The fare gate at Switchback Nine declined Dez Novak-Obi for the third time, and behind her somebody started to hum.

It was a particular hum. Four notes, rising, then a pause where a person would normally come in with the words. She knew the words. Everyone in Ketterline knew the words. They went, *Oh no, oh no, he's covered in mud*, and they had been set to a dance beat by a student in the Terraces eleven months ago and had never quite died.

She did not turn round. She tapped her transit card against the reader again. The screen showed a red cross and RUSH SURCHARGE: BALANCE INSUFFICIENT, the Ketterline Cableway Authority's way of saying that between 7:30 and 9:00 it cost nine dollars forty to be carried up a cliff.

"Ma'am," said the attendant in the booth. "You can top up at the kiosk."

"I know."

"The line's kind of."

"I know," Dez said. She was six feet tall in her work shoes and had been told many times that this made her look patient. It made her look like a lamppost with an opinion. She stepped out of the queue, ducked under the strap of someone's cello case, and went to the kiosk, where the screen offered her a subscription to something called Perch Premium Transit and a chance to rate her experience.

The humming had spread. Two people now. She watched them in the black glass of the kiosk: a man in a cycling jacket and a girl with a lanyard, not looking at her, so carefully not looking at her that it amounted to a salute.

Switchback Nine was a concrete shelf cut into the canyon wall two hundred metres below the Rim, and every morning it filled with the middle of the city. Nurses, junior lawyers, children in the green blazers of Terrace Academy. Beneath the platform Ketterline Canyon fell away, ledge under ledge, apartment blocks the colour of toast, down to the river haze of the Floor. Above, the Rim, all glass, already holding the sunrise. The funicular ran between, a long yellow car on a steel cable, humming too, in its own way.

She had topped up thirty dollars and been thanked for her loyalty. She was walking back to the gate when she saw the man at the booth.

He was fifty, maybe. Work boots, a hi-vis vest with the logo of a drainage company, and a stainless steel thermos in his right hand that he held by the neck the way people hold a bottle in a bar. He was leaning into the booth's little window, talking, and the attendant inside was not an adult. She was a girl of sixteen or seventeen in a KCA polo two sizes too large, with a name badge that read TAMAR and a pencil behind her ear, and she had the face of someone who has been told in training that the customer is always right and has just met the exception.

"Sir, I can't override it," the girl said. "The gate decides."

"The gate decides," the man said. His voice was not loud. That was the first thing Dez noticed, because the volume was all wrong for what his shoulders were doing. "And who decides the gate?"

"I don't know. The, um. The Authority."

"The Authority." He looked around as if for a witness. Nobody in the queue met his eyes. Dez counted the exits out of habit: the stairs to the street, the service door behind the booth, the platform itself, which ended in a drop. Four steps from where she stood to the booth. Maybe five.

"Fourteen minutes I've been in this line," the man said. "My nephew's got a hearing at nine."

"I'm really sorry, sir."

"Sorry."

She saw the thermos lift.

There is a thing that happens to a person who has trained for years to stand in front of other people. The body learns the arithmetic before the mind does. Distance, angle, weight, the second and a half you have. For nine years Dez had had that arithmetic ready and had never once had to drop it.

Then eleven months ago she had looked at her phone.

It was an ordinary glance. A message from her mother, a voice note that would have run four minutes, and she had thought, *he's fine, the stage is fine, the crowd is behind a barrier*, and a bucket of river silt from the Floor, thrown by a man nobody had searched, arrived over the barrier and over her client's whole head. It should have been funny. It was funny; forty million people had agreed. But beside her client that day had stood his mother, Lorraine, who was eighty-one and who flinched backward off the edge of the stage. The video did not show that part, because the person filming was laughing too hard to point the camera down.

What the video did show, in full colour, was Dez. Standing there. Not moving. Not for one second, not for two, not for the three and a half that people had timed afterwards with a stopwatch overlay.

The thermos came down.

She did not decide to move. That was what she would try to explain later, to herself, in a bathroom, in front of a mirror, with bruises coming up. She did not decide. Her legs had simply gone, as they used to, and her left arm was up and her shoulder went into the gap between the man and the window, and the steel hit her forearm and then the point of her shoulder with a flat sound like somebody dropping a sack of flour on a table.

It hurt a great deal.

It hurt in the specific way of a bone being rung like a bell. Her vision went white at the edges. She heard the girl in the booth make a small noise, and heard the queue, now, all at once, inhale. The man was staring at her. The thermos had a dent in it.

And in the middle of the white, in the air in front of her face, in a typeface like the one on a cheap calculator, a line of text appeared.

COVER ENGAGED.

She blinked. It stayed. It was not on the glass of the kiosk or the gate. It was just there, a hand's width from her nose, pale green on nothing, and when she tried to turn her head it turned with her.

WEIGHT INTERCEPTED: 7. SOURCE: Intentional blow (thermos, stainless). TARGET: Tamar Ibekwe, 17. INTERPOSER: Adaeze Novak-Obi. VOLUNTARY: Yes. PAID DUTY: No. FAMILIAR (24h): No. CREDIT: +7.

Then the numbers rolled, in a satisfying slot-machine way, and settled.

RANK 1. CREDIT 7 / 20. BRACE 1. REACH 0. READ 0. MEND 0.

"Ma'am?" said the man. His voice had gone up an octave. "Ma'am, I wasn't. I didn't."

"I know," Dez said, because it seemed polite. Her left hand was shaking. She was fairly sure she was going to be sick, and also, absurdly, that she was being graded.

A hand took her elbow. It belonged to the man in the cycling jacket, the humming one, who had gone the colour of porridge. "Oh my God. Oh my God, you're, you're her."

"I'm someone," Dez said.

Two commuters, a big man in a nurse's tunic and a woman with a briefcase, pinned the fellow with the thermos against the booth, not roughly, like people afraid of doing it wrong. He let them. All the fight had gone out of him by the time the thermos stopped rolling. He slid down to sit against the concrete with his boots out in front of him and looked at Dez as if she had appeared out of the cliff.

Phones were up all down the platform. She could see the little red recording dots in a row, like a bank of candles.

*Oh no,* she thought. *Not again.*

But it was not the same. She noticed that with a part of her mind that was still counting exits. Eleven months ago she had been the one who stood still. Now she had a dent of throbbing purple rising on her forearm and a stranger's thermos rolling gently toward the edge of the platform, and the girl, Tamar, had both hands over her mouth and was not hurt at all.

"I'm okay," Tamar said through her fingers. "Are you? You're bleeding."

Dez looked down. There was a scrape on the back of her wrist the size of a postage stamp. She felt, distantly, that it ought to have been a lot worse. A steel thermos swung like that should have broken the forearm. In the corner of her eye the green text had shifted.

BRACE 1: WEIGHT RECEIVED 7. REDUCED BY BRACE: 5. DAMAGE: 2 (bruising, abrasion). NATURAL RECOVERY APPLIES.

*Natural recovery,* she thought. *As opposed to what? Unnatural?*

The platform guard arrived, a heavy, apologetic man named Curtis who said "Folks, folks" a great many times, then a transit officer. Someone told her to sit down, and she sat. She gave her name three times and her employer once. When she said "Plumbline Protection" the transit officer's face did a very small and cruel thing, because he had seen the video too. Everyone had.

"I'm off duty," Dez said. It seemed important to say it. The green text had said PAID DUTY: NO, and some part of her had already begun, with the instinct of a person who audits everything, to wonder what it would say if the answer were different.

It was 8:16 when they let her go. The man with the thermos, who turned out to be called Rudy Pak and who drove a van for a drainage firm and who had a nephew with a hearing, had been led off to the Authority's office in the station. He had not said a word since the platform. Only when the officer touched his shoulder did he look up and find Dez with his eyes, and say, very clearly, as though reading it off a card:

"Wasn't meant for the girl, you know."

"What wasn't?"

"That's Floor Rising's call. Not mine." He looked at her swollen arm. "You're the Wall. You were always going to be standing there."

Then the officer steered him through the door and it clicked closed.

Dez stood where she was. *The Wall.* Eleven months of names: the Frozen Bodyguard, Sir Slow, Dezzy Statue. None of them had come with a floor attached.

She checked her phone because there was nothing else to check. Thirty-one notifications. Her mother had sent a four-minute voice note; she let it sit. Bao, her flatmate, had sent: **are you ok??? DEZ. you're on Reelhouse. a guy has you in slow motion with violins.** Her boss, Cilla Adjei, had sent **Report. Now.** and, a minute later, which was the Cilla version of tenderness, **Ice it.**

The funicular was waiting at the platform, yellow and ready. She tapped in at the gate. The reader accepted her, and she felt oddly that it had been a very near thing.

On the ride up the wall she held the rail with her good hand and read the menu again, slowly, with the Rim coming down to meet her in glass and light. There was more of it than she had noticed. Under RANK there was a small heading that said CHARGES (1), and under it, a name.

TAMAR IBEKWE, 17. BOND: 1. DISTANCE: 212 m. DISTRESS: 0.

She watched the number. It hung there. Zero was good. Zero was a girl in a booth, probably getting a cup of tea from Curtis the guard.

Then, around the time the car passed the Terraces ceiling and the long cable went taut and singing, she felt it. Not on the menu. In her chest, a second pulse that wasn't hers, quick and light, a bird behind a rib.

DISTANCE: 340 m. DISTRESS: 3.

"No," Dez said, to the empty air of the car. A woman with a stroller looked at her. "No, no, no. She was fine."

DISTRESS: 5.

The car did not stop. It was not the kind of car that stopped. It climbed, steadily, up the rock, away from the girl who was suddenly, somehow, in trouble, and the only thing in Dez's whole body that was moving was her thumb, hard against the bruise.