The stone wall at the corner of Pasadera and Weir was twelve metres long and the colour of old teeth. Someone had cut thirty-one names into it, in two columns, with a small bronze plaque at the bottom that said NEVER AGAIN and was already green at the edges.

Behind it, set into the brick, was the gate. Dez had looked at the gate for some time. It was a drainage grille the size of a garage door, rusted down to the lace of its own bars, with a padlock hung through it that looked newer than anything else on the street. This was where the river had come up. Nine years ago the gate had failed, and the water had come through it into Pasadera Street, and thirty-one people had gone down in the flood, mostly in their beds.

She counted the people in front of it instead, because it was something to do with her eyes.

Three thousand, give or take. Yellow, nearly all of them: scarves, ponchos, ribbons, balloons with a wave drawn on each one in marker. They filled the corner and the two blocks beyond it, standing on kerbs and steps and the roofs of parked vans. A stage had been knocked together at the foot of the wall out of pallets and a stripe of blue tarp, and on it a woman with a microphone was reading from a list in a clear, unhurried voice.

"Odile Ferreira-Mbeki, aged sixty-six. Jun Takeda, aged nine."

"You're thinking about leaving," said Mac Solano-Reid.

"I'm not."

"You've moved your feet three times. You do that when you want to leave." He stood at her left shoulder in a black suit that did not quite agree with his shoulders, a man of thirty-eight with a boxer's flattened nose and a wife who sent him to work every morning with a packed lunch and a note. He was the best partner she had ever worked with and the only one who had not mentioned the video, except now. "You all right, Statue?"

"Don't call me that."

"I'm calling you it with love."

"It's worse that way."

"Is it? Hm." He looked out over the crowd. "Do you want to tell me why you look like you've been run over by a funicular?"

"A beam," Dez said, "fell on me."

"At the *hospital*?"

"At a fire."

Mac turned his head very slowly. "You were in a fire? Last night? I thought Cilla said you were at home with your feet up."

"I was. I got up."

He opened his mouth, shut it again, and let out a breath through his nose. "You know what I like about you, Dez? I never know what to put in the report." He turned back. "You look good, though. I'm saying that as a coworker. Your arm's out of the sling. Don't tell me, I don't want to know."

She hadn't wanted to be here at all. She had left the hospital at twenty past six with her hand clean and pink and her back healed over a long pale stripe, with a number written on a prescription pad in her pocket and a very dignified paramedic watching her from the ambulance bay. "Nine o'clock," he had said. "I'll take it out of the drawer. If I'm lucky I'll have forgotten." Then Bao had met her at the Owl stop with a garment bag, a protein bar, and the disorienting look of a man who had been awake all night for love, and she had been dressed on the Floor, in a public toilet behind a bakery, in the one black suit she owned.

The woman on the stage finished the first column. A roll of applause went through the crowd, quiet and strange, a sound like rain starting.

"And now," she said, "the Chair of the Cableway Authority would like to say a few words."

The applause stopped.

Neil Abara-Whitfield climbed the three steps in a dark suit and a black tie with a yellow ribbon pinned to his lapel. Bethan's work; Dez could see the staging in it. He carried the wreath himself, white lilies on a wire ring. He stood at the microphone and put the wreath down on the stone ledge, and then he stood back and looked up at the wall, and there was a long silence in which nobody breathed.

She watched him in profile. The silver at his temples, the shine on his jaw. He wasn't performing. Or he was, but he'd also stopped, somewhere in the last minute, and that was a different thing.

"Folks," Neil said, hoarsely. "I —"

"Say their names," someone shouted.

It came from the middle of the crowd. A woman's voice, not Lucia's. A second voice took it up, then a third, and it rolled outward across the corner, a low swelling chant. *Say their names. Say their names.*

Dez felt the shape of the crowd change. It was like standing in a river when the current turns. Heads had come up. The stage creaked. From the right, a few metres off, a barrier of steel crowd-control fencing that someone had rigged along the front of the stage gave a long metallic groan as the people behind it leant.

*Weight,* she thought, absurdly. *Distribution.*

She was moving before she could think the next thing. At the same instant, on her left, the world narrowed to a pinpoint: a dark shape coming up from the crowd, overarm, turning in the sun. A bottle. Glass, green. It hung for an unfair moment against the yellow, like a coin, and the whole of her training, nine years of it, roared up and pointed at the man in the black tie.

Then the barrier went.

It didn't fall so much as fold. The fence bent from the middle, the stage-front stanchion bowed, and a whole hinged section sagged forward under the pressure of two hundred bodies, spilling people over the edge like beans out of a bag. A few caught themselves. Most were adults. At the bottom of the fold, three feet from a steel foot, a small boy in a yellow raincoat with a balloon tied to his wrist stood perfectly still, looking up at the ten feet of steel that was coming down on him.

TARGET: Dario Okonkwo-Reyes, 6. WEIGHT INBOUND: 12.

TARGET: Cornelius Abara-Whitfield. WEIGHT INBOUND: 3.

The two numbers hung in the air, side by side, in her ribs, and she had perhaps a second and a half.

She had been a bodyguard for nine years. She had been taught to the point of tears that in a crowd you do not leave your client. Not for a flare, not for a fire, not for a baby in the road. You *covered*, you went to the car, you let the other people be people. Eleven months ago she'd let one of them be a punchline, and the sentence had been written for her in forty million screens.

*Distance, angle, weight.*

"Mac," she said.

He was already moving. She didn't have to say the rest. He went left, the black suit flying, shoulder low, and she saw the green glass hit his sleeve and burst, saw him fold around the man at the microphone and haul him down below the lip of the stage in one practised sweep. Behind her, in a fraction of a second, a thing happened that she had not known she could feel: the trust, loose and heavy in her chest like a coin dropped into a well.

Her thumb found the app in her pocket. Hold. One. One and a half.

Her feet were already on the road.

She went under the fallen rail like a roller-derby jammer, shoulder first, a six-foot woman in a funeral suit going through a gap built for a child. She got her arms round the boy and pulled him into her chest, and the steel stanchion came down across her back with a crack that she heard in her eyeballs.

COVER ENGAGED. WEIGHT INTERCEPTED: 12. SOURCE: Collapsed crowd barrier (steel, ~90 kg). TARGET: Dario Okonkwo-Reyes, 6. NEW. INTERPOSER: Adaeze Novak-Obi. VOLUNTARY: Yes. PAID DUTY: NO (CLOCKED OUT). FAMILIAR (24h): No. BRACE 2: RECEIVED 12. REDUCED BY BRACE: 8. DAMAGE: 8 (bruising, cracked rib). CREDIT: +12.

CREDIT 12 / 40.

For a moment it was just the boy's hot head under her chin and the smell of shampoo and mud. The balloon had burst. He lay in her arms, rigid, enormous-eyed, and said, in a very reasonable small voice, "You're squishing me."

"Sorry."

"It's okay." He considered. "Is the man all right?"

"What man?"

"The man you didn't catch."

She turned her head, and her ribs said no.

Neil was sitting on the stage with his tie over his shoulder, mud on his knee. A green star of glass surrounded him on the boards. Mac was crouched beside him, shaking glass out of his sleeve with a wry, unbothered face. Behind them, in front of the stone wall, at the microphone, someone had stepped up in the confusion.

It was Lucia. She was in a yellow coat, no ring light, no ponchos, no rehearsed face. She held the microphone in both hands. She was looking down, off the front of the stage, straight at Dez and the boy.

For a long second neither of them moved. The crowd had gone quiet, shocked into the quiet of people who have almost done a terrible thing together. Then Lucia lifted the microphone.

"We read the rest of the names," she said. "Slowly. Nobody pushes. Mr Abara-Whitfield, you can sit down now. Somebody get that child's mother." And, off-mic, in a voice that reached only the first two rows: "God, she went *under* it."

---

The list took forty minutes. Dez stood to one side, holding a bag of ice to her ribs and a small boy's hand, the boy being named Dario and the hand being, at his insistence, hers. His mother, a nurse with a face the colour of paper, had cried into her shoulder and then gone to stand with a policeman. Dez had an ice pack, a cracked rib that was already, quietly, beginning to mend, and the silent satisfaction of a number in the air that said so.

The names were read. She heard them one by one. At the end of the first column the reader stopped, and Lucia stepped forward and read the line at the top, the oldest name, the first.

"Nestor Paredes. Seventy-four." Her voice did not shake. "My grandfather. He ran a locksmith's shop on Weir. He used to say a lock was just an opinion with a key. He died on the fourth floor of the Calloway building, with his neighbours, because the lifts that should have taken them out of this canyon were told to wait for permission."

She looked up, and the crowd, all three thousand of them, looked with her at the man on the stage.

Neil Abara-Whitfield had flinched. It was a small flinch, only a movement of his shoulders and a quick glance at the ground, and Dez would not have seen it if she had not spent nine years watching shoulders. It wasn't the flinch of a man being accused. It was the flinch of a man being recognised.

Later, much later, in the black car with the engine running and Bethan on the phone in the front seat, he put a hand on Dez's sleeve and held it there.

"I knew him," Neil said quietly, to the window. "Nestor Paredes. He fixed my mother's front door." And then, without turning: "Don't tell anyone I said that."