The fourth pulse was not a pulse at all, Dez realised, in the second it took her to stand up. It was a sound.

It was the sound of a scuff on gravel, a yard away through a wall, and a short breath drawn in by someone who had been about to say something and decided against it. She had spent a week learning to listen to the cord in her chest. She had never thought to listen to the dark.

And under the sound, on the pale green edge of her vision where the menu hung, one new line, in letters she had not seen before:

UNBONDED DISTRESS: 7. (<10 m). NOT A CHARGE.

"Dez?" said Obie.

She was already at the back door. It was a fire-door in a council-green frame, painted shut so many times that the gap along the hinge was filled with wax, and she shouldered it open with the flat of her good arm and went out into the yard in four strides.

The Paredes yard was a rectangle of concrete and tomato crates, bounded on three sides by walls and on the fourth by the lane. A line of washing hung across it, wet and unmoving. At the far end the wall was higher, brick topped with broken glass, and in it was a steel door set into a frame, rusted red, with a chain looped through its handle and a padlock the size of a fist.

The drain gate. The thing that had stood between thirty-one people and the river.

Lucia was beside it. She had her back against the brick and her phone in her hand, lit blue, and she was looking at the wall above her head with the particular stillness of someone who has heard the wrong sound and is deciding whether she is imagining it.

"Lucia," said Dez.

She turned. "Go away."

"Lucia. Come here."

"I said —"

A man dropped off the top of the wall.

He did not climb. He fell, a black shape in a hood with a length of galvanised pipe in both hands, and he came down on the concrete in a crouch, and the number in Dez's chest had gone from seven to eleven before she saw the pipe.

She did not decide. She had never decided; that was the thing she had begun to understand about herself. She went across the yard in two steps, a long reach of boots and breath, and put herself between Lucia and the hood, and the pipe came round in a flat black arc.

She got her left forearm up. The impact was the kind of sound that carried: not a crack, a deep wet *thock*, like a spade into clay. Pain went down her arm and up into her teeth. She had time to think *Brace* and to feel it close around her like a hand, and then the man stepped back, and she caught his eyes in the slit of the hood, white and astonished.

WEIGHT ABSORBED: 9. BRACE 2: -4. DAMAGE: 5.

VOLUNTARY. PAID DUTY: NO. FAMILIAR: NO. NEW TARGET.

CREDIT +9. 32/40.

She did not make a noise. She said, "That's enough," in the voice she used on drunk men outside clubs, and the hood hesitated. It was a good voice. It could stop a bull.

It did not stop him. He swung again, a short wild backhand, and she took that on the shoulder too, and heard something in her collarbone say a small and ominous word. She seized the pipe with her right hand and held it. They stood there, in the wet yard, two feet apart, in a kind of dreadful intimacy, and she looked down into the slit of the hood and said, quietly, "Who sent you?"

He let go.

It was so sudden that she nearly fell. He just opened his hands and the pipe stayed in hers, and he turned and ran, three strides to the brick, a leap at the top of the drain-gate wall, a scrabble of boots on glass, and then nothing. A thump on the other side. Footsteps, receding down the lane toward Weir.

Obie came out of the back door with the peas still in his fist. Pilar behind him, in her shawl, her mouth open.

"Dez," said Obie, "are you —"

"Fine."

"You're *bleeding.*"

She looked. The sleeve of her shirt had split along the forearm, and below it the skin had opened across an inch of angry red; not deep, but wet. She wiped it on her thigh. The bruise was blooming already, black and lilac, a long dull welt the exact width of a pipe.

She felt Mend begin, a faint warm itch under the skin, and sat down on a tomato crate before anyone could notice she was doing it.

Lucia had not moved. She was still against the brick, her phone dark in her hand, and her face was a thing Dez would remember for a long time, the way you remember the moment a bird hits a window. She was white. Her lips were slightly apart. And her eyes, her sharp, bright, relentless eyes, went from the pipe to Dez's arm and from Dez's arm to the wall and back to Dez's face, not with gratitude, but with something else, a second thought she did not seem to want.

"You knew," she said.

"What?"

"You *knew.* You got up before he came over the wall. You got up, Obie said, before there was a sound, and you were out the door like a, like you were *expecting* it."

"I heard something."

"You heard something." Lucia gave a short ugly laugh. "Through a wall. Over the TV. And a man with a pipe, a man with a pipe happens to drop out of the sky and hit you, you, with the single most convenient forearm in the Terraces, and then he, what, he runs away? He doesn't hit you again? He doesn't hit *me*?"

"He hit me twice."

"Because you stood there!"

"Lucia —"

"It's the second time, Statue. It's the *second time.* A fire you're on the pavement for. A pipe you're in the yard for. You're always in the right place, always with the right arm, and every time it ends with you on the ground looking brave and a nice clean clip for the feed." Her voice rose. "What do you want? You want the Floor to love you? You want the," she gestured at her own chest, "the *redemption arc*, you want it with a bow? Because I read the Authority's press release, I know about 'Unfrozen', I know there's a hashtag —"

"Lucia." It was Pilar's voice, from the doorway. Very quiet.

"No. No, Abuela. Look at her." Lucia's eyes were fierce and wet. "She comes to your kitchen with tangerines. She takes Papi's key. And ten minutes later, a man appears out of the dark and she, oh, she's *right there.*"

Dez said nothing. She sat on the crate with her left arm on her knee and her right hand curled round the pipe. There was no answer that did not begin with a menu. She could have said: *I felt your fear through a wall.* She could have said: *If I had staged it I would have earned nothing.* The lines of the rule stood in her head in the pale green font. COLLUSION: TARGET CONSENTING. NO CREDIT. And at the bottom of the display, quietly, where the numbers kept their record, 32/40, eight more than a day ago, which nobody could see or prove.

"Here," she said at last.

She held out the pipe. Lucia stared at it.

"It's galvanised. There's a number stamped on the end. Rubber grip on the left side, worn, so he's right-handed. Take it to the police, or Obie's friend with the lab. See who it belongs to." She put it in Lucia's hands, and Lucia took it because it was shoved at her. "If I staged it, I'd have thrown it over the wall."

A silence. The washing hung wet and still.

"He said nothing," Lucia said slowly.

"He didn't have to."

"He, he looked at me. Not at you. When he came over the wall, he looked at *me.*"

"I know."

"Why would someone —" She stopped. She looked down at the pipe in her hands, and then, with a kind of horror, at the padlock on the gate beside her, and Dez saw it arrive: that the man had come over the wall of the drain gate, to the one patch of ground in Ketterline where Lucia stood most, in a yard where the ledger had gone missing nine years before.

"Because you were close," Dez said gently. "To something."

Lucia did not say thank you. She did not say anything. She lifted the pipe in both hands, as a person might lift an unwelcome baby, and walked back into the house.

Dez stayed on the crate. After a time Pilar came out with a clean cloth and a basin of warm water, set it on the ground, knelt with a groan, and began to clean the cut on her arm without comment.

"She will come around," Pilar murmured.

"She shouldn't have to."

"No." The cloth was gentle. "But that is not the same as should."

The wound closed under the water. It did it slowly, in an unfaithful, ordinary way that Pilar could look at and mistake for clean skin. Dez watched the green menu settle at the edge of the world and thought, with the odd clarity of pain, that there was a line she had not seen before.

CHARGES: 4.

LUCIA PAREDES. BOND 1. DISTANCE: 6 m. DISTRESS: 5.

She closed her eyes. Somewhere behind the wall, in a grandmother's kitchen, a woman who despised her was pacing with a pipe in her hands. And Dez could feel every step.