Pem had a new tote bag.

Ottilie noticed it from the doorway of the Records Hall at 8:40 on Monday, because it was the colour of a swimming pool and because Pem, who ordinarily slouched across his desk like a wet coat, was sitting up. The tote said RESILIENCE IS A PROMISE in a white wave-in-a-circle. It hung from his chair. It was, quite visibly, a gift.

"Morning, boss!" He said it a half-beat too bright. "Oat latte on your desk. I mean, no dairy before noon, I know, it's oat. It's from the Tidemark cart. They've got a cart. In the lobby. A man in an apron."

"I'm aware of the cart." She hung her coat on its peg. The brass gauge by the door said sixty-one per cent, as it had every morning for nine years. "Pem. Who knew I visit my mother on Sundays?"

He laughed. It went on a little too long and then stopped, abruptly, as if a plug had been pulled.

"Everyone? It's in your calendar. Recurring. Sunday, eleven, *Mum*, with a heart. It's, like, a really sweet thing, honestly, people think it's sweet—"

"Who asked you about it?"

Pem looked at his keyboard. He had very long eyelashes, and she had read somewhere that this was a disadvantage in the practice of lying, since there was so much to hide behind and all of it moved.

"Kemi," he said. "From the grey fleeces. On Wednesday. She was asking about, you know, how you work, what you're like, your routine. For the *handover*. She said Lucinda wanted to make sure the pack was built to suit you. I said you're a creature of habit, and I said you do Cannery Terraces on Sundays, and I said, um, the name. Of the place." His voice dropped. "I didn't say her name. Your mum's. I swear."

"You didn't need to. There is one care home on the fourth deck."

"It was *Wednesday*, I didn't know about—" He stopped. "What happened?"

She had been going to say nothing. It was the Authority's way, and her own. But there was something in his face, raw underneath the cheer, and she heard herself say, in the voice she would have used on a ledger, "They have approached a member of staff at Harbourlight and obtained her personnel file. They did it Friday."

"Oh no."

"Yes."

"Oh no, boss, I'm so sorry, I thought it was just, like, interest. I thought she *liked* you. She's really nice to me." It came out very small. "She remembers things. I told her about my nan's hip."

"I know," said Ottilie. "That is how it is done."

Pem said nothing. For once the silence was real, the kind in which a young man took out the thing he had been carrying and looked at it. When he spoke again it was in the quiet, perceptive register she had met only three times before and distrusted every one of them for being right.

"She's not going to hurt your mum, is she? That's not what this is."

"No. I think she'll use her."

He nodded slowly. "Same thing, though. Isn't it. If she's the one being used."

Ottilie, who had a brief on her desk and a headache beginning behind her left eye, found that she had no reply on file.

---

Halvard Pereira-Oduya sighed when she put the paper on his blotter. It was not an unkind sigh. It was the sound of a man putting down a lifelong hope, a small one, such as an uneventful week.

He read it twice. He did it with a pencil, the way he did everything, tapping the end against his teeth at each clause. The Deputy Counsel's room in the dome had no windows, only a long skylight with a crack across it, patched with tape, through which the rain looked in.

"Unreviewed," he said.

"The Registry's status field."

"Which means no one at the Registry has looked at it. Yet. But filed by the Tenant, through the Registry's own intake, on a date, with a witness, so it exists." He tapped. "It is a very good document, Ms Bakare. I am afraid that is its difficulty. Documents that good attract opposing counsel the way a clean plate attracts a fork."

"Capacity."

"Capacity." He said it as if tasting an unfamiliar wine. "Your mother has a diagnosis."

"Dementia, mixed type. Diagnosed three years ago. Reviewed each March for the subsidy." She heard her own voice lay it out like cutlery. "She has good days and poor days. On good days she is lucid for approximately two hours."

"And on the fourteenth of February?"

"I don't know."

"No." He put the pencil down. "Does anyone?"

It came to her at once, the way a footnote surfaces. "Harbourlight keeps a daily cognitive observation. It's a requirement of the subsidy. Staff record orientation, mood, decision-making. A tick-box and a line of narrative, signed by the carer on shift." She had signed the annual summary herself. She remembered the wording. *Participates in simple choices with prompting.* "If the fourteenth was a good day, it will say."

"And if it was not?"

"Then it will say that too."

Pereira-Oduya looked at her for a moment over his glasses. "You understand that if you request those records you are acting for the Applicant. Whatever your motive."

"I'm requesting my own mother's care records. As her next of kin."

"Under the Code, Article Nine..."

"I know Article Nine. I wrote it out eleven times on Saturday." She could hear herself getting short, which was a luxury, and put it away. "I haven't agreed to act. I have agreed to read my mother's file. If the two things turn out to be the same thing, I will say so."

"You are very precise," said the Deputy Counsel, wearily, "for someone proposing to jump."

"I'm trying to land, not jump."

"A distinction without a difference, I have found, for the last thirty years." But he almost smiled. He drew a form out of a drawer, a pale blue one, *Request for Access to Personal Care Records by Next of Kin*, and slid it over with a fountain pen. "I shall note that I advised you against nothing. The Warden has asked to see you at noon. He will want tea. I would be careful with the cardamom."

---

The Warden did not offer her tea.

That was the first thing. He was standing at the dome's one real window, the one that looked down over the Quad's grey roofs to the water, with his hands behind his cardigan, and the kettle on its stand behind him was quiet and cold.

"Ms Bakare. Let us sit."

She sat. There were four chairs; he did not take one.

"The Registry's intake system flagged a new filing on Friday. Application for Recognition of Residency, with annexures. I have read it. I have read Annexure A three times." He said it very softly. "I knew the name, of course. I knew it the moment I saw it. I want you to understand that I did not know your father's name was in the record, and I want you to understand that I am sorry."

"For what?"

"For not having looked." He turned. His face, which she could not have drawn, was doing something she had learned to read anyway, in the set of the shoulders, in how he held his breath. "For nine years we watched the mesh and we did not watch the *people* who spoke to it. Adedayo Bakare worked for me. He was on the foundation team. I signed his leave forms."

"You were his director."

"For eleven months." A quiet pause. "He was the sort of man who said good morning to the pumps."

"I've been told."

"Yes. Well." He sat at last, heavily, in the chair beside her, and for a moment he looked his age. "Let us be plain with one another, as colleagues. I cannot instruct you to act for the Tenant. I cannot permit you to. I would be in breach of my own charter duty, and you in breach of yours. But I cannot instruct you not to, either, because it asked for you in writing and the Office's silence on that is now a matter of record. Whatever you do next will be done in the shape of a gap in my authority." He folded his hands. "I am told that is the usual shape in which we are all of us decent."

"Warden. Tidemark have my mother's file."

"I know." Before she could speak: "Counsel told me twenty minutes ago. We have no power to stop them reading what they have lawfully obtained. We have power to see that it is not all they read. The cognitive logs." He nodded at the blue form in her hand. "Yes. Do that. Do it today. If the fourteenth of February was a good day, we will have a ground to stand on. If it was not..."

He did not finish. In the glass his reflection, tall and white and soft, looked back at him.

"If it was not," said Ottilie, "then the best document in the case is worthless, and the one person who did exactly what the Tenant asked, correctly, in good faith, will be called a dupe by a woman in white shoes."

"Yes," said the Warden. "I am afraid that is the shape of it."

---

She was at her desk by two with the blue form signed and sent by hand to Harbourlight, when the message came.

It was not a ticket. It was an ordinary email in the Authority's ordinary typeface from an address she had never seen, and it said:

*Hi Ottilie! Lucinda here, circling back. Just a quick one. I was so sorry to hear your mum's not been well, and I wanted to say that Tidemark takes duty of care REALLY seriously. We're preparing a short, non-adversarial welfare review of Harbourlight's digital systems (calls, alerts, nothing invasive) and it would help hugely if you, as next of kin, would countersign the attached consent so we can access Folasade's records under the resident-welfare protocol. Totally optional. No pressure at all. Happy to chat over a coffee, oat, obviously.*

*L.*

The attachment was a single page, and she read it, because she read everything. It was very good. The consent was narrow on its face and broad in its schedule, and it would give Tidemark the very thing she had just sent a pale blue form to collect, before her. It would give them the logs for the fourteenth of February and for every day either side. It was a signature line. It had a pen-sized box.

Across the Hall, Pem was not looking at her so hard that she could feel it on her neck.

In her ear Ansel said nothing. On the wall the brass gauge said sixty-one per cent, and on her desk the oat latte had gone cold in its cardboard cup, and she found that she had picked up the pen.