The first thing Dez learned about being Cornelius Abara-Whitfield's permanent protection officer was that he sang in the shower.
It was not a short song. It was a long, operatic, wandering thing in a language she didn't recognise, with a recurring bit that sounded like a man falling off a horse. It came through the frosted door of the second-floor bathroom at 6:50 on Monday morning and filled the whole of the house on Crest Road like warm water, and she stood in the corridor outside with her back to the wall, her earpiece in, listening to a man she was meant to keep alive be happy.
"He does this every day," said Mac, from the stair. He had come on at six and looked like a man who had slept in a hedge. "I asked him once what it was. He said, *folks, it's Welsh.*"
"Is it?"
"It's his ex-wife's. He doesn't know a word of it."
The house was glass. That was her second observation. It sat on the edge of the Rim on a street of identical glass, a long white box with a flat roof, and it was cold in the way expensive houses are cold, with nowhere to put a coat. The hall had a floor of pale stone and a wall of shelves on which stood thirty-one model funiculars in a row. She did not count them on purpose. They were exquisite, hand-painted, and each one had a tiny brass plaque at its base with a place name and a date. The twenty-ninth said PASADERA, and had no date.
Beside the last shelf, asleep in a basket, lay a very old corgi called Mayor, who raised one eyebrow when she passed and lowered it again with the air of a being who has seen every sort of bodyguard.
By seven-fifteen she knew where the exits were, which neighbours had cameras, which window in the kitchen would not lock, and that Neil put four sugars in his coffee and then looked at the cup with disgust. By eight-thirty she had learned that a man can say the word *folks* nine times between his front door and the car.
And she had learned something else, quieter. Between 7:15 and 8:30 she had been, by the strict arithmetic of a menu that read contracts, a woman on the clock. Not one Weight had come near her. Nothing had been thrown. Nobody had so much as dropped a croissant. The air in front of her face had hung blank and green, and the number at the bottom had not moved.
CREDIT 12 / 40.
*Paid duty,* she thought. *Half-owed.* It would take her half a year to level on this salary. She felt it as one feels a very small stone in a shoe: not painful, just always there.
---
The steering meeting for the Spire Line was held in a room at Crown Station with a table the colour of wet slate and a view, on three sides, of nothing but sky. There were eleven people at it. She stood by the door, as she'd been trained to, and learned their faces as they came in. Two Authority engineers, a deputy mayor, a municipal lawyer, and at the foot of the table, a woman in a charcoal suit, who stood when Neil came in and held out her hand as to a very old friend.
"Neil. You look wonderful. You always do. It's indecent."
"Rhiannon! Folks, you know Rhiannon. Rhiannon Falk-Adeyemi, Ostrava-Kline's head of Civic Delivery. Our partner in crime."
"I prefer *partner in construction*," said the woman, and the table laughed, as it was supposed to.
Dez looked at her. She was forty-seven or so, handsome in a quiet, upholstered way, with short iron-coloured hair and a small gold pin at her collar, a sort of stylised wave with a vertical line through it. She had a voice like warm milk. She wore no jewellery except the pin and a watch, and when she smiled she did it with the whole of her face but not her eyes, which went round the room like a lighthouse, resting for a moment on each person in turn. They rested on Dez.
For a second, nothing. Then a flicker of interest. "And this must be the famous Statue."
"The Authority's chief of personal security," said Neil proudly. "She's with me now, permanently. She's a *tonic*."
"I saw the footage. I thought: now there is a woman with excellent timing." Rhiannon inclined her head. "Please don't mind me staring. I always want to know the people who stand in the doorways of rooms. They know more than anyone."
"I mind a bit," said Dez.
The table laughed again. Rhiannon smiled with her whole face.
The meeting itself was dull and quick. A map was brought out and unrolled across the table, an enormous aerial of Ketterline Canyon, lacquered in blue and yellow, with a thin red line drawn from the Rim to the Floor like a crack in glass. At the line's end was a small neat square.
"The Floor terminus," said an engineer, tapping. "Pasadera and Weir. We've always wanted the corner for a transfer hub. It sits above the old drainage network and the foundations are, frankly, perfect. The difficulty was the land."
"The land?" said the deputy mayor.
"Twenty-two Pasadera was in the way. Condemned, as of last week." The engineer coughed. "We're very sorry for the loss to the community."
"We are," said Rhiannon. "Of course we are. I've sent flowers to every family." She turned a pen in her fingers. "But I'd be lying if I said it didn't clear the way. It was an extremely fortunate fire, from the point of view of the alignment."
"Don't say fortunate."
It was Neil. He had not shouted; his voice was quite low. But it stopped the room like a hand on a bell.
"Neil —"
"Don't say fortunate, Rhiannon. Not in front of —" He stopped. His gaze had flicked, for just a fraction of a second, to the door where Dez stood, and then away. "There was a woman in that building. She is staying with friends. She's seventy-one years old, and she is, I'm told, a force of nature, and we'll be sending her a very good cheque." He drew a breath. "It was an *accident.* It was an old building. It could happen to any one of us."
"Of course," said Rhiannon gently. "I misspoke."
She did not look at Dez again for the rest of the meeting. Which, Dez thought, was how she knew.
*Ostrava-Kline,* thought Dez. OKH PROPERTY SERVICES. Do not touch the fuse panel. Her eyes went down the red line of the map and landed on the square at its end, and she thought of a locksmith's phone call, and a woman making cocoa.
---
It was 11:41. The meeting had adjourned into a long standing session with coffee. Neil was explaining the Spire Line to the deputy mayor with his hands, as to a child, a safe, direct lift for the Floor, the first time anyone in Pasadera would be four minutes from the Rim; this was his legacy, folks, he was going to *finish* it, and Dez, by the door, was counting the gaps between the windows when the stone in her chest dropped like a lift.
TAMAR IBEKWE. DISTANCE: 700 m. DISTRESS: 7. WEIGHT INBOUND: ESTIMATED 6.
She didn't move. She wanted to stand perfectly still and make it a mistake. Then, beneath Tamar's, a second pulse, strong and angry, which she hadn't felt in two days.
HEPZIBAH IBEKWE. DISTRESS: 8.
*The flat.* Seven hundred metres was Switchback 14. It was a bad clean arithmetic: the funicular was eight minutes from the Rim to the Terraces, eleven with the wait.
"Mac," she said, quietly, into her cuff.
"Go on."
"Emergency clause. Imminent threat to life. Not the principal."
There was a pause of perhaps one second. It was enough for her to think about everything. About Cilla's pen scratching the margin. About a coat on a hanger. About a man's flinch, and what it would look like to walk out of a room like this one, in front of a dozen witnesses, in the first week of the job.
"I've got him," said Mac. "Go."
"Thank you."
"Don't thank me, Statue, run."
She ran.
Down the corridor, past a startled receptionist, into the lift, and her thumb was on the Plumbline app before the doors closed. HOLD. One. One and a half. She felt it go, like a hand letting go of a coat.
PAID DUTY: NO.
---
The funicular took nine minutes. They were the longest nine minutes of her life since the stage, and she spent them on her feet in the corner of the yellow car, her hand clenched on the rail, watching two numbers climb. At the Terraces station she did not wait for the lift. She took the stairs, three at a time, and then the street, a narrow switchback of apartment doors and laundry and a woman selling plantains from a cart, running with the long, flat stride of a woman who had once blocked for the Ketterline Wreckers in a state final.
TAMAR IBEKWE. DISTANCE: 90 m. DISTRESS: 9. WEIGHT INBOUND: ESTIMATED 6.
The door of Switchback 14 was open.
Not ajar. Open, all the way, with the stair light slanting through it and a cardboard box lying on its side on the landing, and Hepzibah's green headscarf on the floor beside it like a dropped flag. She heard Bao before she saw him, his voice high and furious and absolutely terrified.
"You can't take that. That's, no, that's *her* — that's an old woman's wheelchair, you absolute —"
And then a man's voice, flat and bored, saying, "Sir, step away from the property, please. We're only here to serve the notice."
