The dryer on the end, number nine, had decided to flood.

Dilnoza Karimova stood in two inches of grey water at 11:26 on a Tuesday night with a mop in one hand and her phone in the other, and ran the checklist she ran everywhere. Two exits: front door, locked; back door to the alley, propped with a brick, which was a problem for another day. Camera over the change machine, dead since March. One customer, asleep in the plastic chair by the window with a laundry bag for a pillow. One flood. She could handle a flood.

"It's not the dryer," her brother said from behind her. "It's the drain line. Dryers don't flood, Dilly, they burn. This is a plumbing situation."

"Then call a plumber."

"Chat, she says call a plumber." Rustam was twenty-two and held his phone out at arm's length with the lens aimed at his own chin, narrating to a live audience of, by the count in the corner of the screen, forty-one people. "Chat, my sister, the legendary Dilnoza, is currently defeating a machine. Hit the heart if you believe in her."

"Turn that off."

"Forty-one hearts. Zero of them are for you."

"Rustam."

He turned the phone round and filmed the water instead, which was worse, because the water had a sock in it.

Karimov Wash & Fold had thirty-one machines, one boiler older than Dilly, and a sign over the door that had read WASH & FOLD for twenty years and KARIMOV for none of them, because their mother had never paid the sign man the second half. Gulnora Karimova called it the shop. She called it the shop the way other people said the family name. It sat on Dray Street between a phone-repair counter and a church that had become a gym, and every machine in it took payment the same way: you waved your phone at the little blue pad and it said Tally, and a coin of money left your account and arrived in hers.

Everything in Corliss Ferry ran on Tally. The rent, the parking meters, the school lunch lines, the buses, the paychecks of roughly one household in two. Tally belonged to Fairhold Mutual, and Fairhold Mutual belonged, in the sense that mattered, to one family. Dilly had been born in a hospital that Fairhold financed, taught to ride a bike in a lot Fairhold had paved, and had learned to dislike the blue pad the day she was nineteen and it had told her, politely, in front of a line of people, INSUFFICIENT.

She wrung the mop. In her back pocket the paper folded against her hip was a different kind of politeness.

It had come that afternoon in a cream envelope with a window, addressed to Mrs. G. Karimova, and Dilly had opened it because her mother's reading glasses were somewhere in the building and her mother's patience was not. NOTICE OF MATURITY. The loan on the shop, the one the family had been paying down for fifteen years in monthly amounts that felt like a sentence being served, had a final lump. Forty-one thousand, two hundred dollars. Due in sixty days. She had read it standing at the folding table with her heart doing nothing visible, the way it had learned to, and then she had folded the letter small and told her mother the envelope was an advertisement.

Sixty days. She had a savings account with eleven hundred dollars and a reputation.

The reputation was seven seconds long.

She knew every frame of it, because so did everyone. A product launch at a convention hall, fourteen months ago. A founder named Priya Ventura at a podium. A man in a hoodie vaulting the stage rail with something in his hand. And Dilly, six feet from the podium, wearing the earpiece and the black jacket and the face of a woman who has been trained for exactly this, doing nothing. For two full seconds, nothing. Hands at her sides. Then the thing in the man's hand turned out to be a cream pie, which hit Priya Ventura in the side of the head, and the clip, forty million views and counting, had a title. The Flinch. There were stickers of it. There was a sound, a soft little oh, that people used when they hesitated at a restaurant menu. Dilly had not flinched. She had not moved at all, which was the part nobody could explain, least of all her.

"Dilly." A voice from the chair by the window. The sleeping customer had woken and was squinting at her. A man in a delivery vest, fortyish, kind-faced. "You're her, right? From the thing?"

"I'm the person who's mopping."

"No, you're her. Do the oh."

"Sir, it's midnight."

"Eleven fifty-seven," he said, and sat up, and looked at his phone with the expression of a man at a family dinner waiting for grace.

And she understood, because the room had changed. Rustam stopped talking. The forty-one people in his phone had stopped typing, if the scroll of the chat was any guide. In the phone-repair shop next door the television that never turned off fell quiet. Down the whole of Dray Street, and the length of the river, and up Pellow Hill, thousands of people paused whatever they were holding and looked at the thing in their hand.

It was a ritual older than Dilly. At 11:58 each night, a small blue hand appeared on the Tally screen over a line of text. CLOSING. The hand was the signature, the founder's actual signature, redrawn as an icon, and under it the line stayed until the Nightly Close was done: every account in the city reconciled, every pending payment settled, sixty-one years of Odessa Thornquist's rule that a bank should know to the penny where it stood before anyone in it slept. A person signed a physical ledger at a physical desk in a vault on Merchant Street. The icon turned green when they had. Then Tally said, Closed. Sleep well, Corliss Ferry, and that was that. The kids had a joke that it was the city's lullaby.

Dilly pulled the phone from her pocket and watched with everyone else.

The hand appeared. CLOSING.

The water lapped at her boots. The delivery man held his breath. Rustam muttered, "Chat, hold on, today's special," and she did not need to ask why. Odessa Thornquist had died that afternoon at the age of eighty-seven, in her bed on Pellow Hill, and the city had spent six hours finding out how many things it did not know. Who signed tonight? Who would sign tomorrow? There were rumours already: that the old woman had always signed, that the Close had been a cheat of automation for twenty years, that Fairhold would be sold by morning.

The icon stayed blue. A minute. Two.

At 12:01 it went green. Closed, it said, and under it a line Dilly had never seen in her life: Signed by A. Thornquist-Adeleke, Keeper. Witnessed, M. Halvorsen-Duarte.

"Anselm," the delivery man said, with enormous relief, as if a relative had walked into the room. "The grandson. Good. He's good, right? He's all right?"

"I don't know him."

"Nobody does. He keeps to himself." The man gathered his laundry bag. "My mom had a loan with them in 2019. They called her before it was late. Called, a real person, like a person. That's the thing. You go anywhere else, you're a number." He glanced at her, embarrassed. "Sorry about the oh. I just meant. It was one time."

"It was seven seconds," Dilly said, and he left, and she turned to the mop and the sock.

That was when the front door, which she had locked, opened.

The lock did not break. It was opened, in the ordinary way, by someone with a key, and she had her hand on the mop handle and her weight on her back foot before she recognised what she was looking at, and who was behind it. Her mother, in a quilted coat over her nightdress, with her reading glasses finally on her head, and with her a tall man who stood in the doorway as if he had been told not to touch anything.

He was in a charcoal suit that had been tailored for a heavier man. That was the first thing. The second was that the collar stood away from his neck, and the third, as he stepped in and the fluorescent light found him, was the colour of his face, a grey under the brown like paper that had been wet and dried. Thirty-three, she knew that from the news. He looked fifty and about to be sick. His hands were very still, the way a person's hands are still when he is holding them still on purpose.

"Dilnoza," her mother said, in Uzbek, which she used for announcements. "This man says he is the bank."

"I am not the bank," the man said. His voice was low and exact, a voice that finished its consonants. "I am an unsatisfactory representative of the bank. Ms. Karimova. Forgive the hour, and the water, and the fact that your mother let me in with a key I did not know she had. I rang. Nobody heard. Mrs. Karimova, you were very kind."

"I am not kind," said her mother. "You looked like you would fall on my floor."

He almost smiled. It cost him something. Dilly watched it cost him. "I walked from the vault," he said. "I should have taken the car."

"You signed the Close," Dilly said. "Twenty minutes ago."

"Seventeen." He looked at Rustam's phone, which was still aimed at him, and then, with great courtesy, at Rustam. "Might that be turned off?"

Rustam looked at Dilly. Dilly looked at him. The phone went dark.

"Thank you." Anselm Thornquist-Adeleke drew a breath that did not seem to reach the bottom of him. "My grandmother died this afternoon. You will have heard. Among the things she left is a will, and in the will a clause, and the clause gives me thirty days. I have used up one." He held a hand out, flat, a small gesture, as if smoothing a tablecloth. "I need to be married by Friday week. To someone I can trust with my life, and who is willing, for a year, to be paid to pretend. I have read your file. You were the best close-protection agent in the state until the one afternoon you were not, and I do not think a woman like that stops being what she is because the internet laughed at her."

The boiler ticked. A drip fell somewhere in the water.

"Mr. Thornquist-Adeleke," Dilly said.

"Sel."

"Mr. Thornquist-Adeleke, are you proposing to me in a flood?"

"I am," he said, "hiring you in a flood. The proposing comes later, I'm told, and under oath." His eyes went to the wet floor, then to her mother, who had folded her arms. "I know about the balloon notice. It is being waived as of this moment. That is not a bribe. That is what I would have done if you had said no, and I would like you to know it before you answer, so that you answer only on the question that matters."

"Which is?"

He swayed, very slightly, and caught the edge of the folding table. His knuckles went the colour of the paper. When he spoke again it was lower, and the long courteous sentences had gone, and what was left was short.

"Whether you can stand to watch me die," he said, "and do your job anyway."