At 2:47 in the morning the parcel room at Casa Alvorada smelled of cardboard, wet umbrellas and someone's illegal cheese. Zee had been in there for ten minutes with her sleeves pushed up, fighting locker 14, which had decided at midnight that it contained a parcel it did not contain and would not open for anyone.

"Come on," she said to it. "Be a professional."

The locker kept its small green light on, like a smirk. Behind her the building made its night noises: the lift cables settling, a washing machine thumping through the wall of the laundry, the fridge hum of the whole Art Deco block that had been a shipping insurer's headquarters, then a hotel, then nothing, and was now Casa Alvorada, forty-one flats of people who had all moved to São Vidal to work remotely from somewhere with a sea view. Most of them had never seen the sea view. They worked in the dark with their blinds down and ordered noodles.

Her phone buzzed against her hip. Then buzzed again. Then went off like a hornet's nest, which meant the residents' group chat had woken up.

She wiped her hands on her trousers and looked.

The chat was called CASA ALVORADA RESIDENTS (NO SELLING!!!), a name Seun had chosen after a tenant in 5D tried to move a bicycle-parts business through the parcel room. Seun was her best friend and the community manager and the only person in the building who had never once asked her about the clip. He was also asleep, as far as she knew. He slept like a man falling off a roof.

The message was from 3A. Gus Brandão-Okafor, who did something with tokens and lived on energy drinks and had once asked her, sincerely, whether the lobby plants were real.

**Gus:** LOL guys is this the concierge?? 😭😭 someone sent me this

Under it, a video thumbnail. A black tailored back, a crowd, a man at a podium with his arm up in the light. Over it, in the fat white font that meant it came from Loop, the caption she could have recited in her sleep, and often did.

ZEE BLINKED.

Her thumb went cold. Not her hand. Just the thumb, the one that had landed on the button.

There was a rule she kept, the way other people keep a rule about not texting exes. She did not watch it. She had watched it in the first week, forty times, for work, to find where she had gone wrong. After that she had understood that nobody could find it, because there was nothing to find. A woman in a dark suit stands six feet behind the principal on a rain-slick terrace in Marseille. She turns her head toward a noise. The principal, Kasimir Aubry, thirty-nine then, the most-watched politician in Europe because he lived in front of a camera, is smiling at his own joke. A man steps out of the crowd. The woman in the suit turns back a quarter second late.

Thirty-four seconds. Two million remixes. A children's dance, even. You did a Zee when you looked away at the wrong moment. Waiters said it to each other in kitchens.

She did not press the thumbnail. Then she pressed the thumbnail.

The terrace. The rain. Kasimir's grin. The noise, a car horn, nothing. She watched her own head turn and felt the old drop in the stomach, the lift cut loose.

Thirty-four seconds. The man. The knife. Kasimir's mouth open on a word that was not a sound yet.

Then the image should have frozen on the thing everyone froze it on, her turning back, her face with that terrible wide attention, too late. That was where the original ended.

It did not end. It kept going.

The picture lurched. The rain stopped as if cut with scissors and the colour dropped out of it, and the angle changed, high and wide and slightly warped, the way a camera looks from a ceiling. She knew the angle. She had checked it herself her first night here, standing on the desk with a torch. It was the lobby camera. She was looking at the lobby of Casa Alvorada, at 2:48 in the morning, with the reception desk, the dead fern in its brass pot, the mosaic floor of blue and cream tiles laid in a pattern of waves, and the great brass sunburst light hanging over the middle of it all on its three chains.

The counter in the corner said 0:35.

At 0:36 the front door opened. A man came in sideways, weaving, an energy-drink can in one hand, keycard in the other. Gus.

At 0:38 he put the can on her desk. Her desk. The place she was standing right now, the exact brown ring where he would put it down.

At 0:40, the picture shook, and one of the three chains over his head let go.

She did not hear the sound, because the clip had none. That was the awful part. Just a dry flick at the top of the frame, and the sunburst tipping, like a plate, the heavy brass rim coming down toward the top of a head. At 0:44 the screen filled with it. At 0:45 the image went black.

Forty-five seconds.

Zee looked up.

The lobby was exactly the lobby. The fern. The tiles. The brass sunburst, four hundred kilos of cast and polished showmanship, hanging over the middle, one chain a fraction brighter than the others.

Behind her, in the street, a key scraped.

She counted. It was the oldest habit she had. Counted exits, counted hands, counted the seconds a thing would take. Eleven seconds from the clip, from where the door opened to the point the chain went. She had to be wrong. Clips did not do this. She was tired and had been staring at a locker, and the thing was a deepfake, a prank, a cruel kid's edit; somebody in the building had done it to hurt her.

But the can. The brown ring. Nobody could know the ring.

The front door opened.

Zee went over the desk. She was thirty-three and two years out of the job but the body kept the file, and it went without being asked. Her palm hit the wood, her hip slid, her boots landed on the tiles and she was already moving. Gus came in sideways with his can and his keycard, and he looked up with delight, a man who had been waiting all night to find someone awake.

"Zee! Did you see it, did you see the —"

"Move," she said.

"Why would I —"

She took him by the front of his hoodie and ran him backward the length of the lobby like a trolley. The can left his hand. Behind her something snapped, once, high and flat, the sound of a chain going. She did not look. She had been taught the cost of looking.

The sunburst hit the desk.

It did not sound like metal. It sounded like a car landing on a car. The brass rim bit through the old wood and the polished counter, folded the desk like a card, and sent a shrapnel of splinters and brass leaf across the tiles. Something sliced Zee's left forearm from the elbow to the wrist, a hot clean line. Gus screamed, a high happy-sounding scream. Then everything rang, and the fern, absurdly, tipped over in its pot and lay on its side on the waves.

The can rolled out from under the wreck and stopped against her boot. It was still full.

"Oh my God," said Gus, in a small voice, from the floor. "Oh my God. My can."

"That's the part you're upset about?"

"No. No, I'm — Zee, you're bleeding. You're bleeding on the tiles. That's — that's really a lot of —"

"Sit," said Zee. "Hands on your knees. Look at me. Don't look at the desk."

He sat. His hands shook on his knees. She pulled the scarf off her neck, the one she wore because the night heating was theatre, and wound it round her forearm. Her heartbeat was stupidly loud. It had a strange echo in it. For a second, in the black glass of the front door, her reflection moved a beat behind her: she tightened the scarf, and the woman in the glass tightened it a moment later, like a bad connection between two rooms.

Then the glass caught up. She told herself it was shock.

Upstairs, doors opened. Voices, a dog barking, somebody calling, "Hello? Was that thunder?" The lift began to hum. Seun would be on his way down in socks. In ninety seconds the lobby would be a crowd, and the crowd would be a story, and the story would have the word concierge in it.

She took out her phone. Her left hand shook; she let it. The Loop clip was still open on the screen, frozen on black, the counter reading 0:45.

She should not have pressed it.

But she had been a bodyguard, and bodyguards are people who go back and check the door twice.

She pressed play.

The terrace. The rain. The knife. The ceiling camera, the lobby, the open door, Gus and his can, the chain, the sunburst. She watched her own stupid shape cross the desk like a hurdler, in ugly grey, and take him by the hoodie, and carry him backward in the exact direction she had carried him, with eleven seconds of the lobby going quietly to pieces around them.

It did not stop at the crash.

The picture went on. The dust settled in the footage. The fern rolled, the can rolled, and the camera, as if tired of being a camera, tilted a degree down and held on the entrance.

The counter said 0:56.

The door opened, in the clip, and there was no one in the doorway. The street light showed an empty rectangle. And then something in the empty rectangle stood up out of the dark, a tall figure in a long raincoat with a thing round its neck like a pair of headphones, with a face she could not see well. It walked into the lobby over the broken brass. It stopped under the camera and looked up into the lens, directly, and it spoke. The clip had no sound. She read it anyway.

Hello, Zainab.

Down the stairs, Seun's voice shouted her name.

The counter turned over to 0:56 and the video stopped, and in the corner of the screen, small and white, it asked her whether she wanted to watch it again.