"So it's a menu," said Bao.
"It's a menu."
"Like a video game menu."
"Like a, I don't know. A tax form that's decided to love me."
Bao Tran took off his glasses, cleaned them on the hem of his cardigan, put them back on, and looked at the ceiling of the flat as if something might fall from it. It was half past ten on Saturday morning. The kitchen smelled of a broth he had been working at since dawn, a clear amber thing with a rind of dried tangerine in it. On the table between them lay the evidence: an oven mitt, a stockpot lid, a banana, and a sheet of A3 paper on which Dez had written, in two colours of felt pen, everything she knew.
"And you can see it now?"
"It's there now."
"What's it say?"
"RANK 2, CREDIT 12 of 40. There's a thing called CHARGES with three names. And it's a little bit rude."
"Rude how?"
"It said I was *unpaid* a minute ago," Dez said, "like it was making a point."
"Say a line."
She said it aloud, slowly. He wrote it on the whiteboard behind the kettle, where he usually kept the week's prep list, and when she'd finished, the board looked like the notes of a man planning a bank job. At the top, in capitals, was COVER RULES v1. Beneath it, numbered:
1. Credit = Weight absorbed for someone else. 2. Must be voluntary (!!) 3. On-the-clock = HALF. 4. Same person within 24h = HALF. 5. Fake fights = ZERO. 6. Hitting yourself = ZERO. 7. Under 1 Weight = ZERO (pillows, mitts, soup). 8. Level 2 → 3 needs 40 credit. 9. Stats are PERMANENT. (!!!) (Think.) 10. Bond with "Charges": shows where, how scared, what's coming.
"That's the lot?" said Bao.
"That's what I've got."
"You've had it for three days."
"I know."
"Dez." He sat down opposite her, and she saw that his hands, which could julienne a carrot in six seconds without looking, were not quite steady. "I'm going to say three things. One. I believed you before you said any of it. The oven mitt thing was weird, and you've been walking round for three days like a woman who has been given a puppy and told it's a bomb. Two. This is the most exciting thing that has ever happened in this flat and I'm so frightened for you I could throw up. Three." He held up a finger. "Why didn't you tell me *Thursday*?"
"It's not a thing you tell people."
"I'm not people. I'm Bao. I once spent four hours helping you carry a sofa up from the Floor and we had only one tram pass between us." He gestured at the board. "Everything's better with a second brain on it. That's all I'm saying. It's how soup works."
"It isn't."
"It's *exactly* how soup works."
She laughed. It surprised her. It came up out of her chest like something she'd been keeping in a drawer, and for a moment she could not stop; she had her face in her good hand, laughing, with her shoulders going. Bao watched her with an expression of enormous tenderness. When she'd finished, he gently handed her a napkin.
"There," he said. "Better."
---
They worked all day. It was, in its way, the happiest she'd been in a year. Bao asked questions, the way he always did, in lists, with a pen. What counted as harm? Was it only physical? ("Don't know. Haven't tried the other kind.") What if she was *wrong* about the harm, if she jumped in front of a ball that would have missed? ("I think it checks. 'Source,' 'Target,' it keeps logging. It said 'Ineligible' when the lid hit the cushion.") Could someone else see it? ("No.") What if she got a stat wrong, what if she put points in a thing she didn't need? ("Permanent." "*Permanent*," said Bao, with relish, in the voice of a man reading terms and conditions to a child.)
At two o'clock he came up with a plan, which was how she knew they had run out of questions.
"We could farm it," Bao said.
"No."
"Hear me out. We hire a stuntman. We hire *five* stuntmen. Strangers, so there's no familiarity penalty. You jump in front of a flowerpot, a different stuntman each hour, boom, Rank 3 by Tuesday."
"It checks for collusion. You watched it."
"Then we hire people who don't *know* they're in on it. A man in a hat, say, standing under a scaffold."
"Bao."
"I'm being theoretical!"
"You're being a criminal." She picked the banana up and pointed it at him. "Someone has to actually mean the harm, or actually have it coming. Otherwise it's nothing. That's the rule underneath all the rules. It doesn't pay for the show of it. It pays for the *bruise*."
Bao looked at the banana, then at her, and slowly deflated. "That's a really good, really sad thing to say."
"I know. I'm cross about it too."
At half past three he put down his pen and said: "The fire."
"What about it?"
"You haven't told me about the fire. I've got *Floor Rising* footage of you running in, Dez, you've been on three news sites, there's a clip of the beam falling. I saw all that. But I've been trying to line up the times. And there's something that's making my head hurt."
She told him about Yusuf. She told him about the call at 2:05, the prepaid phone, the smoke alarm that had woken Hepzibah at 2:20, the window that blew at 2:44. She didn't tell him about the way a paramedic's hand felt on her wrist. When she was done, Bao drew a line on the board, a long horizontal arrow from left to right, and began to write on it in a small tight hand.
2:05 — anonymous call. 2:14 — D wakes. Bond: Tamar 1.4 km, DISTRESS 9. 2:20 — alarm wakes nan. 2:31 — D on Owl. 2:44 — D at Pasadera. Window.
"Here's my problem," Bao said. "At 2:14 your menu says Tamar's already at nine out of ten. She's terrified. At 2:14. But the alarm doesn't go off for another six minutes, and the window doesn't go until half past. So what is Tamar scared of at 2:14?"
"The fire."
"Which nobody could see yet. You said it. Nine out of ten, and then it was ten at 2:30, and the INBOUND number had already shown up." He tapped the arrow. "Who calls in a fire nine minutes before they can *see* it? Either someone's psychic, or someone started it, or someone *knew* it was going to start. That's the thing I can't get round."
"The wiring was bad," Dez said. "The notice board said, 'Don't touch the fuse panel.' It could have been going to blow for weeks."
"Or someone helped it blow." Bao sat down. He put his chin on his fist. "And Tamar knew."
"Why would she know?"
"I don't know! I'm a cook. I'm saying her number went to nine before there was any fire to be scared of." He frowned. "Unless it's not the fire. Unless something *else* had her at nine. Is it only fire it tracks? Or fear? Because if the menu says 'distress', and not 'danger'..."
It was an uncomfortable thought. They both looked at the board.
"Don't write that one down," said Dez.
"I wasn't going to." But he had already written it, small, in the corner, with a question mark: *what scared T before the fire?*
---
The knock came at ten past ten that night.
Dez was on the sofa with her feet up, eating a dumpling out of a tea towel, watching a documentary about bridges. Bao had gone to bed with a notebook. She heard the knock and thought of the neighbours, of a package, and then, in her breastbone, with a faint electric click like a light switch, she felt a third small pulse that she had half stopped noticing.
TAMAR IBEKWE. DISTANCE: 4 m. DISTRESS: 4.
She opened the door.
Tamar stood in the corridor under the yellow strip-light with a rucksack on her back, a bulging duffel over one shoulder, and a covered pot clutched in both arms against her chest, like a girl in a play. Her hair was out of its braids; she still smelled faintly of smoke. And behind her, in a folding wheelchair that someone had obviously found at short notice, sat Mrs Hepzibah Ibekwe, in a green headscarf and a man's overcoat, with a face like a superior court.
"Hi," said Tamar. "Sorry. I know it's late."
"What's happened?"
"The Authority suspended me. Pending review. Quint rang this afternoon. 'Conduct inconsistent with the Authority's values.'" She did a creditable impression of Dolores Quint's voice, and then lost her nerve halfway through. "And the landlord's people say the building's condemned, and my uncle's got six people in his flat already. And then Nan said, well, that nice tall woman." She gulped. "I looked you up. Your address is on the Plumbline site. I'm so sorry. It's not a stalking thing. She said it wasn't."
"It is *not* a stalking thing," said Hepzibah Ibekwe, in a voice that took in the corridor, the flat and the whole of the Terraces. "I am seventy-one and I have been in a hospital with a tube. Young lady. You owe me a sofa."
"I what?"
"You went into my house without being invited," said the old woman. "You carried me down three flights on your shoulder like a roll of carpet. It's only manners. In my day, if you took a person down a staircase, you were responsible for where they slept." She sniffed. "I have brought rice."
"Nan —"
"She is going to say no, and then she is going to say yes. I know the type. Her mother and I have the same face." She craned her neck. "Is that a documentary about bridges? Good."
Dez stood in her own doorway with a dumpling in a tea towel and, in her chest, two soft pulses, one steady, one bright. Behind her, from the dark hallway, came the creak of a door and a cheerful, sleepy, deeply alarmed voice:
"Dez? Why are there *people*? Did you order people?"
"Bao," said Dez. "Get the good cushions."
