"Hi, Wall," said the woman on the phone again, in case anyone had missed it. "No, don't go. Obie, hold it steady, babe, you're making her seasick. Wall, hello. I've been wanting to meet you in person, and look, here you are, in a poncho of orange sports drink. I love it. Real brand work."

Dez looked at the phone. Behind the woman, a kitchen: a yellow wall, a calendar from a church in Pasadera Street, a pot on a stove with the lid rattling. She thought, absurdly, *somebody's cooking*.

"Good morning," she said.

"Oh, good *morning*," said Lucia Paredes, to forty-one thousand people. "She says good morning. Chat, did you hear that? Very calm. Very ex-army. Listen, I have a quick one, because you're clearly busy. Eleven months ago a man threw a bucket of the Floor on your boss, and you stood there. This morning a man threw a thermos at a Cableway worker and you jumped. Why do you think that is?"

"I looked at my phone eleven months ago," Dez said.

"Right! That's the thing! You did! And I want everyone to notice that's all she's ever said. *I looked at my phone.* Nothing about the mud. Nothing about the Floor." Lucia's face was very animated, very warm, a face made for close-ups. "But when it's a Cableway uniform, boom, she's *there*. Funny, that. It's almost as though some people are worth standing in front of."

"She's seventeen," Dez said.

"They're always seventeen." The comment line beneath her scrolled in a blur; Dez could see a few words slide past, **WALL**, **wall wall wall**, a row of little yellow waves. "Look, I'm not saying you're a bad person. I'm saying it's a system. You protect the people who built the lifts. We, the people who went down in them, would like our questions answered. Tell Neil Abara-Whitfield the Floor remembers. Tell him we've got a very nice wreath."

"I don't talk to Mr Abara-Whitfield about —"

"But you *work* for him."

"That's different."

"Is it?" said Lucia, with a kind of tender interest, as if Dez were a patient. "Okay! See you tomorrow, Wall."

The phone went dark in Obie's hand. He stood there a moment, wearing the expression of a man who has just watched his own protest be taken out of his hands and made into a better one.

"She's really good," he said, almost to himself.

"She's very good," said Dez. And then, because she was exhausted, and because the arm had begun to throb in rhythm with the girl's pulse behind her: "Tell her thank you for her time."

---

The statement took forty minutes in an office with a poster of a smiling funicular on the wall. A supervisor named Dolores Quint asked her three times whether she had "engaged the aggressor physically," and Dez said three times that she had stood in the way of a thermos. Tamar, who had been given a cup of tea and a chair and a form to sign, watched Dez over the rim of the cup like a first-year student watching a large, strange teacher at the front of the lecture hall.

When Dez left, Tamar stopped her at the door.

"Thanks," she said. And then, painfully fair: "I don't know what you think I did."

"You didn't do anything."

"I know. That's what I mean." She frowned, and Dez felt it, a flicker in her chest, a low clean stab of embarrassment that did not belong to her. "Everyone I know will say you're awful. My nan will say you're awful. She'll have it on the TV."

"Your nan's right about most things," Dez said. "She'll be wrong about this."

She walked out into the sun with her arm in a sling of her own folded jacket and found that the pulse in her chest was still there, fainter, as she climbed the stairs to the platform. A bond, the menu had said. It didn't fade all at once. It thinned with distance, like a radio station going out of range, until at the top of the long yellow ride she could feel almost nothing at all.

She had a smile for the rest of the way up. It was a small, private one. It lasted until she saw the screen above the Rim platform, which was playing the video from the morning, in slow motion, with the song, and a caption that read **UNFROZEN?** in white letters under a smiling yellow mascot of the Authority.

---

Crown Station sat on the lip of the canyon like a glass hat. The Ketterline Cableway Authority occupied its top eleven floors, and the Chair of the Authority occupied the forty-first, in an office with a view of every ledge in the city and a framed photograph of a small boy holding a model funicular. Dez had seen that photograph perhaps two hundred times. She had never been sure whether the boy was Neil or his son, and had never asked.

"There she is," said Neil Abara-Whitfield, coming around the desk with both hands out. "There she is! Folks, have you seen the footage? Bethan, have you seen the footage? The woman is a *tonic*."

"Morning, Mr Abara-Whitfield," said Dez.

"Neil. I've told you. Neil." He was fifty-eight, broad, silver at the temples in a way that photographed well, with the walk of a man who had been warmly applauded for thirty years and was afraid, privately, of silence. He took her good hand in both of his and held it a moment too long. He smelled of vetiver and breakfast. "You look terrible. Beautiful, but terrible. Bethan, ice."

"I have ice," said Bethan Oyelowo-Marsh, from the sofa, without looking up from a tablet. She was thirty, immaculate, and had the stillness of someone who has spent a long time standing near an explosive. "She's had ice. Cilla told me."

"She's had ice! Sit, Dez. Sit. I want to tell you what we're going to do."

Dez did not sit. It was a habit, not a statement; she stood by the window, with her back to the wall, and counted the exits. Two doors. One lift. A wall of glass over a drop of four hundred metres. "Sir?"

"Eleven months ago," Neil said, "I stood on a stage and I was a punchline. And do you know what I thought? I thought, well, Neil, that's the price. Folks, you take the long view. You take the mud with the monument." He had said this to Dez before, in nearly the same words, on a bad morning in the spring. "And now. Look at this." He turned the screen of his desk monitor toward her. The footage again, the sling, the thermos, a fat red number in the corner: 9.2 million views. "The same woman. The same *face*. Ketterline looks at it and sees the story it's been waiting for."

"Which story," Dez said.

"Redemption! A fall and a rise. A frozen woman, unfrozen. I've had the communications people on it since eight. We're thinking of a short piece, very modest, a coffee. 'Unfrozen: One Year Later.' You get to be the hero, Dez. And it so happens," he said, a shade too casual, "that the Authority is rather, well, in need of a hero."

"Because of the Floor."

His smile did not leave, but something behind it went and stood very still. "Because," he said, "of a number of voices."

"One voice," said Bethan, from the sofa. "She has two million followers."

"Bethan."

"I'm just saying what she said at breakfast." Bethan tapped the tablet. "She's announced a vigil. The Pasadera anniversary is tomorrow. They're doing it at the old memorial on the corner of Pasadera and Weir, nine a.m., and she's telling people to bring yellow. There will be a good many people. Many of them are, I should say, extremely annoyed."

"The ninth of October," said Neil, as if tasting it.

Dez had known the date for a long time. Everyone in Ketterline did, in the way you know the date of a war. Nine years ago, in the rain, the river had risen into the streets of Pasadera, where the Floor's old drainage gate had failed, and the lifts that might have carried people to the Terraces had been, depending on the story, either overloaded, or slow, or switched to maintenance, or simply not enough. Thirty-one people had died. It had been a tragedy. It had been, according to three separate inquiries, nobody's fault. Neil Abara-Whitfield had been the Authority's deputy director, and had been on a plane to a conference in Lisbon when it happened. He had cried at the funerals. Everyone said so.

"Sir," Dez said. "Are you thinking of going?"

"I'm thinking," said Neil, "that a Chair of the Authority cannot be seen to hide from his own people on the ninth of October. I'm thinking that I will go down to Pasadera Street, tomorrow, in a dark suit, and lay a wreath, and bow my head in front of every phone in this city." He rested a hand on his desk. For a moment the folksy shine dropped away and she saw a heavy, tired man who had not slept. "And I'm thinking I'd like a tall woman beside me who stood in front of a thermos for a girl she'd never met."

"Neil," said Bethan quietly. "Security hasn't cleared a walk-through."

"Cilla will clear it."

"Cilla will say no."

"Then we will ask nicely."

Dez said nothing. She was seeing the yellow ponchos in a ring on the platform, a boy's phone, a woman's warm hard voice. *Tell Neil the Floor remembers.* Beside her ribs, a thin thread of someone else's pulse, a girl she'd been paid, by a menu, to protect, going on faintly in the distance.

She looked at the menu. It was there if she wanted it. Rank 1; Credit 9 of 20. The wide cold sum of what she had earned that morning and what she would not be paid for tomorrow, when the whole of the ninth of October fell on a man she was paid, by the hour, to keep upright.

"Sir," she said, "I'd like to think about whether that's a good idea."

"Of course." Neil smiled his handsome, public smile. "Think. Take all the time you need. Until nine o'clock tomorrow morning, say, when you'll be standing next to me on Pasadera Street, in a black suit, with a wreath."

He was not asking, and everyone in the room knew it, including the part of her that was, even now, adding up the weights.