It began to rain as the cabin left Weir Station, and the cabin, very slightly, began to slow.

Dez noticed it in the soles of her feet. A drag, no more, a sound in the cable like a held breath. She looked at the window. The Floor was dropping away below them in its long wet ribbons of sodium light, the river a dull seam down the middle, the yellow roofs of Pasadera shrinking to a handful of dust. In the glass she could see her own reflection, a tall woman in a black jacket with one sleeve dusted white from the chairs, and behind her, Neil Abara-Whitfield on the leather bench, dabbing his forehead with a folded handkerchief.

"Does it always do that?" she said.

"Do what?"

"Slow down."

"Ah." Neil put the handkerchief away. "Weather protocol. Wet cable, folks, wet cable. Anything above a drizzle and the controllers take it down to sixty per cent. It's for safety." He smiled. It did not quite arrive. "There's a rumour, you know. That we do it deliberately when it rains on the Floor. To keep the Floor in its place."

"I've heard it."

"It's nonsense." A pause that went on a beat too long. "It's an *old* rumour."

The cabin was the Chair's carriage, a lacquered box with a brass plaque and six seats and a little walnut cabinet that held, Dez had discovered an hour ago, a decanter and a plate of shortbread. Mac was in the cabin behind, a gap of forty yards of wire and rain. She had checked the door latch twice. The nearest exit was a thousand feet of air.

"Mr Abara-Whitfield," she said. "You wanted a word."

"Neil. Please. We've been through the vigil together."

"Neil."

He took a shortbread, looked at it, put it down. For a moment he looked less like the Chair than like a man of fifty-eight in a suit that had been cut for someone slightly more confident. "I need you to tell me where you were on the ninth," he said. "And I need you to know before you answer that I'm not going to be angry. I'm a patient man. The long view. I just need to know what I'm standing next to."

She had been ready for this. She had rehearsed it on the tram, on the stairs of the Annex, in the long reasonable silence of the hall. And now that it came, she found she was still holding the first sentence in her mouth like a stone.

"I had a phone call," Dez said.

"Ah."

"From a friend. Tamar Ibekwe. The girl from Switchback Nine. I'd given her my number. She sounded frightened. She said there was a problem at her grandmother's building. I went."

It was not entirely a lie. Tamar had not called. Tamar had *sent* something, a pulse of fear through a cord she had never asked for. The distinction was something she could stand on, but only just.

Neil let out a long, shuddering breath. His whole face seemed to loosen. "Well, there it is. A welfare call. A neighbour in distress. Of course." He leaned forward and put one hand on his knee. "That's very good, Adaeze. That's very good indeed. You can say that."

"Say it where?"

"To the press. If it comes to it. To the inquiry, if they reopen. To Ms Paredes." He was smiling now, properly, the big mayoral smile with its genuine warmth underneath. "She phoned. She was scared. You went. It's *you*, it's the whole story, folks, it's the whole redemption. Bethan can draft it tonight. You'd barely have to change a word."

Dez said nothing.

"You'd sign something, naturally," Neil said. "A short statement. Nothing fancy."

He was kind. That was the trouble. He was handing her a gift, a clean white shirt to put on over the thing she was ashamed of. And she could see all the way down it: Tamar's phone records, which would show no call. Lucia's team, who would find that in a day. The signature, in ink, on a lie, and the way it would pull the whole of the rest of her life toward it.

"I can't sign that," she said.

"Why on earth not?"

"Because there's no call log. If anybody checks, they'll find nothing."

"Then she'll say she called from another phone. A friend's. A payphone." He waved a hand. "People do. People *forget.* Adaeze, you must understand, a story needs a spine. Nobody wants the truth in the raw, it's a *lumpy* thing. A good story is the truth with the lumps taken out."

"I'd rather say nothing."

"Saying nothing is saying something."

"I know," Dez said. "I've watched what it says."

The rain thickened on the glass. The cabin slid on at its sixty per cent, a ponderous brass box in the dark. Below, a long way down, a tram bell chimed and was lost.

Neil sat back. The smile was gone. He had the look she had seen once before, on the stage the night his mother fell: the look of a man who has just noticed that the plan he thought was solid is a thing other people are leaning on.

"I didn't ask to be the sort of man who makes things up," he said, at last, to the window. "It's an occupational hazard, I'm afraid. You start with the sheet, with the speech, and by the time you turn around there's nothing under you but the next one."

"Who told you about the clip?"

He looked at her sharply. "What clip?"

"You didn't ask me what Lucia meant. You didn't ask who Mrs Lindqvist was. You asked where I was on the ninth." She kept her voice level. "You knew what she was going to say."

A very long moment. In the next cabin, forty yards back, Mac would be sitting with his hands on his knees, watching the wire.

"Rhiannon sent it," Neil said.

"Falk-Adeyemi."

"Yesterday evening. Seven, a little after. A courtesy, she said. A video from a doorbell camera on Pasadera Street, which she'd had from, I believe, the neighbour's landlord. It's a lot of buildings, Adaeze, you'd be astonished. She said Ms Paredes would be airing it within the day and I should be prepared." He lifted his chin. "She suggested, very gently, that a person on my personal detail who had been standing outside a building before it burned was a *liability to the Authority.* She suggested I suspend you pending review."

So OKH had the footage before Lucia had it. OKH had a landlord on Lucia's street who could hand them a doorbell. And OKH had known the cut of tonight's argument a full day before the room did.

"But you didn't," Dez said.

"I did not."

"Why not?"

He took a long time. When he spoke, the folksy bluster had gone out of his voice, leaving something drier and smaller. "Because I thought, if I'm going to be afraid of someone, I would like to be afraid of them from close up. I thought, if that young woman knows something about what happened on Pasadera Street, I would rather have her standing next to me than across the road." He flushed. "That sounds sinister. I'm not sinister. I'm just tired, and I'd quite like it if somebody told me what's true."

Dez looked at him.

She thought of Lorraine's glass terrace, of the brass duck's head on her stick. *He took a call at 11:20 at night. He said I'll look into it. And went to bed.*

"So would I," she said.

"Then we understand each other."

"Not entirely."

"No." A faint smile. "Perhaps not entirely." He picked up the shortbread again. This time he ate it. "I'll have Bethan keep the welfare-call statement in a drawer. You don't have to sign it. But it's there, Adaeze, if you ever find you'd rather have something to say. I don't offer it to be clever. I offer it because it would be a *kindness.*"

She thought: *a kindness that costs me my name.* But she nodded.

The cabin shuddered. It was a small, deep shiver in the cable, the kind you feel in your teeth, and the lights went out.

For a count of three it was entirely dark, a lacquered box swinging in rain a thousand feet above the Floor, and Dez had Neil by the lapel and the door-handle in her other hand before she knew she had moved. Her heart was a hammer. Not hers alone: three smaller hammers answered it, far below, somewhere in a flat on the third floor of Switchback 14, where Hepzibah, at that exact moment, would be asleep in a sofa bed with her glasses on the table. She held her breath until the emergency lamp came on, a dim amber glow, and the cabin lurched forward again.

"Backup power," Neil said, gently. His face was a foot from hers, white and enormous. He didn't try to pull away. "Happens twice a year. It's all right. It's all right, Adaeze. You can let go of my coat."

She let go.

"You frightened yourself," he said, with the softness of a man who had himself been frightened often and had learned not to say so. "You grabbed the right person. That's all."

They rode the rest of the way up in silence. The cabin crept into Crown Station at sixty per cent and the doors folded open on a wet platform where Mac was already waiting, the rain beading on his shoulders, his face carefully blank.

Neil stepped out. He turned.

"Dinner at eight," he said. "Mayor will want walking. And Adaeze?"

"Yes?"

"If Ms Paredes does find out what's true, I would prefer to hear it from you."

He went off along the platform, humming, a small, balding, vain, frightened man in a good grey suit.

Dez looked back at the wire disappearing into the rain below them. The Cableway was a long thread of lights going all the way down into the dark, and every cabin on it was moving at sixty per cent.

It was a drizzle, on the Rim. On the Floor it was something else.

She had the strangest feeling that somebody had been counting.