The goods lift at Halcyon Court was the size of a wardrobe and smelled of bleach and old cardboard, and for the first eleven seconds of its descent nobody spoke, because all four of them were listening to the main lift pass them on the way up.

It was a very distinct sound. A hum in the shaft, a soft electronic click at every floor. Fifteen. Sixteen. Sol had pressed herself flat against the wall with her cap crushed in both hands. Dr. Okoro-Lund, wedged in the corner between the mop bucket and a trolley of toilet roll, was breathing through his mouth in short whimpers. Anselm Quigley-Osei stood in the middle with his coffee, and, as far as Nadia could tell, had not spilled a drop.

"Seventeen," said Anselm, pleasantly. "You'll want to be out of the lobby before he turns round and notices the cleaning cart's gone."

"You've done this before," said Nadia.

"Once or twice." He sipped. "Driving's a surprisingly broad discipline."

The lift jolted. The floor numbers on the little display blinked down through the teens, through ten, through the dead zone of the mechanical floors where no one went and a wolf's nose could not have told one cable from another, and settled at B2 with a sigh. The doors opened onto a concrete loading bay, strip-lit and echoing, a row of wheelie bins, a pile of flattened boxes. Somewhere far off, a ventilation fan turned over like a very slow heartbeat.

"Car's at the north ramp," said Anselm. "Two minutes if we walk. One if we don't talk."

"I'm not getting in your car," said Nadia.

"Mrs. Ostergaard would be very disappointed."

"Mrs. Ostergaard can be disappointed in the morning. I have a friend with a van."

"I have a van," said Sol, with enormous dignity, "that is technically a bakery's van, and I borrowed it on the strength of a favour I do not intend to explain. It's parked on Ledgerow Lane and it has a dent." She'd got her breath, and with it her voice. "Also I'm not leaving my doctor on the floor. I mean, the doctor. Fenwick. You're coming with us."

"I am?" said Fenwick.

"Unless you want to wait for the Director."

The doctor wept slightly and followed.

They went at a jog, five paces, six, past a row of bins and a forklift with a flat tyre. Nadia kept her eyes on the green exit sign at the far end of the bay and her mind on a single idea: do not run. Running was loud. Running told every wolf in a fifty-metre radius that you were frightened, and she knew exactly one thing about wolves, and it was that they could smell it on everyone but her.

Which meant that, in this particular corridor, she was the only one who could lie.

"Don't run," she said, low. "Fenwick, Sol. Walk. Look bored. I'll go first."

"Look bored?" Sol hissed. "I'm a lifelong criminal, I've never been bored in my life."

"Think about tax."

"That's worse."

Behind them, a long way back, the goods lift chimed. A door opened. A pair of footsteps began to cross the concrete, light, measured, unhurried.

"Ah," said Anselm, softly, "that would be our friend."

"I thought he went to the nineteenth floor."

"He did. He's rather quick." Anselm lifted his coffee, finished it, and put the empty cup in a bin with a sort of absent-minded neatness. "I'll hold him up. You three go through the fire door on the left. It'll bring you out in the bus depot on Ledgerow. The van's there. Don't stop for the light."

"You'll what?"

"Hold him up. A word, a cup of coffee, a few of the usual stories about traffic. He likes to be agreed with." Anselm gave her a look, mild and sorrowful, like a priest at a wedding he didn't approve of. "Dr. Quispe-Halloran, when I say that Mrs. Ostergaard would prefer you alive, it's not a figure of speech. She doesn't bluff. If you'd care to come to tea, the house is on Cormorant Rise. Take your time. Don't bring the doctor."

He turned, and walked back down the loading bay toward the sound of footsteps, hands in pockets, whistling something faintly cheerful and a little off-key.

They went through the fire door.

It opened onto a stairwell, then a narrow service passage lined with fire hoses, then a steel door that Sol put her shoulder to with a grunt, and then the night, in the wide, wet yawn of a bus depot, a dozen idling coaches with their lights off, a security booth with a sleeping man in it, and, at the far end, parked askew under a flickering sodium lamp, a small white van with a baker's name on its flank and a dent in its door the size of a fist.

Sol had the engine running before Nadia had shut the passenger door. The van pulled out, swayed, took the bus-lane gate with an inch to spare, and shot onto Ledgerow in a long, low cough of exhaust.

"Is he following?" said Fenwick from the back, among the flour sacks.

"Nobody's following," said Sol. "Everybody's very busy being nobody."

Nobody laughed. Nadia twisted in her seat and looked back. The street behind them was wet and orange and empty, a long ribbon of shuttered shops and one all-night kebab van. No silver saloon. No tall bald man in a pewter suit.

She breathed out, and found that her hands had gone to fists on her knees.

"Doctor," she said, in the voice that had comforted a thousand nervous clients, "you said there was another one like me."

From the back, a pause. A rustle of flour.

"I did."

"Who?"

"I don't know their name." He had stopped weeping. Something had come over his small soft face, a kind of exhausted clarity, the look of a man who has crossed a line and is now on the far side of it. "Not the living one. I know what he's afraid of. I know he keeps a register. A private ledger, in the Director's own safe. A list of people who can't be read. It isn't long. Seven names. Perhaps eight."

"Seven," said Nadia. The word felt strange in her mouth: it was a number, and a number was something she could hold. "You've seen it?"

"Once. The week your father died. I was in the Director's office to sign for a prescription, and he left the safe open, and I saw..." He shook his head. "I only remember the top. Because it was crossed through, in red. That was the newest. The first line, crossed out, with a date three weeks ago."

The van swung onto the river road. Down in the dark below the embankment, the water moved slow and glossy under the Floor's lamps, and above it, the whole canyon rose in its ranks of light.

"Whose name?" said Nadia.

"A woman's. A young woman, she'd have been thirty-five, thirty-six." The doctor's voice caught on a thread of something like grief. "Castellanos-Boyd. Wren Castellanos-Boyd. The Assayer who fell."

Sol hit the brake without meaning to. The van skidded, righted itself, and stopped in the middle of the road with its hazards ticking.

Nobody said a word. In the back, the flour settled.

Wren Castellanos-Boyd had been an Assayer. An Assayer was a wolf. Imelda had known her mother. Imelda had said *I knew her mother*, not *she was a wolf*, and it had never occurred to Nadia to ask.

"She wasn't a wolf," Nadia said at last. "She was never a wolf."

"She was the best nose in the Strata for eleven years," said Fenwick softly. "And the only person in the whole Assay Office, apart from the Director, who knew how very much she wasn't."

Her father's page. *They will come for the scentless ones next.*

And in her pocket, as the van's hazards ticked in the dark, Nadia's phone began to ring, and on the screen, with a picture she had never taken, a small photograph of a laughing woman in a pale coat, the name read LIESEL.

"I never saved that number," Nadia said.

"Then she saved it for you," said Sol, staring. "Pick up. Or don't. Actually, don't, that is deeply sinister."

She picked up.

"Dr. Quispe-Halloran." The voice was warm, low and smooth as poured honey, and so frightened that it hummed. "I'm so sorry. I know this is outrageous. Please, don't hang up. I'm not calling for my mother."

"How did you get my number?"

"Odile wrote it on the back of a coaster and put it in my coat. She does that. She thinks it's romantic." A breath that wasn't quite a laugh. "I know what's in the tea. I mean, I know it now. I found out this afternoon what it really is, and I've been sitting in my bathroom for six hours trying to decide whether to be sick. Kaveh's been drinking it for three years. I made it. I made it with my own hands and sat across from him while he drank it and told him it was luck."

"Liesel."

"And he trusted me. He trusts everyone. He does the crossword in pen." She was crying, finally, in a small, quiet, well-bred way, as if tears were a mess she would clear up later. "I can't ring him. I can't. I don't know what to say. I'm a coward, I've always been a coward, I just wanted to be allowed to love somebody. I thought if I was careful and kind I could keep everybody safe."

Nadia looked at the dashboard. Beside her, Sol had stopped chewing her gum and was staring straight ahead, very carefully not listening.

"What do you want from me?" said Nadia.

"I want to see you. Tonight. Not at the Rim, not at Mother's. At the flat in Glassrow. My, my person's flat. Her name is Saoirse. She's asleep." A swallow. "She doesn't know any of this. I've never told her. I want to tell her, and I want to tell you first, because you made the thing that did this to him, and I think you're the only person in the city who might understand what it is to build a life out of something that was never real."

"That's quite an assumption."

"I've read your file." She said it very gently. "Odile gave it to me. I don't mean to frighten you. I know what you are, Nadia. I know about your skin. I know the Director has a list, and I know you're on it, and I know my mother has known for years." The voice dropped to a whisper. "And I know, because I have a very good nose, that there is a man standing on the pavement outside Saoirse's building, and he has been there since six, and he is not one of ours."

Sol, at the wheel, put the van into gear without a word.

"Don't tell Kaveh," Liesel said. "Please. Not yet. I need to say it to his face, and I can't, not until I've said it to her. Come alone. Come now."

The line went dead.

For a long moment the hazards ticked in the dark. Down on the river, a barge hooted its low note, and somewhere in the flour sacks, the doctor began, very softly, to pray.

"Glassrow," said Sol. "That's twenty minutes."

"We shouldn't."

"No."

"It could be a trap."

"Definitely."

"It's the daughter of the woman who put a bounty on me."

"I'm a gambler, Nads," said Sol, and swung the van across two lanes of empty road toward the lights of the Strata. "I know a bad bet when I see one. I also know the only way I ever won anything was by turning up."

Nadia held the phone in both hands until it stopped being warm.