lie. She had been awake since four. Toby had suggested a wire, then a disguise, then, at three in the morning, that they simply move to another country, and she had said no to all three and then lain in the dark composing the speech she would give the person on the other end of a gold-foil ring.

The person was already there.

She sat at a corner table behind a wall of ferns, a tall woman in a pale linen coat, folded in a wicker chair like a deckchair put away for the winter. Thirty-two, perhaps. Fine brown hair cut straight at her jaw. A face that kept its weight in the eyes. On her right thumb, a flat gold band, thin as a wire.

Kaveh stopped.

"Odile," he said.

"Kaveh." She did not get up. Her voice was low and rough, unused. "You've lost weight. It doesn't suit you. Sit down, you're drawing attention, you both look like you're about to hand me a summons."

"Are we?"

"Probably." She poured from a glass pot into two cups she had already set out. "I took the liberty. It's chamomile. I won't be drugging anyone, I promise, my family has done enough of that."

Nobody drank.

"You're the one with the hatbox," said Nadia.

Odile turned and looked at her, and her whole face changed, a slow, shocked softening, like watching a locked house find a key. "You've got his hands," she said. "Pablo's. I'd know them anywhere. He used to hold the pen like that, as if he was afraid of hurting it."

Nadia sat. She had not planned to. Her legs decided.

"You killed him," she said.

"No."

"You paid him, and six weeks later he's dead on the floor of a clinic."

"I paid him a quarter of a million because my mother said to, and I stood in his waiting room for an hour while he said no and no and no, and then he said yes, because you were failing your thesis and he couldn't bear it." Odile's hands lay in her lap, very still. "I've thought about that waiting room every night for three years. I did not kill your father, Dr. Quispe-Halloran. I think someone else did. And I think they would like to do it again."

The ferns dripped. A waiter in a green apron went by with a tray of croissants, glanced at the three of them, and, wisely, did not stop.

"Start at the beginning," said Kaveh.

"The beginning." Odile gave a short breath that was not quite a laugh. "My sister cannot bond. That's the beginning. It isn't anything wrong with her, she's perfectly healthy, it's only that Liesel is, and always has been, entirely uninterested in men. Or, I should say, in men who are wolves. She has a person. Has had for eleven years. A human woman, a kind, quiet landscape architect who lives in a rented flat in Glassrow and does not know the Ostergaard Tenancy exists."

Kaveh's face did not move. Nadia, watching, saw something behind it close like a door in a long hall.

"You can't register a bond with a human unless your Tenancy permits it," Odile said. "And the Council seat passes through a bonded heir. Liesel is the heir. She is also the only one of us who can hold the Tenancy together, and my mother would sooner see the seat sold than see her wed to a human. So Mother wanted a bond. A good one. A respectable one. She chose you, Kaveh, because you were sensible and good and would never have looked at my sister the way a man looks when he wants to be loved." Her voice cracked on the last word, and she held it, as if it were an ache she'd made peace with. "She went to Pablo for the third note. I took the money. And my sister drank the tea, and thought it was only the paperwork of a very large family."

"So Liesel knew," said Kaveh, softly. "About the bond."

"She knew it was an arrangement. She did not know it was a forgery. She thought the Assay would simply be a formality. My mother told her that her nose was the one thing a bond could not get wrong, and so a bit of help was only help." Odile looked at him, and the old family steel was in her. "She did not know about the second dose. She did not know there was a dose at all, not until last month, when she found my mother's chemist's receipts in the study and asked what they were. Mother told her they were a tonic. Liesel believes she has been making you a tonic for three years, Kaveh. She thinks she's been looking after you."

The hush that followed was the kind in which a person could watch another person decide not to break a cup.

"And the suppressant?" said Nadia.

Odile's gaze went to her. "I don't know what you mean."

"In the tea. Alongside the second dose. A smell-dulling agent. It stops him from noticing the forgery on test mornings."

"That," said Odile slowly, "was not in my brief."

"Then someone else added it."

"My mother's chemist is a man named Dr. Fenwick Okoro-Lund. He has an office on the Strata. He is the one who took your father's recipe from me, after Pablo died. I never understood why he wasn't asked to make it himself." She frowned. "I assumed Mother simply wanted the original author silenced. A neat and bloodless sort of woman, my mother. She says it is only good manners to tidy up after a job."

Nadia heard the sentence land twice, once in her ears and once, much later, deep in her chest, in a place that had been empty since the funeral.

"The notebooks," she said.

"Ah." Odile reached into her coat and drew out a small brown envelope, no larger than a postcard. She set it on the tablecloth. "I'm not giving you the book. Volume ten. It's in my safe, and it is the only thing in this city that keeps me alive, so I'm sorry, I won't part with it yet. But this is the first page. In his hand. Dated the week he died."

Nadia's fingers closed on it before she'd decided to move.

The paper was soft with age. Her father's handwriting, small and slanting and apologetic, ran across it in blue ink: a formula, a drawing, and at the bottom, underlined twice, a sentence she read three times before she could breathe.

*They will come for the scentless ones next. D.A.N. knows what we are.*

"D.A.N.," said Kaveh quietly.

Odile was already standing. She laid a bill beside the pot, as if she'd been leaving for a long time.

"My mother is the one offering fifty thousand for the Chandler's name," she said. "Not to hurt you. To meet you. She wants the recipe, and she wants the chemist, and she is a woman who gets what she wants. You have perhaps a week." At the fern curtain she turned back. "Don't tell Liesel what you know. Not yet. She is a good person, Kaveh. She is also a very good liar, and she's been lying to herself for so long she no longer notices the weight."

She went out, her coat trailing in the green light, and the café closed over her like water.

Nadia looked down at the page in her hands.

*The scentless ones.* Plural.

Beside her, very quietly, as though he were afraid of waking something, Kaveh said, "You said you were the only one."

"I thought I was."

"So did I," said Kaveh.

They sat there until the waiter came to ask whether they wanted anything else, and Kaveh said no with such complete courtesy that the boy apologised and left. Outside the glass, the terrace filled with the lunchtime crowd: Strata office workers in lanyards, a woman pushing a pram with a dog riding in it, a group of teenage wolves in school blazers arguing over a phone. All of them with noses. All of them walking past a woman who couldn't be read, in a city that had just told her she was one of a kind, twice.

"You are shaking," said Kaveh.

She looked at her hand. It was true.

"Cold," said Nadia. "It's a greenhouse. Obviously it's a cold greenhouse."

He took off his jacket, shook it out once, and set it around her shoulders, the way you would with a stranger on a station platform. It was heavy and warm and it smelled, to her, of nothing, which was the sort of thing she'd never been able to explain to anyone: that she knew only by the weight of the cloth that a man had worn it. She did not take it off.

"Your sister-in-law," she said, "is the one who's been feeding you."

"My bonded mate's mother," said Kaveh. "Liesel is, as of this morning, a woman who has been lied to by her family, and who has lied to me, and who did not mean to do either. I have no idea what I am entitled to feel about her."

"What do you feel?"

"Tired," he said. He looked at the page in her hands, at the blue ink and the apologetic slant. "And, I find, unexpectedly, relieved. I spent three years wondering why I was never able to want her. I thought something in me was broken. I thought it was a defect of character, a lack." He breathed out. "It turns out that I was the only one in the room who wasn't pretending."

It was such an odd, stripped thing to say in a café with a person he had known for a week that Nadia could think of nothing to say back. She folded her father's page, once, along its old crease, and slid it into the inside pocket of the jacket she was wearing.

"Then let's find out who D.A.N. is," she said, "before somebody else finds me."

"D.A.N.," said Kaveh. "I have only one candidate. Dov Albrecht-Nwosu." He rose. "But the man who has always called himself my friend would have no reason to kill a chemist. Unless he were afraid of what the chemist knew."

"Afraid of what?"

"That is the question, I think." He held out a hand to help her up, and she took it without thinking. "Whether the Director of the Assay Office has been guarding the integrity of the nose, or whether he has been guarding a secret about what happens when a nose is wrong."

The pot of chamomile went cold between them.