"You left," said Cilla Adjei.
"I did."
"In the middle of a principal movement. Under live fire."
"It was a bottle."
"It was a *glass* bottle, Novak-Obi, and the principal in question is the single largest client Plumbline has had in nine years." Cilla stood behind her desk in the Annex, which was the converted flat above a laundromat on Terrace Six where Plumbline Protection kept its files, its coffee machine and its framed photograph of a Labrador in a bulletproof vest. The whole room smelled of warm lint. Through the floor came the slow tumbling of dryers, a sound Dez had long since stopped hearing and now noticed all over again. "You clocked out. I got an alert. You know what an alert looks like at nine-oh-six on a Friday? It looks like a coronary."
"I'm sorry."
"No, you're not. You're something. I haven't decided what." Cilla was forty-four, five foot six, with a back like a ruler and a grey streak at her left temple she had never been known to touch. She tapped a tablet on the desk. "Watch this."
It was the footage, from above, from a rooftop phone. The stage, the crowd, the long green arc of the bottle. Mac going left in a wide tidy sweep. And Dez, in her black suit, going sideways and down under a falling steel rail like a woman sliding into base.
The clip had a caption. **STATUE MOVES.** Under it, a counter said 6.1 million.
"By noon it will be twenty," said Cilla. "Look at the comments. Go on."
Dez scrolled. They were strange to read. *the way she just GOES.* *I take it back about the mud.* *she left the rich guy for a CHILD??? love this for her.* A few, scattered, in yellow, with little waves: *still a wall tho.* One said, simply, **she's crying in the last frame** and had been liked eleven thousand times. She looked, and she was not.
"Dario's mother put up a post," Cilla said. "Priya something. She's a nurse. She says you're the reason she still has a son. It's been shared eighty thousand times. Do you know what that is, Dez?"
"Is it a problem?"
"It's *marketing.*" Cilla sat down, abruptly, and rubbed her eyes with the heel of her hand. "I wanted to fire you. I want to say that for the record. I came in this morning with the letter half-drafted. Then Mac told me why you left, and then Bethan Oyelowo-Marsh rang, twice, and then Neil himself rang, which has never happened, and said, and I quote, *Cilla, folks, I want her. I want that woman on my elbow permanently.*"
Dez said nothing. In the corner of her eye, the menu offered its usual patient green text. She did not look.
"Residential detail," said Cilla. "He wants a named principal protection officer, twenty-four-hour rota, one-in-two weekends. You live in. Or near. You travel when he travels. Forty per cent on your current rate, plus a retainer, plus the Authority covers your medical." She said the last part with some bitterness. "He's very concerned about your arm."
"My arm's fine."
"Your arm is *always* fine." Cilla looked at her. "Isn't it."
It was a clean pause. She'd have liked to believe she was imagining the weight of it.
"He wants me on call," Dez said slowly. "Always."
"Always."
"Paid."
"That's what the money's for."
Dez looked at her hands. *Hired cover is half-owed.* If she took the job, then every hour, every night, every walk to the corner shop would be accounted as paid duty, because the menu read contracts. She would be earning credit at half speed, or none at all, or she would have to clock out of the thing that paid her rent every time a stranger was in danger. And behind it, quieter, the thing that the job was: to stand in front of Neil Abara-Whitfield, a man who had known Nestor Paredes, a man who had flinched.
"There's another way to say this," she said. "I want a clause."
"A clause."
"An emergency clause. If there's an imminent threat to life and it isn't the principal, and a second operator is on the detail and can cover him, I can break the detail. Without a write-up. Mac, for example."
Cilla stared at her. "You want a clause that says you can walk away from your principal."
"When he's covered."
"Dez. Do you know what you froze for, eleven months ago? You froze because you were unsure whether to stay or go. You're asking me to write a rule that makes you decide, in the middle of a riot, whether to stay or go."
"I decided this morning."
"I saw." Cilla picked up a pen from the desk, looked at it as if it had said something rude, and began, with no change of expression whatever, to write in the margin of the contract. "Emergency clause," she said, aloud. "Operator may break detail. Where. A second. Operator. Is. In position." She underlined the last word twice. "I'm going to hate this. When something goes wrong, they will read this out in court. I'll have to stand up and say, *My Lord, it was my idea.*"
"It was mine."
"It'll be on my letterhead." She pushed the page across the desk. "Sign. Start Monday. Tell your mother, because I'm not going to."
Dez signed. The pen was cheap and scratched. When she handed it back, Cilla held it for an extra second.
"Eat something," Cilla said, not looking at her. "You look like a coat on a hanger."
---
Floor General's canteen was a long cold room with a vending machine of sad sandwiches and a window onto a courtyard where somebody had planted tomatoes in cut-down tyres. At one, the only other occupant was Yusuf Demir, hunched over a tray, in a clean uniform and the look of a man who had slept for four hours and dreamed of arithmetic.
He saw her and stood up, then sat down again, then stood up in a way that suggested he was working out which of the two was less awkward.
"You came," he said.
"You wrote your number on a prescription pad."
"It seemed like the best form." He gestured to the chair. "I got you a roll. It's egg. I'm told no one can hate an egg."
"Many can." She sat, and took it, and found she was starving. He watched her eat the first half and did not say anything. She liked that more than she wanted to.
"So," said Yusuf eventually. "The drawer."
"Right."
"I took it out." He turned his tray a few degrees, a nervous quarter-turn, squaring it with the edge of the table. "Your scan. The one at 3:10. A displaced fracture in the left clavicle, quite clean. I looked at it myself. I saw it, Dez. I held it up to the light. Then you had another at 6:05, because radiology asked, and they didn't believe the first." His voice was very quiet. "The second one shows callus. Bone callus. That takes weeks. Not three hours. And your burns, I'm not going to talk about the burns."
"You can talk about the burns."
"I'd rather talk about the egg." He didn't smile. "I've been a paramedic for eleven years. I have seen things that people would pay a great deal of money to be told were not true. I believe in medicine and I believe in the body and I believe, above all, that sleep deprivation causes hallucinations. So I'm going to ask you once, and you can say whatever you like. Is it something that's going to hurt you?"
"I don't think so."
"Is it something that's going to hurt anyone else?"
She thought of the fire. Of a beam, of a cold green bell chiming underwater. "No," she said. "That's the whole point of it."
"Of what?"
"I don't know. Give me a month."
"A month."
"When I understand it myself," Dez said, "I'll tell you everything. I swear on my mother. She'd want me to."
He looked at her for a long time, and she understood, with the clarity of the very tired, that he was deciding something that had nothing to do with medicine. Then he nodded, once, and picked up his fork.
"All right," he said. "A month. I'll write nothing down. I'll tell nobody. If it starts to get worse I will override all of this and sit on you." He cut a piece of something. "Meanwhile there's a thing that won't wait."
"What thing?"
"The fire." He pushed the fork down. "I went to see Dispatch after my shift. I was angry. We don't roll up to a building like that unless someone calls it in, and I wanted to know who. The log says the first call came in at 2:05. Caller said *fire on the third floor, 22 Pasadera Street.* Clear as a bell. Prepaid phone, bought for cash somewhere on the Rim, switched off since."
"Two-oh-five."
"Yes."
"The third-floor window blew out," Dez said, "at about a quarter to three."
"At 2:44. Nine minutes *after* the first engine got there, and nearly forty after the call." His eyes were very dark. "Hepzibah Ibekwe told me the smoke alarm woke her at 2:20. Twenty-five minutes after somebody phoned in a fire that, by every account I can find, hadn't started yet."
The courtyard was very quiet. Someone pushed a trolley down the corridor, rattling, going somewhere with a purpose.
"Somebody knew," Dez said.
"Or somebody made it," said Yusuf. "I haven't decided which would be worse."
