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At eleven-fifteen, he goes back downstairs to check the rigging room. There’s a booking at eleven-thirty, and he checks every load-bearing piece in the building before it’s used. Every time. Even after William’s done it.

I go with him. I tell myself it’s because I’m an owner and should know how the rooms work.

It’s the room I saw on Monday, the one with the dark wood floor and the steel rings in the ceiling, where William was working with the rope. It’s nothing like the troll suite. The rope’s coiled on its hook now, and in the middle of the room, set up for the booking, there’s a suspension frame: a square of black steel tubing with a crossbar on top for the rope to hang from, and four legs bolted into plates in the floor.

There’s a tag hanging from one leg of it, on a zip tie. It’s dated Monday, in William’s neat, square handwriting. Inspected. Load-tested. W.

Tav starts at the bottom, the way he does everything. He checks the floor plates, then the legs, working his way up. When he gets to the top of the first leg, he stops.

He reaches out and touches one of the bolts holding the crossbar to the leg, and it shifts under his finger. It shouldn’t. It’s as thick as my thumb.

He leans closer, then reaches up and turns on the work light over the frame. In the hard white light, I can see the bolt clearly. A fresh cut runs most of the way through the bolt, the exposed steel bright under the work light.

He checks the next bolt. Same thing. And the next.

“Tav,” I say. “What is it?”

He doesn’t answer right away. He straightens up, all seven and a half feet of him, and takes his phone out and photographs every bolt, one at a time, under the light. Then he takes a roll of red tape off his belt, runs it across the frame twice, and writes DO NOT USE on it in black marker, in letters a foot high.

“Call William,” he says. “Tell him to come down. Now. And tell Kit to cancel the eleven-thirty.”

My hands are cold. “Tav. Could those bolts have just failed? On their own?”

He looks at the bright, clean cut in the steel. At William’s tag, dated Monday. At the crossbar a person would hang from, seven feet off the floor.

“No,” he says quietly. “Somebody used a tool.”

Chapter ten

Tara

The records vault is at the end of a staff corridor behind the main Club. Members never come back here.

The hallway has concrete floors, exposed pipes, and a row of utility doors. At the end is a heavy green door with a keypad.

RECORDS. AUTHORIZED STAFF ONLY.

It's seven-forty on Thursday night. The Club opens at nine, and William is expecting me on the roof at eight-fifteen, and I'm wearing my good jeans and the black sweater Merek said was nice, which is the closest I've come in years to dressing for a date. I have half an hour. I'm going to use it.

Last night, I stood next to Tav while he photographed cut bolts under a work light. Four nights before that, I stood inside a freezer, hitting a release that wasn't connected to anything. I've been thinking about both of them all day. So this afternoon, I asked Lenart where the building's safety records were kept, and he told me: the floor plans, the original door specs, the inspection history for every emergency release and fire exit in the building, all here, in the vault. Some of it goes back to 1885.

If two safety systems in this building have failed, I want to know what the rest of them are.

I hold my keycard against the reader. Lenart had it made for me on Monday. The light goes green, the lock thunks, and I pull the door open. It's heavy, steel-cored, and it swings slowly on hydraulic hinges.

Inside, the vault is a long narrow room lined with steel shelving and filing cabinets, lit by fluorescent tubes. It smells like dust and old paper. There's a table at the far end with a lamp, and a red metal box on the wall beside the door, the kind you see in hotel stairwells, labeled EMERGENCY.

The door sighs shut behind me on its hinges.

I find the drawer marked FACILITIES: EGRESS, and I'm pulling out the first folder when I hear the lock.

Not the soft electronic thunk it made when I came in. A heavier sound, deeper in the door, a sound like a bolt the size of my arm sliding home.

I put the folder down.

I walk back to the door and push the release bar. It moves. It goes all the way down under my hand, smooth, the way it should, and nothing happens. The door doesn't move a quarter of an inch.

I push it again. I put my shoulder into the door.