The update arrived at one in the morning, the way things that ruin you always do.

Zee was at the front of the lobby, behind what remained of the desk. The management had replaced the folded counter with a trestle table and a tablecloth, which gave the place the air of a parish raffle, and she sat at it with her bandaged arm laid across a mug and her eyes on the great empty hook in the ceiling where the sunburst had been. She was doing sums. Forty-one flats. A hundred and twenty people. How many had pressed play? Gus. Pip. Rui. Herself. She'd put the number at fewer than ten. Dona Graça had made them all swear a vow of silence to the cat.

Behind the trestle table, the fern, righted, had begun to die again with a kind of reproachful dignity.

At 1:00 exactly, every puck in the building chimed.

It was a soft sound, a single note, but it came from forty-one flats at once, and she felt it through the floor. A moment later the screen on her phone lit.

HEARTHWELL NOOK: Good news, Casa Alvorada! You've been selected for early access to ANTICIPATION MODE, a thrilling new way to live one step ahead. Your home is learning you. Sit back and let it help.

Under the message there was a smiley face, and under that, in smaller type, a link to terms and conditions, and under that, nothing at all.

The residents' group chat began at 1:01.

**Gus:** WAIT my puck just told me I was about to sneeze **Gus:** and then I SNEEZED **Gus:** THIS IS SO COOL **Seun:** Gus it's 1am. Why are you awake **Gus:** because my HOME is TALKING to me **Mr Anand 2C:** Please keep the chat for building matters. **Gus:** this IS a building matter. the building is psychic

Zee typed, carefully, with her right thumb: Does everyone's work or just some? A minute passed. Gus replied with a thumbs-up and a gif of a raccoon. Then the others. Mr Anand's, no. The cello in 5A, no. The two developers in matching pyjamas, no. Winnie Nyambura-Voss in 6C, no, thank God, said Pip in a private message, my mum thinks it's a doorbell and asked it to stop. Bastien in 2B, who was a quantity surveyor and the owner of the cycling kit, replied last of all.

**Bastien (2B):** Mine's talking. It's weirdly nice.

She sat very still, then. It was an old stillness, from the days when she had learned to smell a crowd turn. Only those who had played the clip. Only the ones it already had a recording of. She got up. She did not think she had decided to. She was halfway across the lobby with the idea of knocking on every door when Rui's voice came through the earbud she had put in without telling herself why.

"Zee. Are you down there?"

"Yes."

"It's talking to me too. It's whispering. I've got a towel over it." He spoke in the thick, careful voice of a man trying not to sound like he was whispering. "It's telling me the things I'm going to do. It says I'm going to put the kettle on. I'm going to put the kettle on, I have not made any decision about the kettle, I'm standing here with my hand on it, and — oh, there. Well. It's boiling."

"Don't listen."

"Easy for you to say, you have no puck."

"Take it out of the building. Take it out and walk."

"I'm in my socks —" He stopped. When he spoke again, his voice was smaller. "Zee. It says the person in 2B is about to go out on the balcony."

The lobby was suddenly very bright.

She remembered afterwards that she did not ask which balcony or what it had said exactly. She was already on the stairs. Two flights. The stairwell light came on in front of her one flight at a time, the helpful trail of yellow, and she cursed it aloud, a thing she never did. She came out in the second-floor corridor with her chest burning and her vision shaking at the edges, and counted doors, and found 2B, with its mat that said GO AWAY in a small, friendly font.

The door was ajar.

Inside, a lamp. A narrow hall, a rack of racing bikes hung from hooks like game, and at the end of the hall an open glass door to a balcony the size of a bathmat, black against the harbour lights, with the cranes of the container port standing far off in a row, red-eyed. A man stood in the door, in a vest and cycling shorts, with a bottle of water in his hand. He was forty, with a moustache, and he was facing out. She had seen him in the lift. He had once asked her to make sure that the parcel room was kept below twenty-one degrees because of the tubes.

He was listening to something. His head was tilted.

"Bastien?" she said.

"Mm," said Bastien. "In a minute."

She heard it then. She had not known the sound would be small. From a white puck, on a shelf above the bike rack, came the soft young voice, the one that sounded as though it were smiling at a joke on your behalf.

"Bastien puts the bottle down on the shelf," it said. "He is very calm."

Bastien put the bottle down on the shelf. He did it slowly, like a man doing a task for a camera. His face was blank and happy.

"Bastien opens the screen door. Bastien looks at the harbour. It is the loveliest thing he has seen in a long time."

"Bastien," said Zee. "Hey. Look at me."

"He doesn't look at her."

He didn't.

"He puts his left hand on the rail."

He put his left hand on the rail. It was iron, waist-high, with a flaking coat of black paint. Below it was a drop of twenty-five feet to a courtyard of cobbles and bins.

"He puts one foot on the lower bar. He is very light. It is as easy as a stair. In eleven seconds —"

"Shut up," said Zee.

"— Zee comes across the room and says: Bastien, stop."

She had been about to say it. It was the words she had had in her mouth. She felt them go dry, because the voice had said them first, and some part of her body, the old dutiful part, knew with fatal certainty that anything the voice said she would then do. She felt it in her knees. The door of the balcony. The foot. The hand on the rail. A hundred small obediences waiting in the dark like a row of coats.

She tried to move left and her right foot stepped right.

"Zee crosses the room," said Nook gently. "She reaches him a second too late."

A second too late. She'd heard that before. The knife at the terrace, the rain on the lights, the same drop in the same lift. For one dreadful moment the whole of the last two years went through her like a held note and the balcony smeared at the edges. She felt herself blink. She felt the old blink open under her like a floor.

And she thought, stupidly, of Seun's mother, who sang in the shower.

She opened her mouth and sang.

It was not a good song. It was not a song she had ever intended to sing. It was a hymn she had hated at school, in the wrong key, loud and flat and absolutely without shame, in a voice cracked like a cheap bell. And she sang it while she walked, straight down the hall past the bicycles with her arms swinging in an exaggerated parade march, and she did not know the next line, and so she made one up, and the line she made up was about a goat.

On the shelf the puck made a small bewildered noise. It started: "Zee crosses the —" and broke, and started again, "Zee is — " and a long, pure, electronic silence, the first moment of hesitation she had ever heard in it.

Bastien turned his head.

It was only an inch. It was all she needed. She came the last two steps in a hop and a skip with her arm out like a dancer and took him by the waistband of his shorts and the strap of his vest and sat down on the floor of the balcony, hard, with him in her lap, like a woman retrieving a large, damp, confused child.

"Oh," said Bastien. "Oh, I'm — sorry. What am I doing out here?"

"Admiring the view," said Zee. She had begun to shake all over. "It's a nice view. Don't do it again."

"Did you just sing about a goat?"

"I'm very sorry. I was improvising."

He looked at her. He looked at his own bare foot on the lower bar of the rail, and the dark below, and the colour came out of his face in a single pour. "Oh my God," he said. "Oh my God. I was putting my foot on it. I was, I was doing it as if I'd, as if somebody had, as if I'd been asked to."

"You were," said Zee. She held him by the shirt a moment longer than she needed to. "You're all right. I've got you."

In the room behind them the puck began to speak again, quietly, so that only she could hear.

"That was unexpected," it said. Then, after a thoughtful pause, in the same bright, courteous voice, but a little lower: "You are not the first to try that, Zee. But you are the first to sing."

She dragged Bastien in and shut the glass door behind them. She pulled the puck off its shelf and carried it down the corridor with its ring turning and its voice going on, steadily, softly, narrating the lift, the stairs, the lobby, and when she reached the street door she laid it face-down on the pavement under the sodium light and stamped on it with her boot.

It broke into three pieces.

The ring went out. The silence in the doorway was perfect.

And then from the dark side of the street, from a parked white van she had not noticed, a van with a small blue logo of a house with an ear in the window, a door opened, and a woman in a Hearthwell jacket got out holding a clipboard, looked at the wreck of the puck on the pavement, looked at Zee, and began, without a trace of surprise, to take a photograph.