The Weir Street Community Hall had been a fish market before it was a hall, and no amount of paint had persuaded the floor to forget. Dez stood on it at twenty to seven on Tuesday evening, in the humid dark smell of river and old brine, with her back to a pillar and her eyes on the doors.

Two doors at the front. One fire exit stage left, propped open with a folded chair. A kitchen hatch. A staircase to a mezzanine that Mac had already walked, twice, and reported on in his usual three-word telegrams. *Clear. Pigeons. Pillar.*

Three hundred folding chairs, perhaps two hundred and forty filled. The yellow ponchos were everywhere, not worn, folded across knees and laps like a congregation's hymn sheets. Neil, at the lectern in his good grey suit, was in the middle of a story about his grandmother's first cable-car ride and the hat she lost on it.

"And she looked down," Neil said, "and she said, Cornelius, folks, that hat is going to land on somebody's head today and I hope it's a handsome man." A ripple of dutiful laughter. "The long view, friends. That's what the Spire Line is. A hat that finally comes down on the Floor."

Nobody laughed at that. Dez, who had written Neil's face into her memory the week before like a map, watched it register: the small, bright, hopeful hold of a man waiting for applause and receiving the sound of three hundred people not clapping.

The Authority had called it a listening session. The Floor had come to listen to whether it was being listened to.

Lucia Paredes was in the fourth row.

She wore the yellow scarf and a black jacket with the sleeves pushed up, and she did not hold a phone at all, which Dez found more disturbing than if she had. Her hands were folded in her lap. She sat very upright. She was watching the lectern with the dedicated, patient, wholly engaged expression of a woman who had been told there would be questions at the end and fully intended to ask them.

Dez had counted her at 6:52 and again at 6:58. At 7:04, Lucia turned her head and looked straight at Dez across thirty feet of fish-scented air, and smiled.

It was a very friendly smile. Dez's pulse did something unpleasant.

"Questions," said Neil, when the story was over, and the hall rose a little in its chairs. "Folks, I've got time. Let's do it properly. Hands, hands, no shouting, I'm an old man."

A woman asked about the fares. A man asked about the rain. Neil gave warm, long, well-lit answers, the kind that sounded like water running over a smooth stone, and Dez began to understand why he had survived nine years. Then Lucia stood, and the hall changed temperature.

"Chair Abara-Whitfield." She did not need the microphone. "Lucia Paredes. Floor Rising. Thanks for coming down to the basement."

A murmur. Neil spread his hands. "Ms Paredes. A pleasure. And may I say first how sorry I am —"

"Yes. You may. Later." She was smiling still. "I wanted to ask about your security first, if you don't mind. A friend of mine says it's the best in the Terraces, and I thought, well, I'd like to be introduced."

Heads turned. Not to Neil. To the pillar.

Dez did not move. She kept her eyes where they were, on the left-hand door, and she felt it come down on her like a hand: three hundred people looking at the largest woman in the room.

"Ms Novak-Obi is a professional," Neil said, a degree too quickly. "She has been through a great deal."

"She has. We all saw." Lucia came out of her row into the aisle. Her phone was in her hand now. She had not taken it out; it had simply appeared there. "The Wall. The Statue. Pick one, I've used both. I want to ask her a very simple thing, and she can answer it or she can stand there like a pillar, which, honestly, is on brand."

A few laughs. Not many.

"You were on Pasadera Street on the ninth of October at 2:31 in the morning," Lucia said. "I have you on a doorbell camera. Mrs Lindqvist, across the road, bless her, has a thing. Timestamped. You walk up the pavement in a black coat. You stop outside number twenty-two. You look up at the third floor. You stand there for a minute and a half." She held the phone up. "The first call to Floor Dispatch about a fire came at 2:44. The fire engine arrived at 2:58. You were there thirteen minutes before anyone called, and twenty-seven before the engine."

The hall had gone quiet. Neil had gone, quite slowly, the colour of the lectern.

"So I'd like to ask," said Lucia, lightly, in the tone of someone asking after a train, "how did you know?"

Dez could hear the extractor fan over the kitchen hatch. She could hear her own heartbeat in the ear that had been closest to the pillar. Beneath it, the three small pulses. Tamar, at a flat steady four. Hepzibah, five. Dario, nothing.

"No comment," said Dez.

"Oh, *come on*."

"I'm on duty."

"You're always on duty. That's what scares me." Lucia took a step closer. Behind her, the yellow ponchos were moving, shifting forward in their seats. "Because here's what I think. I think someone told you. I think someone in that building knew there'd be a fire, and told you, and you went to look. And you know what a person does when they're told a building's going to burn, and they go and look?"

"Lucia," said Dez.

"They *watch it burn.*"

"I carried a woman out of it."

"After," said Lucia, softly. "You carried her out *after.*"

There was no way to answer that which did not contain the truth. Dez could feel the truth sitting in her mouth: a green menu, a bond, a number that said WEIGHT INBOUND at 2:14 when no building was visibly on fire. She said nothing. It was the only thing she could do, and it was the worst thing she could do, and Lucia's eyes watched her say nothing and wrote it down.

Something happened at the back of the hall then.

It was small. A boy of seventeen or eighteen in a yellow poncho, thin, with a Floor Rising lanyard and a phone held at chest height, filming. A KCA security guard, one of Neil's, a heavy man in a pale blue vest who had been standing by the east door all night with his hands on his belt and the look of a person who wanted to be somewhere else, put out an arm. It was meant to be a barrier. It was a shove.

The boy went backwards, off his heels, into the air, towards a stack of metal folding chairs.

Dez was moving before she knew it. She was very aware, in the half-second of her stride, of exactly what she had been told. *PAID DUTY: YES halves.* She was on the clock. Neil was thirty feet away at the lectern, with Mac already half-turned toward him. She could break detail. She could text *boy, chairs, now* and be furious later.

No time for the text. She put her thumb on the app and held it as she ran, one-and-a-half seconds, and the chairs came down.

She got her back under the boy, between him and the steel, and the stack landed across her shoulder blades in a long iron clatter like a train crash in a kitchen.

WEIGHT ABSORBED: 5. BRACE 2: -4. DAMAGE: 1.

VOLUNTARY. PAID DUTY: NO. FAMILIAR: NO.

CREDIT +5. 23/40.

She had clocked out in time. The menu, which could audit a coffee stain, had registered the thumb-hold and counted it in her favour. She stood, the chairs sliding off her, and the boy looked up from the floor with an astonished white face and said, "You, you *caught* me."

"Did you want to be caught?"

"I, no, I mean, yes, I, thank you —"

"Then that's what happened." She held out a hand. He took it.

The hall was on its feet.

She had hoped, in one corner of her mind, that it would make a difference. It did not. If anything, it fed the fire. Somebody shouted, *he pushed him*; somebody else, *you saw that*; and then there was a surge toward the east door and the security guard backed against it with his palms out, saying, *I never, I never*, and three more KCA men in blue came out of nowhere with the particular flat blank faces of men who had been told to prevent an incident and were about to cause one.

"Mac," Dez said, into her sleeve. "Take him out. Now. Back door."

"Copy."

She watched Neil go, bundled by Mac and a young man from the Authority's comms team, still wearing his small startled smile, a man leaving a restaurant where somebody had been rude. She saw him look back once. Not at the crowd. At her.

Then Obie Strand came out of the fourth row.

He was twenty-two, wide as a doorway, with a poncho tied round his waist and a voice that could stop a tram. He went for the guard, not violently, but with his chest. The guard's partner took his arm. Somebody shouted *police*, though nobody had called them, and then someone had, and the thing which had been happening at the pace of a conversation began to happen at the pace of a collision.

Lucia was beside her. Dez had not seen her arrive.

"That's my volunteer," Lucia said. "That boy you caught. That's Teo. He's seventeen."

"I know."

"You know. You know *so much.*" Her voice was low and very steady, and her eyes were furious. "And do you know what I'm going to do with this? I'm going to cut it. I'm going to put you on the floor with the chairs and I'm going to tell two million people that the Wall caught one boy while three hundred of us watched your boss's guards beat on another. I'm going to say you ran *toward* the cameras."

"I ran toward the boy."

"Great. Say that to Obie." She jerked her head. They were putting Obie against the wall, two of them, cuffs out, his big face turned toward the hall with an expression of enormous surprise. "Say it to his mother."

"Lucia —"

"No. Don't Lucia me." She was shaking, from anger or cold. "You were on that street before the fire. You were *on that street.* I don't know what you are, Statue. But I'm going to find out. And when I do, I want you to remember that tonight you were standing right here, and you didn't say a word."

She turned and went after Obie.

Dez stood in the wreck of the folding chairs with the iron cooling on her back and the numbers glowing in front of her face. 23/40. Seventeen to go.

A man's hand closed on her elbow. Mac. His face was grey under the hall lights.

"Neil wants a word," he said quietly. "In the car. He says it's urgent. And Dez? He's asking where you were on the ninth of October."