Terrace Four was a station built for people who were going somewhere else. It had a bench, a bin and a vending machine that sold only sparkling water, and Dez stood in front of it for eleven seconds with her heart going in two rhythms before she understood that she was not going to be able to get off a moving car any earlier than she had.
The car slowed. The doors opened with their usual sigh. She was through them before the woman with the stroller had finished saying "Excuse me."
The down car wasn't there. It was a minute and ten seconds out, according to the board, which showed a little yellow icon crawling toward her through a diagram of the canyon. Dez watched it crawl. On the inside of her ribs the other pulse went at a canary's speed.
TAMAR IBEKWE. DISTANCE: 480 m. DISTRESS: 6.
The phone buzzed in her pocket. She took it out left-handed, which was the wrong hand, and the bruise told her so in a voice like a dentist's drill.
"Report," said Cilla Adjei.
"Hi, Cilla."
"I have you on four news aggregators and a very upsetting parody with a cello. Are you hurt?"
"My arm. It's fine."
"Is it broken?"
"It's, no. It's fine." It was a lie of about the size and shape of a bruise. "Cilla, I have to go back to Nine."
"You have to do nothing of the sort." Cilla's voice was the voice of a woman standing in a car park with a clipboard, which was in fact where she was; Dez could hear the beeping of a reversing truck. Cilla Adjei was forty-four, had twenty years in the army, and carried a rolled-up copy of the Plumbline duty roster in her back pocket the way other people carry a rosary. "Listen. The Authority's lawyers called me before the footage finished loading. Pak's going to be charged. You're a witness. Plumbline is attached to you by name, which means Plumbline is attached to the video, so you're going to give a statement at the Switchback office, nicely, in your uniform jacket, on company time. Ninety minutes. I want a face that says *responsible*."
"I've got a face."
"You have the face of a woman who has just been told her dog is dead. Try the other one." A truck beeped. "And Dez? Abara-Whitfield's detail at ten. Do not be late. His office has asked twice whether you're still *available*."
That word. It sat on the line between them like something on a plate.
"Available," Dez said.
"I said yes. Rent is rent." Cilla hung up.
The car arrived. Dez rode it down with her jaw tight and her thumb on the Plumbline app, which had already, helpfully, logged her as ON SHIFT: CLIENT LIAISON, and was timing her in pale green numbers that she had never liked and now, for reasons she couldn't yet articulate, disliked a great deal more.
*Paid duty: no,* the menu had said earlier. She turned the question over. It had written the line as though it had been waiting for the answer to be different.
---
Switchback Nine had changed in her absence.
She saw the yellow first, coming out of the funicular onto the platform: a patch of it by the staff door, bright and cheap and loud against the concrete. Rain ponchos. Eight of them, ten, in a ring, on a dry morning in October when the sky was a blue as hard as enamel. Somebody had drawn a wave on the back of each in black marker. Under the wave was a word, FLOOR, and under that, smaller, RISING.
In the middle of the ring was Tamar Ibekwe, with her back to the door, holding a clipboard in front of her chest as though it were a shield.
"Say it," said a young man in front. He was twenty-two, perhaps, thin, with a shaved head and a nose ring and a phone held at arm's length, tilted toward her face. "Say who gave the order. You just have to say who gave the order for the lifts."
"I don't know what you're talking about," Tamar said. Her voice cracked right down the middle. "I work the gate. I swipe cards."
"You work for the people who let my cousin drown on Pasadera Street."
"I was *eight*."
"That's not a defence, it's an age." A ripple of laughter, thin, the kind that follows a leader's joke. "Obie, get her badge."
"Obie's got it," said a girl at the back, and the young man with the phone pivoted, a small pleased turn, and Dez saw that a second person was holding a can. A tall can, in a hand on the edge of the ring, the sort of can that had held soup or tomatoes or an energy drink that was mostly sugar and threat.
She was twelve metres away. Two seconds. Perhaps three.
DISTRESS: 8.
"Hey," Dez said.
It came out dry, almost pleasant. The ring turned. She watched them see her: the height, the jacket, the shoulder rolled forward over the bad arm. She watched recognition arrive at three different speeds. The young man with the phone got it first. His face lit like a pinball machine.
"Oh my days," said Obie Strand. "It's *her*."
The can came out of the back of the ring, overarm, in a long slow lob with a bad aim to it. It was not aimed at her. It was aimed at the pale space beside her face, at Tamar's head, and in the long half-second of it turning end over end in the October light, Dez felt the old arithmetic come up from the floor like a lift: distance, angle, weight. She was already moving.
This time she knew what she was doing. That was the strange part. She stepped across Tamar and let the can come to her, a small, cold, heavy punch on the point of the collarbone, and a cheap soup smell, and a rattle on the concrete.
COVER ENGAGED. WEIGHT INTERCEPTED: 4. SOURCE: Thrown object (steel can, 400 g). TARGET: Tamar Ibekwe, 17. INTERPOSER: Adaeze Novak-Obi. VOLUNTARY: Yes. PAID DUTY: YES. HIRED COVER IS HALF-OWED. CREDIT: +2.
CREDIT 9 / 20.
She had braced for the hit. She hadn't braced for that.
"You're joking," said Dez, aloud.
"Excuse me?" said Obie. The phone was right in her face now. "Did you just say something? Say it again for the stream."
*Half-owed,* thought Dez. Her jacket. The app. The helpful little green timer. The statement she was on her way to give for Plumbline, which was a paid thing, a company thing, which meant that every blow she took for a stranger between now and ninety minutes from now would be docked by a menu that had read her contract better than she had.
She looked at the ring. She looked at Tamar's hand, white where it held the clipboard, and at the girl's pulse, which Dez could feel, clearly now, going on her own sternum like a shy knock.
"One second," she told the crowd. "Don't throw anything yet."
"That's not how this works," said Obie.
"It's a little bit how this works." Dez put her thumb on the Plumbline app and held it. The phone buzzed once, a polite vibration. SHIFT ENDED? it asked in a font of unbearable cheer. Clock out will be reported to your supervisor. She pressed YES.
In the corner of her eye the green timer vanished.
PAID DUTY: NO.
She felt faintly sick, and quite free.
"Okay," said Dez. "Go on."
The girl at the back, who had thrown the can, looked at Obie. Obie looked at his phone, as though checking it for permission. A second can emerged, a third object that was not a can at all but a plastic bottle of something orange, and these came as a pair, one low, one high, not at Tamar this time but, with a sort of horrified glee, at Dez herself.
She let them both hit. Under the jacket the bruise on her arm rang again, but the bottle only bounced.
COVER ENGAGED. WEIGHT INTERCEPTED: 0. SOURCE: Thrown objects (2). TARGET: Adaeze Novak-Obi. HARM NOT AIMED AT ANOTHER. NO CREDIT.
*Of course not,* she thought. *They were aimed at me.* She took a very slow breath. The orange liquid was running down her sleeve and the girl in the poncho had put her hand over her mouth.
"Nope," said Dez, politely. "Not for me. For the girl."
"What?" said Obie.
"Aim at her."
"She's *insane*," someone whispered.
"Aim at the girl," Dez said. "I'm trying to do a thing."
It was perhaps the most unreasonable sentence she had ever spoken, and the ring recoiled. A young man in a poncho put his hands up. "I'm not throwing anything at a teenager for a bodyguard. This is a bit much."
"Nobody's throwing at a teenager," said Obie quickly. He lowered his phone a few degrees, and Dez saw, under the glow of it, a boy who was no longer entirely sure what he was filming. "This is a protest. It's a legitimate protest."
"I know," said Dez. "I'm going to stand here while you do it."
She did. She stood in front of Tamar with her feet apart and her sleeve dripping orange, and the crowd, which had come to see a girl cry, found itself holding up a phone to a very tall woman who would not move. It lost momentum. It does, she knew from long experience, when there is nothing in the middle of it to push against. After a minute and ten seconds, by the board, a man at the back said "Oh, come on," and ponchos began to peel away along the platform.
TAMAR IBEKWE. DISTRESS: 1.
Behind her, the girl let out a breath that went on a very long time.
"They're not a bad group," Tamar said. "They're just. Everyone on the Floor's so mad. My nan's on the Floor."
"Are you hurt?"
"No. Are you?"
"I'm orange."
A laugh escaped her, wet and startled, and then Tamar did something Dez had not expected. She put one hand flat on Dez's good arm, quickly, like touching a stove to see if it was hot, and let go.
Obie Strand was the last to leave. He stood with his phone still held up, sweating, and said, "I'm sorry, I have to ask, are you actually going to defend her? Because that's, like, a statement. You know?"
"I know."
"That's not going to be great for your image," he said, with real concern.
"My image," Dez said, "is a man with mud on his head and me standing next to it. I'll risk it."
His mouth twitched; he nearly smiled. Then he looked down at the phone in his hand, where something had pinged, and the colour left him by degrees.
"Oh," said Obie. "She's on. She's, hang on, she's been *live* the whole time."
"Who has?"
He turned the phone toward her. On the screen, a tiny window in the corner showed a woman's face, young, a halo of dark curls, a yellow scarf, a ring light reflected in her eyes. Behind her was a kitchen. In a banner along the bottom, in the same cheerful typeface as everything else that morning, ran the legend FLOOR RISING: LIVE, and a counter in the corner that read 41,208.
The woman in the corner had been watching. She leaned toward her own camera, until her face took up the whole of the little glass, and when she spoke her voice came tinny out of Obie's speaker, warm and fast and deeply, bone-deep, unamused.
"Hi, Wall," said Lucia Paredes. "I've been wanting to meet you."
