The Owl came at 2:31 and Dez was standing on the platform when it arrived, in socks and a Plumbline jacket and shoes she had not tied, with her arm strapped in the folded tea-towel Bao had pressed into her hand on the way out of the door.

"Take your phone," Bao had said. "Take a coat. Take me."

"No."

"Take a *banana*," he had said, as a last offer, and she had taken the banana.

The Owl was what the Cableway called its night service: one small blue gondola, not the yellow cars of the day, that dropped from the Rim to the Floor every forty minutes with the air of a thing that would rather be asleep. The driver was an elderly man called Gus who looked up from his thermos and said, "Late to work, love?" and then, seeing her face, did not say anything else. He closed the doors. The gondola dropped.

TAMAR IBEKWE. DISTANCE: 900 m. DISTRESS: 10.

She watched the number fall. The canyon went by on her left in terraces of dark windows, hundreds of them, hundreds of people asleep, and then there was a long black stretch with only the cable humming and the lights of the Floor coming up, orange and low, with a smear of river between. She had never been on this car. People like her went down by day, in uniform, with a client, and came back by day.

At 2:44 the doors opened. The air was hot and wet and smelled of mud and frying oil, with something underneath it that was darker and less ordinary.

Smoke.

She ran.

The Floor had a different geometry from the rest of Ketterline. On the Rim, the streets were straight because someone had paid for a ruler. On the Terraces they zigzagged where the cliff did. Down here they were an old tangled grid left over from before the canyon walls were built up, narrow brick streets with the buildings leaning in over them like people at a bar. Three blocks from the Owl stop she turned a corner and saw it: a street sign that read PASADERA ST, and, a hundred metres beyond it, a three-storey building with its third floor lit from inside like a lantern.

Orange. Moving. A window blew out as she watched and a sheet of flame went up the face of the brick.

The street was empty. A few people stood in doorways in their nightclothes, one woman with a baby, an old man with a bucket. Someone was shouting about the fire brigade. In the distance, far down the Floor, she could hear a siren winding up.

TAMAR IBEKWE. DISTANCE: 31 m. DISTRESS: 10. WEIGHT INBOUND: ESTIMATED 14.

It was strange how clear it was. The number was not the building, or the smoke, or the people in the street. It sat in her ribs like a swallowed stone and pointed, like a compass needle, at the stairwell door.

The door was open. Heat came out of it in a slab.

"Hey!" a man shouted behind her. "Hey, you can't!"

She went in.

The ground floor was a hallway of cracked tile with a row of mailboxes and a notice board nailed to the wall. In the red light she saw a printed sign: TENANTS: PLEASE REPORT ALL MAINTENANCE TO OKH PROPERTY SERVICES. UNDER NO CIRCUMSTANCES TOUCH THE FUSE PANEL. A smoke alarm hung from the ceiling on two bare wires, its battery compartment empty and open like a mouth.

The stairs went up in a dogleg. At the turn of the second landing, through smoke that stood in the air like cloth, she saw two figures coming down.

One was Tamar Ibekwe, still in her oversized KCA polo, with a wet towel over her mouth, bent nearly double. The other was an old woman in a nightdress, upright and stiff, her arm over the girl's shoulder and her feet dragging. They were moving a step at a time. Behind them the ceiling of the third-floor landing glowed like a stove.

"Tamar!"

The girl looked up. Her eyes were streaming; her mouth moved. "Nan can't. Her legs. I can't."

"I've got her. Keep coming."

It took four seconds to climb the flight. She had Mrs Ibekwe's weight off the girl in one bad-armed scoop, a light dry woman who smelled of coconut oil and smoke, who said in a voice as brisk as a teacher's, "Who is this? Tamar, who is this? She's very tall."

"That's the bodyguard," Tamar said, wheezing, "from the telly."

"The one who froze?"

"Mama Hepzibah," said Dez, "can we do this on the pavement."

They had reached the half-landing. Dez got Tamar in front of her, one hand on the girl's collar, the old woman across her good shoulder in a fireman's carry that her left arm screamed at, and turned for the final flight. The stairs were ten steps, eleven. The hallway door was lit red at the bottom.

And above them, with a long slow tearing sound like fabric, the ceiling of the second floor gave way.

She saw it the way you see a car coming: all of it at once, nothing at all. A black beam, old pine, as thick as her thigh, swinging down out of the burning plaster, one end still fixed to the wall, the other coming around through the smoke in an arc that she could have drawn. It was going to come down across the landing. It was going to take the old woman at the head and the girl at the shoulder, and if Dez stepped back, even half a pace, she would be clear.

*Distance, angle, weight.* The arithmetic hadn't gone anywhere. It had been waiting for her.

She went forward instead.

The beam hit her across the left shoulder and the back, and for a moment there was no sound at all.

Then there was a great deal of sound. It was her own voice, and it was not a word. The beam had come down with all its length behind it, a flaming bar the weight of a small horse, and where it landed her collarbone, which had been merely bruised, went off with a sharp crack she felt in her teeth. Her knees hit the stair. The old woman on her shoulder cried out. Burning plaster fell in a rain on her back, and she smelled her own jacket.

"Go," she said. "Go, go, *go* —"

Tamar had her nan by the arm. They went, down the last steps and across the tile and through the door in one stumbling bundle, and Dez, who had a beam across her back and a sensation like a hot iron being laid along her spine, heard the door bang and the street take them in.

She got one knee under herself. She did not stand. The beam shifted, sparking, and slid to rest across the bottom three steps with a crash.

The air in front of her face had not stopped.

COVER ENGAGED. WEIGHT INTERCEPTED: 14 (2 targets). SOURCE: Falling structural timber, burning. TARGET A: Hepzibah Ibekwe, 71. NEW. WEIGHT 9. CREDIT +9. TARGET B: Tamar Ibekwe, 17. FAMILIAR (24h): YES. WEIGHT 5. HALVED. CREDIT +2. INTERPOSER: Adaeze Novak-Obi. VOLUNTARY: Yes. PAID DUTY: No. BRACE 1: RECEIVED 14. REDUCED BY BRACE: 11. DAMAGE: 11 (fracture, burns, smoke).

She tried to read it twice and it swam. Blood was in her mouth. *Fracture,* she thought, with the clinical interest of someone watching a car crash from a distance. The menu did not offer to fix it.

CREDIT 20 / 20. RANK 2 REACHED.

"That's rude," she said, to nobody, and then the smoke got into her lungs and she coughed until the sparks danced.

On the ground floor the alarm that wasn't an alarm clicked in its housing, a dead plastic ticking. The beam creaked above her. The ceiling would be down within a minute, she knew, with a flat cold certainty; she knew buildings. She had a hand free and the stairs were eleven steps, no, three, and the door was a bright square in a black wall, and she could not make her legs agree to cross it.

*Get up,* she told herself, in the voice of the girl on the platform with her hands over her mouth. *You are not allowed to freeze here.*

It was a stupid thing to say. She wasn't frozen. She was just broken, and the difference, it turned out, was enormous.

She crawled.

The door came at her, tile, a threshold, a gust of night air that tasted like rain on stone. Hands were on her then, many hands, in gloves, and a voice said, "Got her, got her, on three, one, two," and she was lifted bodily out onto the cool bricks of the street and laid on something flat and plastic that rocked, a stretcher. A light shone in her eyes. The siren she had heard far off was a wall of noise now, a red and white wash over everything, and in the strobing she saw Tamar and her nan sitting on the kerb under a foil blanket with a neighbour's arm round them both.

Someone knelt by her head. A man, with a short dark beard cut close, a Floor Rescue helmet with the strap undone and a face so tired it seemed to be trying to sleep on its feet.

"Hello," he said, in a quiet voice. "Can you tell me your name?"

"Dez."

"Dez. I'm Yusuf. I'm a paramedic. You've been in a building fire and a beam fell on you, which I'm told is the kind of thing that stings." He had her wrist in his hand and was counting. His thumb was warm. "You're going to be okay. I'd just like to know why you're not screaming."

"I'm," she said. "Busy."

"Doing what?"

She tried to point. In the air in front of her, where only she could see it, the green text had cleared and then filled again with a new box, bigger than any before, with a chime she heard only in her mind, like a bell struck underwater.

RANK 2. YOU HAVE 2 POINTS TO ASSIGN. BRACE. REACH. READ. MEND.

"Choosing," she managed, and passed out at his feet.