"Throw it harder," said Dez.
"I'm not throwing it harder."
"You have to throw it like you mean it."
"Dez." Bao Tran stood in the middle of the living room holding an oven mitt, a stockpot lid, and the expression of a man who had volunteered for a hostage negotiation and been given the wrong script. He was twenty-nine and small and wiry and wore, over his chef's whites, a cardigan the colour of cooked spinach. "I'm a gentle man. I make soup. You're asking me to throw cookware at your face and I want to be on record that I'm doing it as a friend."
"Noted. Throw it at the cushion."
"The cushion is a person?"
"The cushion is my flatmate," said Dez, standing in front of the sofa, a pillow clutched to her chest. "Sitting in the sofa. Under threat."
"You've named the cushion?"
"Just throw it."
The flat at Switchback 14 was a third-floor, two-bed cut into the canyon wall, with a window that looked straight across the gap at somebody's laundry and a balcony the size of a doormat. They had lived here for three years. It smelled, permanently, of star anise. Bao had cleared the table for the experiment and put a lamp on the floor so that, in his words, the lighting would feel *forensic*. He had asked no questions at all when she came home at seven with her arm in a sling and said, "I need you to throw things at a pillow." He had simply looked at her and said, "Do you want the good mitt or the bad mitt?"
He threw the oven mitt. It went up, turned, and flopped against the pillow with a noise like a sigh.
Dez waited. The air in front of her face stayed blank.
"Nothing?" Bao said.
"Nothing. Weight zero. It's not enough to hurt."
"Weight zero of what?"
"Never mind." She had said too much. That was the trouble; she had come home with a secret the size of a bus and found that her mouth wanted to put it down in the first available spot. "Throw the lid."
"The lid hurts."
"The lid is the point."
He threw the lid. It was an aluminium thing, light, and she let it bounce off the pillow with a clank, and this time the green text did appear, politely and without joy:
COVER: NO ENGAGEMENT. SOURCE: Thrown object (lid, 180 g). TARGET: Cushion (not a person). Ineligible.
"Right," she muttered. "Obviously."
"What's obviously?" said Bao.
"Sit on the sofa. You be the target."
"Oh, *no*," said Bao.
"You'd be protected."
"By a woman with one working arm and a cardigan of her own. Dez." He sat anyway, folded his knees up under him, and looked at her with sudden, naked worry. "Are you okay? Are you doing some kind of, like, trauma thing? Because I'm into it. I read an article. But I want to be a good partner in it."
"I'm doing a thing," she said, which was both the most honest and least useful reply she'd given all day. "Throw the lid at yourself. Not hard. Just at your knee."
"At my own *knee*."
"I'll jump in front."
It took two minutes of explaining and one of Bao making her promise it wouldn't be on the internet. Then he lobbed the lid at his own knee, gently, in a long arc, and Dez dived, left shoulder first, across the coffee table and caught it on the back of her good arm with a bright, flat, ringing smack that made them both yelp.
It hurt. It hurt much less than the thermos. In the air:
COVER: NO ENGAGEMENT. HARM THROWN BY TARGET AT SELF. NO CREDIT.
She lay on the carpet with her cheek against a crumb.
"Did it work?" asked Bao. He was kneeling over her with the stockpot lid held to his chest like a communion plate. "Did you get your, whatever? Your reward?"
"No."
"Why not?"
"Because I'm not covering you from anything," Dez said slowly. "I'm covering you from you." She rolled onto her back. "And it knew."
"It?"
She shut her mouth. There was a long silence while the radiator ticked.
"Okay," said Bao, sitting down on the floor beside her. "I don't need it explained. I'm only going to ask one question, and you can lie. Is it dangerous?"
"I don't know yet."
"Is it good?"
She thought about a girl's hand pressed for a second against her arm. About the strange clean click of a number in the air. She thought about the long silence of eleven months, in which she had stood in a lot of rooms with her hands empty.
"Yes," said Dez. "I think it is."
"Then I'll make you soup," said Bao, and got up with the air of a man given a mission at last.
---
They tried the staged one properly after that, with his arm tucked behind his back to look like a threat, as if Dez were being attacked by a man in a cardigan. She tried it twice. The second time the menu said, coolly: COLLUSION: TARGET CONSENTING. NO CREDIT, and Dez stared at the words for a long time. They were not rude. They were just exact, in the way of a tax form.
"It knows when we're faking," she said.
"Of course it does. It's a game." Bao was already at the kitchen counter, ladling something fragrant and pale into two mismatched bowls. "All the good ones have anti-cheat. You can't farm your friends. It'd be pointless."
"I didn't say it was a game."
"You didn't say it *wasn't*." He set a bowl in front of her without ceremony. "Eat."
She was halfway through the bowl, which tasted of ginger and burnt onion and a thing she suspected was lemongrass, when the door buzzed twice and, before either of them could stand, opened.
"Adaeze."
Ngozi Obi-Novak was sixty-two, five foot two, and wearing the good green wrapper and her late husband's raincoat. She carried a thermal bag in each hand and a cloth bag on her shoulder, and she did not enter the flat so much as arrive in it, like weather. Bao sprang to his feet. Dez remained where she was, because she had learned, over thirty-one years, that this was the only pose from which a person can survive her.
"Mama. You have a key."
"I have a key because you do not answer your phone. Forty-one messages I left. Four minutes, four minutes, four minutes. A mother sees her daughter hit by a drinks tin on the internet, in front of strangers, and the daughter is silent?" She set the bags on the table. "Look at the arm. *Look at it.* Bao, look at this arm."
"It's very purple," said Bao, with feeling.
"It is the colour of an eggplant." Ngozi took Dez's wrist between her thumb and finger with the practised grip of a woman who had held pins in her mouth for thirty years, and turned the arm to the light. "Does it move? Make a fist. Hm. Who hit you?"
"A man, Mama. With a thermos."
"A man with a thermos! And why was there a man? Because you stand in front of people. I told you at the beginning. When you were twelve, in the school play, I said, Adaeze, why do you always want to be the tree? A tree is a thing people lean on. Eventually it falls down." She was already unpacking: rice the colour of a sunset, a stew of bitter leaf with stockfish, a smaller tub that she held back as though for a tribunal. "Your father also stood in front of things. He was a plumber, and he stood in front of burst pipes. And look."
"Mama."
"I am only saying look." She sniffed. Her eyes, very bright, went to the wall, to the lamp on the floor, to the oven mitt in the middle of the carpet, and did not ask. "You will eat all of this. Kochanie."
The word still did what it did. It was Polish; her father had learned only seven of them, and he had used all seven over the years in endlessly rearranged combinations. Dez put down her spoon.
"I saw the thing," Ngozi said, quietly, in a different voice. "The little one, with the girl behind you. That was good. That was right. I will not say I am proud. You will go to your head."
"You just said it."
"I did not. I said it was *right.*" She dried her hands on the wrapper. "Now. I am going to sit, and watch you eat, and say nothing."
She said nothing for four minutes, which in her was a world record. Bao hovered with the ladle. Out the window, the laundry across the gap shifted in the dark. At the end she kissed Dez on the forehead, hard, as if sealing a jar, informed Bao that he was too thin for a cook, and left in a gust of vetiver and ginger and bitter leaf, taking her raincoat and none of her opinions.
"She's a lot," Bao said fondly, into the quiet.
"She's the best of us." Dez lay down on the sofa with her feet over the arm. She was empty and full, a thing which she could not explain, and her last conscious thought, as the lamp on the floor ticked and cooled, was of a number in the air. CREDIT 9 / 20. Eleven more to go to whatever came next.
---
She woke in the dark with her hand already on her chest.
The flat was black. Bao's door was closed; she could hear him breathe through it. The clock on the oven said 2:14. Outside, the city made its small night noises: a cable singing in the wind, someone's air conditioner, a drunk, a long way off, singing a song with no tune.
And in her ribs, hard and fast and terrified, a pulse that was not hers.
TAMAR IBEKWE. DISTANCE: 1.4 km. DISTRESS: 9.
She sat up. The distance was vertical, not horizontal; she could feel it as a pull downward, toward the dark mouth of the canyon, toward the Floor. She tried to work out why a girl of seventeen would be down there in the middle of the night, at an hour when the funiculars ran only for the night shift, with her heart going like a trapped moth.
She was on her feet before she knew she would be.
The number moved.
DISTRESS: 10.
It was the highest it had been. It did not say what she was supposed to do about it. But under the number, quite small, in the same cheap-calculator typeface, the menu had added a new line that she had not seen before.
WEIGHT INBOUND: ESTIMATED 14. READ 0: NO FURTHER DETAIL.
