Dez took the last flight of stairs in two strides and did not feel her ribs until she reached the landing.

The flat was a mess in the particular way of a place where people had been told to hurry. Hepzibah's blanket on the floor. The air mattress half-deflated against the wall, one corner pinned under a man's boot. Two men in grey fleece jackets with a lanyard each stood in the middle of the room, and one of them held the folding wheelchair by its frame like a man holding a dead fish for a photograph.

Dez counted. Two men, one door, one window onto the airshaft, a kitchen with a knife block she did not look at. Bao by the whiteboard, his hands out in front of him like he was trying to stop a bus. Hepzibah in the armchair with her cane across her knees and her chin up. Tamar in the bedroom doorway, in the socks she had been wearing all week, one hand on the frame.

TAMAR IBEKWE. DISTANCE: 4 m. DISTRESS: 9.

WEIGHT INBOUND: ESTIMATED 6.

"Morning," Dez said.

Both men turned. The one with the wheelchair was thick-necked and young, with the face of someone who had been promised an easy day. The other was older, balding, with a clipboard held against his chest like a shield. He looked up at her. All the way up. People did that.

"Ma'am," he said. "This is a legal service. If you're a resident, I'll need to see ID."

"I'm a resident." She kept her hands where they could see them. "Put the chair down, please."

"It's listed as unregistered property."

"It's a wheelchair."

"It's a wheelchair belonging to an unregistered occupant." He turned a page. He did not seem pleased about any of it, which she thought was the most dangerous thing about him. "The management is entitled to remove personal effects of persons not named on the lease, pending a hearing. Section nine."

"Section nine," Bao said, from behind her, in a voice that cracked in half, "says *abandoned* effects. Nobody abandoned anything. She's sitting right there."

Hepzibah lifted one finger without taking her eyes off the young man. "Put it down, my son. My granddaughter's mother bought that chair with a church collection. You don't know what you are carrying."

The young man glanced at his partner. The partner glanced at the clipboard. Nobody put it down.

Dez thought: *Nine metres to the stairs, a woman of seventy-one who cannot run, a girl of seventeen who will not leave her.* She thought about the clock on her phone, which said she was off it, and about Mac somewhere on the Rim standing very still beside a man who sang in the shower, doing the work of two. She had perhaps eight minutes before Cilla's phone began to hum.

"What's the notice say?" she asked.

The older man pulled a sheet from the clipboard. It was cream paper with a heavy letterhead, SWITCHBACK RESIDENTIAL MANAGEMENT, and under it, in a smaller and meaner font, the words A MEMBER OF THE HOLDINGS GROUP. He held it out. She took it and read it standing up, because there was nothing in the world she wanted less than to sit down.

It was seven paragraphs of the kind of language that makes a person feel they are being punished for being slow. Breach of occupancy covenant. Unregistered residents numbering two. The tenant of record, Bao Tran, was given seven days to remove the unregistered persons or the lease would be forfeit, together with the deposit. Dez's name was in paragraph four. So was her mother's address, for some reason, as a guarantor she had never signed for.

"Who complained?" she said.

"I don't have that information."

"Somebody did."

"Ma'am, I'm only the server."

"Switchback Residential," she said. "The building has been managed by Mrs Anand's family since before I was born."

"Under new ownership as of the twenty-first," said the older man, and for a second the flatness in his voice looked almost like apology. "Three weeks. They'll have sent a letter."

Nobody had seen a letter. Bao's mouth opened and closed.

"Right," said the young man, who had run out of patience for the conversation. "I'm taking this down to the van. It'll be held at the depot, you can collect it with the proper paperwork."

He turned with the frame in both hands. Tamar had come forward without anyone seeing her do it, with her face tight and her fingers already out, and said, in the small and level voice of a girl who had been told over and over to keep her head down, "Please. She can't walk to the toilet without it."

He swung round, not at her. He swung round because she was in the way of the door and he was a person who did not look where he was swinging. The chair came around with the steel frame at the front of it, a foot above the floor, and the number in Dez's chest went from six to six and *now*.

She was already moving. She did not decide to. It was the same place in her body where the freeze had lived, but pointed the other way. She put her left shoulder in front of Tamar, the shoulder that had been cracked three days ago and was still faintly pink, and the frame hit it with a sound like somebody dropping a toolbox down a flight of stairs.

Pain came up through her neck in a white sheet. She did not make a noise. That was a point of pride, and also entirely beside the point.

WEIGHT ABSORBED: 6. BRACE 2: -4. DAMAGE: 2.

VOLUNTARY. PAID DUTY: NO. FAMILIAR: NO.

CREDIT +6. 18/40.

She breathed out through her teeth. The room was very quiet. The young man had gone the colour of cold oatmeal. The wheelchair hung from his hands at a sideways angle, a dent in its steel where her shoulder had been.

"I didn't," he said. "I wasn't, she was just. You came out of nowhere."

"I came out of the hall," Dez said. "You were looking at the door." Her voice was perfectly pleasant. She noticed with some interest that her left hand was trembling and she put it in her pocket. "Give me the chair, please."

He gave it to her. That was the extraordinary thing: he held it out and let go, the way you let go of something hot. She handed it to Tamar without looking and Tamar folded it against herself, shaking.

"That's an assault," said Bao, in a high voice, with an instinct for the legal register that came entirely from television. "That's, I'm filming, I'm going to, I'm literally filming this."

"You're not," Dez said gently. "Your phone's on the table."

He looked. It was. "Oh."

The older man had put the clipboard down. For the first time since she had come in, he really looked at her: the height, the shoulder, the blank patience of her face, and she saw the moment he put it together. People did that too, a half-second after the eyes. The Frozen Bodyguard. Statue Moves.

"You're her," he said.

"I'm the tenant's flatmate."

"I'm sorry. I didn't know it was going to be, I was told it was a paperwork run. They said two old ladies and a student." He swallowed. "I'm going to log that the property was not removed. I'm going to log the dent as pre-existing. All right? Is that all right?"

"Who told you it was a paperwork run?"

He hesitated long enough that she knew the answer was a name and that he knew it too. "Dispatch sheet came from a legal office on the Rim," he said. "Fenwick and Dray. Acting for the new owner."

"And who's the new owner?"

"It's a holding company. It's, it's a number. I only have the number." He lifted the clipboard and found the line with his thumb. "Switchback Residential Holdings Four. Registered at an address in, in Crown Station."

Dez said nothing. Behind her, Bao said, very softly, "Crown Station is where Neil works."

"It's a big building," Dez said. "A lot of people have offices in it."

"Dez."

"I know."

The men left. She watched them to the bottom of the stairs, because watching was a way of counting, and then she shut the door, turned the bolt, and put her back against it and let her knees go until she was sitting on the floor of her own hallway with her bad shoulder against the coats.

Nobody said anything. Hepzibah got up out of the armchair, which took some time, and went into the kitchen, and came back with a bag of frozen peas wrapped in a tea towel. She did not hand it to Dez. She put it on her shoulder herself, firmly, the way you press a stamp.

"You will not do that again," Hepzibah said.

"No, ma'am."

"You will do it again. But you will not say so to me." She patted the peas. "Sit."

MEND 1 ticked in her shoulder like a small clock. Two damage gone before the ice had warmed. She shut her eyes and listened to Bao pace the length of the flat and back, his slippers slapping the boards.

"Okay," he said. "Okay, okay, okay. Seven days. That's the eighteenth. That's a Sunday. They gave us seven days that end on a Sunday, which is, that's a *tactic*. And it's a month's notice by statute, there's a statute, I read it when I was getting the Soup Cartel lease, it's *thirty days* unless there's cause, and a guest isn't cause, a guest is a human being. I'm going to need the whiteboard."

"Bao."

"I need the whiteboard and I need, I need to call Mrs Anand, because if she sold the building and didn't tell us, that's —"

"Bao." She opened her eyes. "It's your name on the lease."

He stopped. He stood in the middle of the room, in the hoodie that said SAFFRON & RYE across the chest, and looked at her with the whole of his face, and she watched him understand that it was his deposit, his rent, his name, and that there were two people on his sofa because of a thing she had done on a night she had not told him about until Saturday.

"I'm not putting them out," he said.

"I know."

"I'm *not*. I've got four hundred and ten in savings, and a rice cooker, and a spreadsheet. I'm not putting them out."

"You won't have to," said Dez, and had no idea whether it was true.

Tamar was sitting on the arm of the sofa with the folded wheelchair across her lap. She had not cried yet. She was holding on to the frame like a handrail, and when Dez looked at her she said, in the voice of someone reading a speech she had practised, "I'll go back to my aunt's. The Floor. Gran can come when there's space."

"No."

"It's my fault. If the KCA hadn't suspended me, and I had a, if I had a —"

"It's not your fault," Dez said. "Somebody sent two men to take a wheelchair off a woman in a building they bought three weeks ago. That's not you."

Tamar's eyes were very large. "Why would anyone want to do that?"

Dez looked at the notice in her hand. At the cream paper, the heavy letterhead, the line of small meaner type under it. Paragraph four. Her name. Her mother's address.

The pulse in her chest had slowed to its ordinary rhythm. DISTRESS 3. The other two held steady too, Hepzibah at two, Dario somewhere across the city at a low flat nothing. Three small lights, all burning. She thought of the call from the prepaid phone at five past two, nine minutes before a window blew out, and of a man at the next table in a canteen who had said, quietly, *someone knew*.

"I don't know," she said. "But somebody wants these two off the Terraces. And not far enough that they can't be found."

Her phone buzzed against the floor. CILLA. She let it ring twice, then picked up, and heard the clipped and furious breath of a woman who had been awake since four and had not yet had her coffee.

"Report," said Cilla. "Now. And Novak, the next thing you say had better not be 'it's complicated'."

Dez looked at the whiteboard, where Bao had drawn a small cartoon bowl of soup and, underneath it, in red marker, a list of the ten rules of COVER.

"It's complicated," she said.

Cilla hung up.

She stayed on the floor a little longer, holding the notice, until the phone buzzed again with a message she had not expected, from a number she knew only because it had been written on a prescription pad.

yusuf: Heard a rumour you picked up a shoulder. Eat something. That's a medical instruction.