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“Odette says she’ll be all right,” William tells him.

“I heard,” Lenart says. He doesn’t move his fingers.

William comes back from the suite while the paramedics are still unloading the stretcher. He’s got concrete dust on his wings and his hands are skin, but just barely, gray creeping up from his knuckles.

“Was it an accident?” I ask him. My voice is hoarse. My throat is raw.

“No,” William says.

That’s all I need.

He tells Tav the rest, in short, flat sentences, standing on the dock with his wings folded.

“Here’s what I know. One of the counterweight cables was cut most of the way through, and the weight did the rest. It wasn’t cut anywhere you could reach, Tav. It was up inside the housing in the ceiling. You’d have to take the housing apart to see it. Nobody takes the housing apart on a walkthrough.” He looks at Tav until Tav looks back. “Nobody.”

Tav’s ears stay flat.

“Here’s what I think, and don’t hold me to it until the whole system’s been taken apart by somebody who isn’t us,” William goes on. “The suppression system was set off from the manual station in the corridor, behind its locked cover. The door should have released when it fired. It held instead. I don’t know how yet.”

“I didn’t see anybody in the corridor,” Tav says.

“You were running at a door. You weren’t looking.” William’s eyes go to Grady, still against the wall, coughing into his sleeve. “Grady has a key to that cover. So do I. So do four other people.”

“Grady signed the rig,” Merek says.

“Grady signed the rig,” William agrees.

“And everybody on that channel heard where Tara was,” Lenart says quietly.

“That’s mine,” William says. “I set up the channel. I told everybody to call out locations. I made it easier to find her.” His hands go gray to the wrist. “Tonight I’m cutting who’s on that channel to people I’d trust with my own life, and nobody says a name over a radio again. Locations go in code or they don’t go at all.”

Nobody argues with him.

Then the paramedics put me on the stretcher, and Tav follows the ambulance to Good Samaritan in Merek’s truck, because he won’t fit in the back.

They draw my blood. They take a chest X-ray. A doctor with very tired eyes listens to my lungs twice and asks me what day it is, too. Eventually she tells me my levels are back where they should be and my chest is clear, and that the headache should fade overnight. She hands Tav a sheet of instructions: somebody stays with me, somebody checks on me through the night, and if the headache gets worse or I get confused or short of breath, I come straight back.

Tav reads the whole thing twice. We make it back before the doors open.

“We’re closing,” Merek says.

We’re in Lenart’s office now. It’s nine-thirty. I’m lying on the couch under a blanket with Odette’s clip on my finger, a bottle of water I keep forgetting to drink, and a headache that won’t let up. My voice is hoarse. Odette comes in every half hour, looks at the little screen, listens to my chest, and leaves without saying anything, which I’m choosing to take as good news. She has a copy of the discharge sheet folded in her cardigan pocket. Tav is sitting on the floor next to the couch, with his shoulder against my legs. He hasn’t been more than a foot from me since the dock.

“Merek,” Lenart says.

“No. We’re closing. Tonight. Everybody out, every member, every staff member, until somebody’s been through every room in this building with a fine-toothed comb.” His lines are still bright gold. “The freezer. The vault. Now this. I’m not opening the doors and letting a few hundred people walk around in here when somebody’s dropping six hundred pounds of steel on her head.”

He’s not wrong. I know he’s not wrong.

There’s a knock. Corinne’s in the doorway, with her tablet, her face pale.

“I’m sorry,” she says. “I heard. Tara, are you all right?”

“I’m okay.”

She looks at me for a second longer than she has to. Then she looks at Lenart.

“If you’re discussing closing,” she says carefully, “you should know where we stand. Tonight’s listed with the council as an operating night. We can close the doors, but it’s not ours alone to decide. The council has to be notified, and they’ll want a reason. And it doesn’t change anything for Tara.” She glances at me. “If the house is listed as operating, she has to be on the premises, and her hand has to be on the stone at midnight. Whether there’s a single member in the building or not.”