"Rule one of cleaning," said Sol, hauling a mop bucket into the service lift, "is that nobody looks at the cleaner."

"Rule two?" said Nadia.

"Nobody looks at the cleaner's friend either. Hold the bucket. No, the other way, you're doing it like a woman who's never cleaned anything."

"I clean things all the time."

"You clean *glassware*, Nads. It's not the same. Glassware doesn't have a personality." Sol fixed her cap, a navy thing with a stitched logo for a firm called Brightline Facilities, and looked at her reflection in the brushed steel doors. Under the cap her braids had been tucked into a hairnet. She grinned. "God, I look like a trustworthy citizen. It's disturbing."

It was a quarter to eleven at night, and the lift was rising through the Strata like a bubble through syrup. Nadia wore a Brightline tunic two sizes too large and a pair of rubber gloves that smelled of chlorine and old pennies, and her pulse, to her private fury, was audible in her ears. Dr. Fenwick Okoro-Lund kept a private practice on the nineteenth floor of Halcyon Court, an office tower full of dentists and tax lawyers, and the Brightline contract, according to the Chirrup gig board, had come up for subcontract that afternoon at a rate of forty dollars an hour.

"Does Kaveh know?" Sol asked, in the careful lightness of a person who already knew the answer.

"He knows I'm doing something. He doesn't know where."

"Because he'd stop you."

"Because he'd come," said Nadia. "He'd put on a suit and show his Registry badge to the security desk and ask very politely to see the doctor's files, and the doctor would call his lawyer, and by morning the Director would know that the best nose in the Registry had been round asking about tea."

"And that'd be bad."

"That would be the end of everything."

"And me, I'm just a courier with a mop." Sol blew a bubble in her gum, popped it. "I love this. I've been waiting two years to do something properly criminal that isn't a parking ticket."

"You deliver forged bond doses."

"That's *delivery*, Nads. This is *trespass*."

The lift opened on nineteen.

Halcyon Court at night smelled of carpet shampoo and warm photocopiers. The corridors were lit in a dim amber glow that made everyone look faintly cooked. At the far end, behind a frosted-glass door with *F. OKORO-LUND, MD, PHARMACOLOGY & WELLNESS* in gold, a thread of light showed under the sill.

They stopped.

"Someone's in," Sol whispered.

"Or it's a lamp."

"Nadia, nobody leaves a lamp on in a tax tower. It's against the religion."

Nadia held up a finger. In the pocket of her tunic she had a small black unit the size of a cigarette lighter, a skeleton key, as Toby called it, a device to which she owed her entire criminal career and about which she preferred not to think. She crossed the carpet on rubber soles. The lock clicked. The door gave an inch, no more.

The reception area beyond was dark and expensive, with a sofa nobody had ever sat on and a plant dying quietly of neglect. The light came from the inner office. Through the gap, a voice murmured, thin and broken, a man talking to himself.

"...no, no, I told him it was only the one batch. Only the one. It was never supposed to go to the Registry man..."

Sol mouthed, *Okoro-Lund*.

Nadia pressed her palm flat against the inner door and pushed.

Dr. Fenwick Okoro-Lund was a small, soft, grey-haired man in a cardigan with leather elbows, crouched on the carpet behind his own desk with a packing box in his arms. Files lay in drifts around him. A shredder in the corner chewed noisily on a bundle of papers. When the door opened he shrieked, a very high, very clean sound, and flung the box in front of his face, and out of it spilled forty or fifty small brown envelopes, each labelled in a neat clinical hand.

"Please!" he cried. "Please, I'll tell you, I'll tell you everything, I only did what I was told!"

Nobody moved.

Sol, in her Brightline cap, said, "Evening. We're here about the bins."

The doctor stared at her. He looked at the cap, at the bucket, at Nadia's enormous rubber gloves. His mouth worked. Then, slowly, as the logic of the situation assembled itself behind his eyes, a long ragged sob came out of him, and he sat down on the carpet with the box in his lap, and put his face in it.

"They're going to kill me," he said, muffled. "They killed Pablo, and Wren, and now they've sent cleaners."

"We are cleaners," said Sol, reasonably. "Really, though."

Nadia crossed the room, knelt, and took the nearest envelope out of his box. On the front, in tidy block capitals: *O-B / Ostergaard-Banda, L. / Dastgheib, K. - Annual - Leaf (R)*. She turned it over. Inside, a card, a date, a quantity. The suppressant was entered as a separate line, its dose in neat milligrams. At the bottom was a signature, a rapid looped hand, and the single initial *D*.

She held it up where he could see.

"Who is D?"

The doctor raised a face wet with tears. His eyes went to the envelope, then to Nadia's face, and then, with sudden astonishment, he drew a breath through his nose, a long, wolfish, helpless sniff, and she watched him get nothing.

"You," he said. "You're not... there's nothing on you."

"Who is D?" said Nadia.

"I thought you were him. I thought they'd sent the girl with the... there's another one. Another like you." His voice went high. "He said you'd come. He said they always come, in the end, the scentless, because they can't stand not to know. He said when you came, I should call, but I'm not going to call, I swear I'm not going to call, I'm going to take the first train to Aldermoor and live on a goat farm and never write another prescription as long as I live."

Sol had gone silent. She had taken off her cap, and was holding it against her chest, and Nadia knew without looking that she was not thinking about forgeries.

*Another like you.* For twenty-nine years she had thought of herself as a mistake of the skin, a quirk on a birth certificate, a thing her father had explained away as "bad luck with the genes" and never mentioned again. She had built a trade on it, a profession, a life of careful small deceptions with the one feature that made her singular. And now a weeping man in a cardigan was telling her that somewhere in this city another person sat in another room, unreadable and alone, and that someone had been keeping a file.

She put it away. She would feel it later, in the bath, probably, or on a tram. Right now she had a man on the floor and a minute and a half, and in her experience the second thing never lasted.

"Who said?" said Nadia, very gently. Something in her voice had steadied; the technical calm, perhaps, the voice of the person doing the sum. "Who is D? Fenwick. Who is paying you?"

"The Director," whispered the doctor. "The Director of the Assay Office. Dov. He pays my retainer, he has since before Pablo. He brought me the Ostergaard job. He said it was a favour to the family, and to the Registry, and that the suppressant was a precaution, to keep the auditor's nose from..." He swallowed. "He said Kaveh Dastgheib was too good. He said a man like that would find it eventually, so we had to blunt him. He was always so reasonable, so kind. He said no one would be hurt."

"And Pablo?"

"I wasn't there."

"Fenwick."

"I wasn't *there*. But I know what he said, the week before. Dov said Pablo was a loose end, and Pablo had a daughter, and she'd be a loose end too, unless she..." The doctor stopped. His eyes, which had been trained on her face, flicked past her shoulder.

At the door, the amber light changed. A shadow had filled the gap.

"Unless she what?" said a mild, pleasant voice. "Please, Fenwick. Don't stop on my account."

Nadia turned.

The man in the dark jacket from the shoe-repair doorway stood with one shoulder against the frame, a tall, long-armed man with a face like a well-kept knife. He had a paper cup of coffee in one hand and the other casually in his pocket. He smiled at Sol, and at Nadia, and at the dying plant.

"Evening," he said. "I do hope I'm not interrupting the bins."

The shredder, in the corner, finished its last page, and went quiet.

"Anselm Quigley-Osei," said the man, and offered a nod instead of a hand, since both of Nadia's were gloved to the elbow. "I drive for Mrs. Ostergaard, when I'm not otherwise employed. She'd like a word with you, Dr. Quispe-Halloran. Over proper tea, at her house on the Rim, in comfort. The invitation was in the card. Sorry about the doorway. Winter's coming; I wanted to stand somewhere dry."

"You were watching my lab."

"Keeping an eye. It's a rough street." He sipped his coffee. "Also, since we're all friends, I should mention that a silver saloon with Assay plates has just come into the car park under this building. I rather think it's the Director. He's very punctual about his Thursdays."

Fenwick Okoro-Lund made a noise like a kettle.

"Why tell us?" said Nadia.

"Because Mrs. Ostergaard would prefer you alive and in conversation," said Anselm, "and the Director, I'm afraid, has other plans." He looked at his watch. "The goods lift is quicker than the stairs. I'd take the doctor, if I were you. He's the only one who knows where the bodies are kept, and some of them, I gather, are still breathing."

Down the corridor, with a soft electronic chime, the main lift began to rise.