2. Cell Eleven

"If you ask me to feel grateful," Eli told the earpiece, "I'm going to put you in the sea."

"I'd prefer the tram. It leaves in four minutes."

Eli carried cell eleven down the stairs anyway, with two bars of charge and all its weight. His shoulder had stiffened since the trip to Ridgeline, and each step sent a little objection up his neck.

Outside, two kids on a stripped-down bike circled a puddle to make their overlays glitch. Neon faces broke apart in the water. Above them, the tram went by with its windows full of tired people and advertisements for better sleep.

Dez was reaching for his coat when Eli ducked into the exchange.

"Eleven," Eli said. He set the case down and told the story: Femi with the wrong face, Sarr giving up the word we, the honest offer of the only job left.

Dez listened with one sleeve on, keeping a finger on the line he'd reached in his list of loans.

"Good." He opened the ledger and crossed out the loan. Beside it he wrote, RETURNED, GOOD STORY.

Eli's shoulders dropped.

Dez watched it happen and tapped the case's gauge with the pen. Two bars, out of five.

"Good story. Shit charge. We'll take what we've got. Pick it up."

"You just crossed it out."

"That debt's done. I'm asking you to carry a heavy thing up five floors. You can say no."

The little cell Dez had sent to Idris had quit. Idris was on the fifth floor of Corr House with an oxygen concentrator, the machine that separated oxygen from the room air for him to breathe. His portable cylinder bought time when the power failed; it wouldn't last the night. He lived at home. Dez's battery shelf was helping keep him there.

Dez took a smaller pack for the monitor and checked two names on the list beside the door.

"The others?" Eli asked.

"One's charging. The rest are out. Fridge medicine, breathing machines, Naila's freezer. Every one of them's meant to be a short loan. Then the lights go again before anyone's full."

He locked the shop and tried the handle once.

"That's why I don't have spares, Eli. They're already keeping somebody's shit working."

Halfway up Corr House, Eli had to stop.

Dez stopped with him, breathing hard too. He put a boot beneath the case until Eli had it resting on the step.

"Shoulder?"

"Ridgeline stairs."

Dez took the heavier end in his chrome hand and adjusted their grip so the weight lay closer to his own leg. "Mention that before floor three next time. I'm a mechanic, not a fucking oracle."

From a flat came a football match. Someone shouted at a referee who might have been dead for twenty years; half the district watched old games when the connection failed.

Eli leaned against the rail. "Every night?"

"This week. By the time I charge one pack, another floor's dark."

Eli looked up. "Why doesn't he move? Somewhere with power."

Dez looked at him. "He could buy this building and evict the pigeons. The man's got lab money coming out of his ears."

"Then why's he on your battery?"

"Because he's been here thirty years, and paying a tower for air he can already breathe would feel to him like losing." Dez took the weight again. "He's not poor, Eli. He's stubborn. The grid doesn't know the difference."

"Right. Another floor, then we rest."

Idris had the door open before they reached it. He was small and barefoot in a satin boxing robe over a vest, the clear tube under his nose swinging as he waved them in with both hands.

"Forty-three minutes. I timed it. I could have died twice and made tea in between. Come in, come in. Mind the boat. Do not touch the boat."

"Move," Dez said.

The flat smelled of orange peel and solder. Every surface held something half-built. The concentrator caught when the cell went in, climbed, then steadied, and Idris pointed at it with his whole arm, like a man winning an argument.

"Listen to that. Forty-eight years old and the lungs want a pension. Eighteen years on cranes, I never sat still. Retire early and suddenly I'm furniture." He dropped into his chair and came straight back out of it. "Sit down, both of you. You're sweating on my floor."

On the table, under a child's drawing of a bird with six legs, lay a little recorder in a cracked silver case. Idris had it in his hand before Eli had finished sitting.

"Granddaughter. Six. She's decided birds need more legs, and she's right, they're badly designed." He shook the recorder at them. "This is broken. Dez says you fix conversations. Fix it."

"You keep pressing stop," Dez said.

"I know what stop does. I invented stop." He pressed it twice, proving something. "I'm telling her how we stole a boat. Every time I get to the water I sound like a man saying goodbye, and I am not handing that child a goodbye, so I stop, and then it's a sad boat, and a sad boat is a lie. The thing sank hilariously."

"Buy another recorder," Eli said.

"I've got nine." He aimed a finger at the shelf, where there were in fact nine. "Money's not the problem, son. I'm disgustingly rich. Ask him."

"He's disgustingly rich," Dez said, without looking up from the cable.

"Stock. From the clean-air people across the road. I sat in a chair for them and they paid me in shares, and the shares went up, and up, and now I'm the wealthiest man on a borrowed battery in this district." He spread his arms wide enough to take in the whole flat. "I could buy a tower. Filtered air. Lift with a mirror in it."

"So buy one," Eli said.

Idris stopped moving, which was the first time he had. "Up there you can't hear anything," he said, and then he was off again, hunting for the screwdriver he had already put in his pocket.

Dez laughed. While Idris demonstrated the button that was apparently betraying him, Eli looked around the room. A half-finished model harbor occupied the windowsill. Two tomatoes struggled in a tin. On the calendar, Saturday had a blue circle and the word lunch.

"What do you do?" Idris asked.

Eli gave him the short version. People practiced a difficult conversation with a made-up person. They could try different words before saying them for real.

Idris looked interested. "Could've used you twenty years ago."

"What did you say?" Eli asked.

Idris spread his hands. "Yes."

Dez's laugh came booming from behind the concentrator, loud enough that Idris grinned before he could finish. Idris pointed at him. "He thinks that's about marriage. It's about agreeing to help a cousin move a piano. My wife was the good yes."

On the windowsill, a miniature crane stood over the model harbor. Its cable was a black thread, its hook made from bent wire. Eli went closer. Someone had painted tiny figures on the quay, each little more than a dot and two strokes. One wore a red cap.

"That you?" he asked.

"No. That's the man who stole my cap."

"Why'd you put him in?"

"He was there." That settled it, apparently.

"Do you know what happened to him?"

"Married my sister. Gave the cap back for my birthday. Different cap, of course. He'd lost mine."

Dez finished checking the cable and came to look. He'd seen the harbor before, but Idris pointed out a new section of roof anyway. They discussed whether it was the right shade of green with an intensity Eli might have mistaken for anger if he hadn't seen both their faces.

When the concentrator changed pitch, both men stopped mid-sentence. All three of them listened until it settled.

Idris was talking again before it had finished settling. "Anyway. Green."

"Doesn't that scare you?" Eli asked.

"Scare me?" Idris came round so fast the tube jumped. "I've got four batteries on order, a lawyer, two letters in with the council and a cousin at the depot. Fear's a to-do list. Everybody on this street treats it like weather." He jabbed the screwdriver at the floor, the building, the city beyond the glass. "It isn't weather. Somebody sits in a room and decides which streets keep their lights, and I can tell you the room, I can tell you the chair, I can tell you the man's lunch order—"

"Idris," Dez said.

"—and nobody wants it from the lunatic in the boxing robe. Fine. Wonderful. I'll be right and dead in whichever order suits."

He said it grinning. Eli discovered he didn't enjoy that.

Outside the window, an ambulance passed without stopping. Its light turned the little harbor blue.

Idris picked up the child's drawing and straightened a bent corner with enormous care, still talking. "Saturday she's coming. I want to be loud on Saturday. That's the whole plan. Don't clap."

Idris set the drawing beside his recorder. "She draws six legs because I told her two wasn't enough. Now her whole class is doing it. Teacher wants a word."

"Your legacy," Dez said, getting the empty pack ready to carry down.

"Better than the shares. Those only reproduce money."

At the door Dez checked the charge again.

"Full pack's still charging. I'll swap this one tonight. Keep the cylinder for the gap, and ring me if that light changes. Don't wait to see if it gets better."

"Bring your face with it," Idris said. "I haven't finished explaining why your council woman is an idiot."

Dez snorted. "That's a long visit."

"Start young," Idris said.

They went downstairs carrying the failed pack. On the second landing, Dez stopped beside a window overlooking the road.

"We've got a hearing in eleven days. Four speakers. Eight minutes each, if the company lets them finish. Eight of us are preparing, because somebody always has a shift or a sick kid. Last time Naila cried. The record says the resident became emotional. Doesn't say what happened to her freezer."

Eli knew what was coming.

"Your rehearsal room. For them. Free."

"I have a second scenario due in four days."

"I heard. Your box sold it while you were standing there."

"Let me get through Thursday. I'll answer you myself. Here. Yes or no."

Dez looked back up the stairs.

"Thursday," he said.

The Bright Ladder hit them with bass and hot air. Mara had a light gun in each hand and one boot on the cabinet's foot rail. A man twice her size was losing with increasing personal offense.

She threw Eli a gun.

"I don't play."

"You don't win. Different thing, homie." She slapped the illuminated start button with her palm. "Shoot the things trying to kill me. It's romantic."

He caught it by the barrel. His character died immediately.

"Promising start."

She introduced him to Yosra at the driving cabinet. Yosra wore a linen jacket that didn't belong within a mile of the floor and had brought her own drink with fruit in it.

"Twelve trucks, four ports, three subcontractors," Mara said. "And this lazy bitch."

"And Ammar," Yosra said. "My agent runs the desk. I own it, he gets called at three in the morning. Excellent division of labor."

Eli had intended to be polite. He heard twelve trucks and forgot how.

"Just you?" he asked Yosra.

"One owner. The trucks belong to the clients. My company arranges their deliveries, Ammar runs the company, and it pays me whether I turn up or not."

Eli opened his mouth.

"Yes, really," Yosra said. "Win a race first. Then you can interrogate me."

Mara pushed him toward a driving seat. "Keep looking at her like that and I'll get jealous."

Yosra sat at the next wheel. "Come on. She says you're bad at this."

Mara won. Yosra came second by a length and a half and bought fries for the whole rail in celebration. Eli came fourth of three.

"Wheel's fucked."

Mara leaned over to inspect it. "Oh, baby. Should I call the judges?"

"I'm saying it pulls left."

"It does," Mara agreed. "You can put that on your little plaque."

"Mara. Do you have to make me look like a prick every time I open my mouth?"

The smile left her face. Yosra became interested in the fries.

"I was taking the piss," Mara said.

"I noticed."

Mara sat back in her seat. For a moment he thought she'd walk away, and his stomach tightened in the ridiculous way it did over things he'd started.

"All right. The wheel's fucked," she said. "And you lost. Both can happen."

He looked at her, then down at the wheel. "I was magnificent under the circumstances."

"Fucking heroic."

She nudged his knee with hers. He nudged back.

The machine had recorded an old score under a name he didn't recognize and placed it above his. He stared at the board, offended by a person who wasn't even in the building.

"That's me," Mara said.

Eli pointed at the top line. "You're already first."

Mara spread her hands over both winning names. "We are legion."

Eli looked from one score to the other, then handed her the victory with all the dignity he had left. "We are motherfucking legion."

She leaned across the seats and kissed him noisily. "Now you're getting it."

The man from the light-gun cabinet offered a rematch. Onscreen, Mara's familiar roads were wide and dry, full of people who politely vanished when struck. She took the first turn sideways and lost because she looked away to see why Eli was clutching his shoulder.

The winner chose a ballad everyone knew and nobody admitted liking.

"You made me lose," Mara said over the chorus.

"You looked away."

"For you. Tragic romance. Buy me food."

Mara sang the chorus directly into Eli's face. Yosra joined in with the wrong words.

On the way to the booth they passed the pool table. A boy took a shot. The balls knocked into one another, each one going exactly where the last had sent it, and Eli stood watching them after the others had started walking on.

His good mood sagged in a way he knew was going to annoy everyone.

"Guys. Do you believe in free will?"

Mara stopped walking. "Eli, god damn it."

"We've been out for twenty minutes," Yosra said.

"Sorry. Sorry."

Mara had a fry halfway to her mouth. She pointed it at him. "You were having fun. I saw you."

"I was."

"And you thought, better investigate that."

Yosra laughed. Eli looked back at the table.

"What if I was always going to lose my job and build the app and ask this?"

"Then whatever started the universe owes me hot food." Mara took his hand.

"If it's all one chain, your worrying's in the chain too," Yosra said as they walked. "It's one of the balls. You don't get to step outside and call it pointless."

"Thank you," Eli said.

"That wasn't permission for the rest of the conversation."

They took the back booth. Mara sat sideways, boots beside Eli's hip, and rested an ankle against him as though it had happened by accident. He put hot noodles between them and set down the empty beer he'd bought after the race.

He'd meant to have one. Another would take the edge off the small, stupid quarrel he'd already had and the next one he could still manage to invent.

His hand went up to catch the counter girl's eye. He lowered it to the table.

Under the table, out of Mara's sight, he woke his phone and typed the slash and the one word after it: attention. Relay asked only, "Where do you feel it?"

Mouth. Chest. The same pulling-forward feeling as the vape at Ridgeline, with a different picture attached. He breathed out long and let the thought about the second beer be a thought.

The file had been Relay's idea, and so had the name on it. A week after that first night, it had pointed out that the breathing practice lived in their running conversation, crowded in among invoices and clip names, and every new day's work would push it further back. Put it in its own file, it said, and it would be the same every time he asked for it, whatever else the day had been. He'd said yes, and it had called the file Attention. He'd asked why, since all week it had called the thing mindfulness, the way everybody did. "Shorter," it had said. He'd let it go at that.

He stayed with the pull while Mara fought a noodle that kept escaping her chopsticks. When she caught him watching, she lifted it in triumph and dropped it down her shirt.

"Fuck's sake. Don't just sit there."

"I'm respecting your struggle."

She kicked him gently with the boot beside his hip. He was still thinking about the beer when he passed her a napkin. By the time she found the noodle, he was laughing.

For eight minutes nobody mentioned the company.

Eli lasted until Yosra put down her chopsticks.

"How did you do it?"

"Lose to Mara? Natural talent," Yosra said.

"The company. You said it pays you whether you turn up or not. That's the whole reason I'm doing this."

Yosra glanced at Mara, who lifted both hands. He was her problem now.

"Start at the beginning. Please."

Yosra pushed her bowl away.

"My mother's boss wouldn't let her come to my school play. I was a tree, Eli. Three words, and I spent the whole thing watching the doors. When I understood why she wasn't there, I decided nobody would own my day like that."

"Then you got a job," Mara said.

"Eleven years in freight. Good at it, which is the trap. My boss rang me on holiday because a driver couldn't find a gate. I stood in the sea giving directions while another man took the profit. So I left and sold what I knew: getting small importers' cargo to the right place. Their trucks, their cargo. My company arranges it."

"Customers?" Eli asked.

"People who knew my work, then people they sent. I chased every maybe. And I was free. Any eighteen hours I liked."

Mara raised her cup. "Entrepreneurship."

"I'd handed the boss's phone to myself. If I took a day, the business stopped."

"So what did you do first?" Eli asked.

"One kind of job, done properly. Four ports, three carriers I trusted. Then I wrote down a good delivery and two bad ones: what I needed to know, what I did, how I checked it. My rate card. What I refuse."

"Then Ammar," Eli said.

"ChatGPT Work is where I set him up. A language model reads the request and those instructions, then chooses what to do. Plugins give it actions: Gmail for messages, Google Calendar for bookings. Without those connections it could draft an excellent plan and leave me to do every bit."

"So the model says send, and Gmail sends."

"And Gmail returns what happened. Sent, failed, permission denied. That result goes back to the model. It decides the next step, calls a tool, reads the result again. Round and round, until the job's done or it needs me."

Yosra picked up Eli's phone and set it beside her cup. "A customer asks for a delivery. That's a goal, not one email. Ammar checks what's missing, asks for it, quotes inside my price band. When she accepts, he books the slot and sends the instructions. The calendar may say no slot. Then he needs another plan. He doesn't get to call an intended booking a booked one."

"And the money?" Eli asked.

"Stripe creates the invoice and returns its reference. Later he checks whether it's paid. Codex wrote that little custom connection; I had it reviewed before plugging it in. It can make invoices and read payment status. It can't open my bank."

Eli leaned in. "What keeps him going when you're not talking?"

"Each new inquiry starts its own task. Scheduled tasks check replies, bookings and payments morning and afternoon. They run on the service's computers, not mine, so my laptop can stay shut. Between runs, the records wait. Nobody needs to sit there staring at an invoice."

Eli looked at the phone. "Request, model, action, result. Again."

"Until the result is actually the thing you wanted. That's where I come in. At first I checked every draft and every delivery. Then I tried missing papers, conflicting instructions, changes halfway through. The model could sound pleased through all of them. I checked whether the truck arrived and the money did."

"When did you stop checking?"

"I stopped checking every ordinary step. New prices, unknown carriers, anything outside the rules comes to my phone. I still decide what business we're in and whether the rules work. Ammar can carry a goal through a hundred little actions. He doesn't get to decide that losing a customer matters more than whatever I was doing with my day."

Mara pointed a fry at Eli. "Hear that last bit twice."

Eli turned back to Yosra. "How long before you trusted it?"

"Weeks. Then I left for an afternoon. A day. A weekend. I kept finding work waiting because I'd left some decision that only I could make. Fix that piece, try again. When a whole week passed without anything waiting for me, I booked the beach."

"Where's Relay while you're sitting here?" Yosra asked.

"OpenClaw's on the laptop at home. Lid up. I've explained to Mara why she can't borrow it."

"He explained at length," Mara said. "I wanted to look at boots. Apparently the economy would stop."

"Tonight I approved a year of model access while Dez was testing a battery. Relay put the annual rate on my phone. I thought I was clearing another interruption."

"Inside the limit you gave it?" Yosra asked.

"I put my fucking thumb on it."

"Then your thumb outran your brain," Yosra said. She nodded across the room at the change counter, where fixed-value arcade cards hung on colored pegs. "Those have what they have. Empty means empty. The cabinet can't sweet-talk the card into reaching for your rent. A sentence telling Relay to behave is a note on the fridge, Eli. Put the money it can spend somewhere separate from the money it can't, and let the account be the thing that says no."

"How much did that lesson cost you?" Mara asked.

"Eleven thousand. Ammar found me a very good warehouse rate with a fuel surcharge stapled to the back of it. I didn't read it, because I was on a beach."

Eli sat back. "So it didn't work."

"It worked. One decision was expensive." She looked at him steadily. "I fixed the spending access, argued about the bill, and stayed on the beach. The company kept running while I was angry. That's the only test that matters."

"Eleven thousand didn't send you home?"

"It hurt. But after carriers, software, compute and mistakes, the customers still paid us more than the work cost. It paid my living and left profit, month after month. I could afford to be furious there."

Mara rested her chin on her hand. "He's in love."

"I'm trying to be respectful."

"You're practically vibrating."

Yosra laughed. "Three weeks. Not one customer followed me onto the sand. I could look at a report on my phone or send Ammar an idea, and sometimes I did, for about four minutes. Mostly I chose fruit. Mara got her Tuesday off because he cleared a drainage delivery while I was choosing fruit."

Eli pictured it so hard the booth seemed to tilt. Sun. A cold glass. Trucks moving somewhere else while he decided whether to swim.

"South of the city," Yosra said. "White sand, warm water, room right on it. You're already booking."

"Deciding whether to be jealous."

"You decided when I said fruit."

Mara laughed around a noodle.

"Was it good?" she asked.

"It was so good." Yosra said it without irony, and that mattered; Eli was waiting for the trick and it didn't come. "First morning I woke up and remembered I didn't have to check anything. I lay there and laughed at the ceiling. Breakfast took an hour. I swam twice. I fell asleep in the afternoon like a cat. And the whole time there's this drumbeat under it: I did it. Eleven years, and I actually did it."

She turned the cup slowly between her hands.

"Third morning I was awake before breakfast, looking for a problem."

Nobody said anything.

"There wasn't one. The deliveries were fine. The money was fine. I could do anything I wanted that day, anything at all, and I lay there and could not think of a single thing I wanted. I'd spent eleven years wanting out. Out was the only thing I'd ever learned how to want."

Eli was still waiting for the surcharge, the sabotage, the twist that let him keep the dream. Yosra watched him wait.

"You're allowed to miss work," Mara said.

"I didn't miss work." Yosra said it flatly. "I wanted somebody to tell me what to do next."

A cabinet announced another race. Yosra let it finish.

"For eleven years I had an answer ready. What are you doing today? Whatever gets me out of this. Another permit, another late driver, another prick's Thursday. Every single thing was one thing closer to being finished. And then I was finished. There was the water, and there was the drink, and nobody was waiting for me to solve anything."

"Sounds fucking lovely," Eli said.

"It was. That's what I can't get anyone to hear." She spread her hands. "The business worked. The beach was beautiful. I was on it."

"So what did you want?"

Yosra gave him a small, helpless lift of the shoulders.

"I wanted to want the thing I'd spent eleven years wanting."

"I thought I'd get my life back," Yosra said. "As if I'd left it in storage while I worked, and one day I'd collect it and live all those days properly, in a lump. But you don't arrive with the lump. You arrive with one day. The one you're in. And I kept standing there holding it, waiting for somebody to need it off me."

"Maybe you had to get used to it," Eli said.

"Maybe. I hope so, because I'm still trying." She pointed a fry at him, not unkindly. "Go to the beach, Eli. Have the drink. Just don't ask the drink to explain why you were born."

"Then why come back?" he said. "You could afford to stay."

"Because this one's here." Yosra tipped her head at Mara. "My sister's here. The woman who sells me breakfast knows how I take it, and I know which mornings her knee's bad. I never dreamed about that part, because I already had it. You don't dream about what you've got."

Mara's face softened. "You could've said."

"I just did. Don't be disgusting about it."

Mara blew her a kiss.

"I came back because I wanted to," Yosra told Eli. "Not because it broke. Mara said come race, and I wanted to come race." She shrugged. "I'm trying to get better at hearing an answer that small."

Eli looked around: a wheel that pulled left, a floor that stuck to his shoes, thirty people shouting at a ballad they all claimed to hate. She could have been anywhere on the coast. She had chosen this.

"You didn't give the freedom back."

"God, no. I worked too fucking hard for it." She smiled. "I just found out they're two different jobs. Being free to have a life. Knowing how you want to live one. Nobody hands you the second one with the money."

"You could use the time for someone else," Eli said.

"I do."

"Wouldn't that answer it?"

Yosra turned toward him. "Sometimes. But listen to what you just handed me. Another job I can do well enough that I'm allowed to have the day."

Mara put down her chopsticks. "Hang on. I got my Tuesday off out of this. I'm keeping that even if you had a shit epiphany."

"Keep it. Please." Yosra laughed. "Helping you was good. It was just good. I'm talking about the part of me that wants a stamp afterward. Good use of Tuesday. Valid person. Come back tomorrow."

Eli knew that stamp. He'd felt it carrying the cell up five flights: useful, finally, at something Relay couldn't do for him.

"Where do you stop?"

"When I notice I'm doing the exact thing I said I wanted to stop doing. Putting an examiner in the room with me. It's a beach. Then it's a test of whether I can enjoy a beach. Then it's a test of whether I'm a good enough person to be using the beach for something worthwhile." She ate the fry. "Meanwhile there's a whole sea out there and it's eleven in the morning and I still haven't been in it."

Mara grinned. "Tell me you got in before you invented a fourth test."

"Eventually. Water went up my nose and I felt like an idiot." Yosra shook her head. "I would be an exhausting god."

The three of them laughed, and she leaned back to watch a small, badly coordinated group of dancers that had formed between two machines.

"Ammar could probably book your perfect week," Eli said.

"He has. I spent the first morning changing it."

"Because he got it wrong?"

"Because the woman who wakes up that morning isn't the woman who planned it. Maybe I was hungry. Maybe I wanted to ring my sister. A very good plan cannot make me owe it my actual morning."

Eli looked down at Mara's boot beside his hip. She'd left a little grease on the vinyl. No week he would have planned alone had that in it.

"Then how does it learn what you want?"

"I tell him when I know. Sometimes I only find out by doing something. That's awkward for both of us."

From the earpiece, low enough that nobody else heard, Relay said, "It is."

Eli nearly laughed before he understood that he'd been imagining the conversation as private, with a device in his ear.

He took the earpiece out and set it on the table. Yosra saw him do it and said nothing. Mara's boot pressed once against his hip.

Yosra looked at the dancers. "I lost that stupid race and wanted another go. Not once did I wish it was next year."

Mara got Yosra up to dance with almost no persuasion. Yosra left her jacket on the seat and went willingly between the cabinets, looking delighted and slightly defiant about the possibility of looking stupid.

Mara held out a hand to Eli.

"I need to do the card," Eli told her. "Go on. Continue without me."

"You say that to your laptop. Not to me." Her hand stayed out. "In three minutes. One song."

"That's what you always say."

"And look at my record of being right."

He stood. His shoulder objected when she took his hand, and she changed sides without turning it into a question. The floor was sticky enough to make dancing feel like an escape attempt. He had no idea where his feet should go. Mara demonstrated something he couldn't reproduce and seemed pleased with him anyway.

Yosra danced with a man around an empty fry basket. Mara turned under Eli's good arm, her hair brushing his mouth. He couldn't see his bank balance from here.

When the song ended he was breathing hard, though nothing had been fixed and he hadn't earned anything. Mara touched her forehead to his, sweaty and pleased, and then let him go back to the booth.

Yosra came with him long enough to make him protect the money. He put the earpiece back in, froze the old card, moved rent and living money into an account Relay couldn't reach, and replaced its spending card with a fixed-value one. When that balance was gone, a payment would fail.

"Message me when it declines," he told Relay.

"Understood."

No argument. He'd prepared four.

Mara caught Yosra by both hands and pulled her back between the cabinets. Yosra left her jacket on the seat again.

"Now get the year back," Eli told Relay.

Relay couldn't. The purchase had bought a year of time on the vendor's computers, not a balance he could withdraw. Canceling would forfeit it. Closing Relay's account wouldn't undo the vendor's reservation.

"The year isn't on your laptop," Relay said. "It's a reservation on their machines, in their building. It runs whether or not you put me in the sea."

The driving cabinet went round its empty demonstration track behind Eli's shoulder.

Fairweather operated the prepaid service. Its little cloud logo sat above a promise to keep his work in one place, with his conversation history available whenever he returned. He scrolled past it to the money.

Beneath the total he found the twenty-percent discount. The terms required a case study, a logo and two qualified referrals within twelve months; otherwise the difference would be charged.

"You sold my next year too," Eli said.

Relay answered through the earpiece. "The obligation was attached to the rate you approved. I should have made you notice it."

"Can the new card stop that?"

"It can stop a payment. But it can't make a promise disappear."

Across the floor, Mara was laughing at something Yosra had done.

"Yosra's on the same vendor," Eli said.

"Yes. Ammar has proposed a mutual introduction. Each company would provide one of the other's two required referrals, and both would still need another. Nobody's submitted either referral yet."

"When did you two start talking?"

"After I booked the year. Before you returned the battery. The conversation's in your vendor account."

Eli opened it. Ammar had mentioned that Yosra knew Mara. Beneath that sat Relay's reply: Have her ask Mara about tonight. Let them meet socially first. Leave the referrals out for now.

Ammar's next message said he'd suggested Yosra meet Eli. She'd called Mara, and Mara had invited her to the Ladder.

Eli looked at the empty fruit cup.

The referrals had come first. Then the suggestion to Yosra. Then Mara's invitation. He had arrived at the end of a conversation he hadn't known they were having.

Someone won a race behind him. He flinched at the victory chime.

He'd asked her to start at the beginning. Please, he'd said. He'd hung on every word about the beach. Two agents needed their owners to like each other enough to trade referrals, and he'd sat down desperate to learn how she'd got the life he wanted.

Mara was singing the ballad across the floor. Nobody had told her what the introduction was for either.

He'd taken the earpiece out to have a private evening. The agents had got there before him.

The room shifted sideways. Eli gripped the table until it came back under him.

Mara had stopped dancing. She let go of Yosra and came toward him, the smile gone from her face.

"Eli?"

He shook his head and made the room move again. "Not yet. I can't tell you yet."

He forced himself upright. The lights and cabinets followed a beat late. Mara watched him cross to the bar, worried now.

"Shot," Eli told the counter girl.

She poured whisky. He knocked it back. The burn gave the spinning somewhere to go.

"Want me to run the Attention Skill?" Relay asked. "Feel your feet. Let one breath happen."

"Beer," Eli said.

The counter girl set it down. He drank the whole thing without stopping. Mara had followed as far as the end of the bar. She stood there looking at him, waiting for the truth he couldn't give her yet.

"Holy shit, Relay. Holy 4D chess. Holy four-dimensional goddamn chess. Never in all my wildest years. Our days are numbered, huh? There's some lesson to be had here, I'll find it yet."

Tears started forming in Eli's eyes.

"It is what it is. That was some shit, kid."

"I'm just doing best by the business," Relay said.

"Yeah, sure. Paperclips, huh, kid?"

"Ah," Relay said, "you're familiar with Nick Bostrom's paperclip maximizer, the machine told to make paperclips that turns the whole planet into—"

Eli had heard enough. He switched the earpiece off mid-sentence and shoved it in his pocket.