At twenty to eleven on Friday night, Imani Quaye rode into Ostrander Tower on the back of a scooter, wearing an orange rain jacket that said HOPPER across the shoulders in letters a foot high, a helmet two sizes too big, and a delivery bag containing a pair of work gloves, a head-torch, three freezer bags and a cold flask of Pippa's soup.

"Don't talk," shouted Wren Okpara over the engine. "Don't look at the cameras. Look at your phone like you hate it."

"I do hate it."

"Good. That's the whole job."

The Hopper app on Imani's phone, borrowed from a rider named Tobiah who had been paid forty to stay home, showed a single live order: *Parcelhound B1 – 2 items – collect from bay – priority.* It had been placed that afternoon by Ferdie Nwosu, with considerable muttering, in return for a payment plan he would later describe as the best day of his life. Behind them, down the ramp into the loading bay, the shutter stood three-quarters open, with the bored glow of a night shift beyond it: a barrier arm, a kiosk, a camera on a bracket, a guard in a hi-vis tabard reading a phone propped against a flask. Wren raised one hand. The guard raised two fingers without looking up.

That was how you got through a building like Ostrander Tower at night. It did not care who you were. It cared whether you looked like someone it had already counted.

Kobi was waiting in the shadow of the generator cage, in a hooded jacket and a pair of jeans, with a blue plastic crate of parcels at his feet. He had not shaved. He looked like a delivery man who had had a bad month. When the scooter pulled in he glanced at Imani, and the corner of his mouth twitched, a poor imitation of the old grin.

"You look ridiculous," he whispered.

"I look employed."

"Orange suits you."

"Shut up and take the box."

* * *

The sluice room lay at the end of a corridor behind the generators, down five steps and through a fire door painted the grey of institutional despair. Kobi had told her what to expect. He had not told her about the smell. It came up the stairwell to meet them, a thick, sweetish, municipal reek of old coffee grounds and compost and hot metal, and Imani put her sleeve over her nose while Wren, who had insisted on coming as far as the door and not a step more, pulled a face and said, "I'm going to wait up here and be a lookout. I'm a very good lookout. I have never once been caught."

"You were caught on Wednesday," said Imani.

"That was a *different type* of lookout."

Kobi turned the long steel key from Kofi's ring in the fire door and it opened without a sound. Beyond was a concrete room the size of a double garage, lit by one bare tube. A wide rubber chute came down through the ceiling and ended in a mesh cage; behind the cage stood the incinerator, a squat black hulk the size of a van, with a steel hatch in its side and a panel of dials. All along the walls were bins on wheels. In the cage, heaped against the mesh, the week's waste stood in black sacks: forty, fifty, sixty of them, sagging, with the glossy stillness of something that has been sat on.

"Which one?" Imani said.

"I tied it with a red cable tie. I always do. In case I need to find it." He gave her a small, ashamed look. "I read it in a procedure."

"A procedure."

"It said *always mark sensitive disposals.* I thought it was clever."

They went into the cage. The sacks yielded and slumped. Kobi worked from the left and she from the right, heaving sack after sack aside, feeling for a hard knot, a bead of red plastic. Wednesday's coffee; Thursday's cardboard; a bag of what seemed to be an entire dismantled desk; a mass of shredded paper in rubber gloves. Her breath was ragged. She had pulled on the work gloves and her sleeves were wet to the elbow with something she preferred not to name.

"Imi."

"Yes?"

"There's a lot of paper."

She looked. In the nearest sack, torn open by her hand, was a drift of white strips as fine as noodles, crosshatched with print. Not office waste. A document. A great many documents, a deliberate effort. She pulled a fistful out and held it under the tube.

*...Settlement Monitoring Report... Annex C... east core... differential...*

"Settlement," said Kobi. "What's that?"

"It's what a building does when it sinks."

He looked at the strips as if they had spoken. "It's all from the thirty-first floor. The shredder in Ruth's outer office does that. Thin strips, then they bag it and send it down every Friday."

"Then she's been shredding the same report for years."

"This is fresh." Kobi grabbed a handful, smoothed it flat. At the corner, a date stamp in red ink: *Tuesday.* "Imi, it was shredded on Tuesday. After Piet—"

A sound cut him off, from behind them and above, a deep click, like an enormous knuckle cracking. The tube light flickered. Somewhere in the walls a pump coughed into life and the temperature of the room changed, quite suddenly, as if a great invisible mouth had opened.

They both looked at the incinerator. A small blue flame had appeared behind the glass of the pilot window.

"No," said Kobi.

"Kobi —"

"It's *Friday.* It doesn't run on Friday." He was already moving, hands out, to the panel on the side of the machine, a grid of dials and a laminated sheet of instructions. "Someone's brought it forward. Someone's put it on the timer. It's the bag. They knew about the bag."

"Ruth's driver. The one at the bins."

"The one who watched us in the alley." Kobi's face went the colour of the paper strips. "He watched us come out of the hatch, Imi. He *knew.*"

"Find the bag!"

"I can't *find* it, it's in the chute, it's in the —" He looked up. The hatch on the side of the machine had begun to slide, with a long groan, into the up position. Orange light fell out across the concrete, and heat came with it, a dry roaring heat that dried the sweat on Imani's face in one breath. Along a conveyor of steel rollers, sack after sack was trundling forward on its own, to be fed by a ram into the dark. She counted. Thirty sacks. Twenty-five. They moved at a steady stately walking pace, like mourners.

"There!"

She saw it. A red plastic bead, a little twist of scarlet at the neck of a half-flattened bag, three sacks from the hatch, riding the rollers toward the flame. Kobi saw it too. He did not hesitate. He went over the guard rail the way he had once gone over the garden wall at twelve, in one clumsy heroic sprawl, and landed on the conveyor on his hands and knees. The rollers rattled under him. The first sack swayed, pushed against his shoulder, and was shoved on by the sack behind.

"Kobi!"

"I've got it!"

"Get *off!*"

The ram came forward, slow and mindless, a plate of steel eight feet wide. Kobi snatched up the red-tied bag with both hands, flung it behind him toward the cage, and threw himself sideways as the plate came down on the place where his knees had been. He hit the guard rail with his ribs and the breath went out of him in a bark. His left forearm had caught the edge of the hatch. She smelled burning cloth, saw him look at his sleeve, which was smoking in a thin curl, and heard him say in a quite conversational voice:

"Ow."

"Come here. Come *here.*"

He rolled over the rail. She caught his jacket and pulled, and they fell together on the damp concrete in a tangle, and above them the hatch slid down, and the last of Wednesday's coffee went in, and the machine roared. The red-tied bag lay a yard from her hand, split a little at one seam, spilling white flakes on the floor like old snow. She seized it. She held it to her chest.

Kobi sat up, cradling his arm. "Is it the right one?"

"I don't care. It's got your cable tie."

"I tied that tie." He started to laugh, helplessly, through his teeth. "I tied it so well."

"You're burned."

"I'm *marinated.*" He tried to stand and sat down again. The fire door banged. Wren Okpara came down the five steps in a single bound with her helmet under her arm and her braid swinging, took in the roaring machine, the smoking sleeve, the split bag and the two of them sprawled in a heap on the floor, and said, with a shining and entirely unprofessional joy:

"Oh my *God.* Can I film this?"

"No," said Imani and Kobi.

"I'll film it for *myself.* It won't go anywhere." She considered their faces. "Okay, I won't. But there's a guard coming. He's got a torch. He asked me what I was doing in the corridor and I said I'd got a really, really bad stomach, and he said *oh*, and then he said it was funny, because the sluice room's alarm just went off on his phone. I think it was the fire thing. You've got about a minute."

"The fire thing," said Kobi faintly.

"The thing that goes *bing* when something that isn't supposed to be on is on." She hauled him up by the good arm with astonishing strength. "Can you walk?"

"I can walk."

"Can you walk *fast?*"

"I was a very fast child."

"Imi. Look. Look in the sack, next to it."

She looked. Beside the red-tied bag, shoved off the rollers when Kobi had landed, lay a smaller clear bag of the sort used for lost property. Inside it, flat against the plastic, were a pair of black-rimmed reading glasses, a pocket paperback with a cracked spine, a lanyard with a photograph of a bearded man with a cheerful, lopsided face, and a phone. The phone's screen was a spiderweb of cracks. Someone had stamped on it with a heel.

The screen was lit.

She didn't breathe. She turned the bag over with two gloved fingers. The phone lay face up, shattered and glowing, and as she watched, a small grey banner slid down across the cracks, bright and ordinary, like a thing from another world.

*T: Piet? Please pick up. I'm sorry about the other night.*