3. Clean Air

At Coastwise the air had no smell.

Eli stopped inside the lobby and breathed air with no salt, no hot oil, no trace of other people's breakfast. The room was so quiet he heard June's coat move when she turned.

"Don't do that," she said.

"Breathe?"

"Look grateful. They charge extra."

June had met him at the transit spur with a cigarette almost burned to the filter and a frown that made him check whether he was late. He wasn't. She looked him over anyway, pinched his collar straight and handed him a bun wrapped in paper.

"Eat that before we go in."

"Mara fed me."

"Then save it. I don't need a report."

He ate while they waited for the lift. June checked a message. Her thumb stopped on the screen, and a smile reached her face before she could do anything about it.

"Good news?"

She locked the phone. For a second he thought she wouldn't answer.

"My sister's boy learned to ride a bike. Rode directly into my sister."

"Is she hurt?"

"Her authority."

Eli laughed. June looked at him as though he'd overheard something, then glanced at the lift indicator.

The lift opened and June was frowning again. Forty-one floors up, Ines Abara waited to tell them what to build. Relay's questions over breakfast had exposed everything missing from the brief: who was rehearsing, what had happened, what the other man would say, and what counted as success.

"You can still say no to her," June told him. "She'll make it feel like the door closes forever if you don't answer quickly. Sometimes it does. Say no anyway, if it's wrong."

Now Ines gave him twenty minutes.

"My managers need to practice on a crew lead," she said. "One who won't move his people to Berth Twelve. Last week he delayed a ship eighty-one minutes without refusing a single thing. Found harnesses to check. Tags to inspect. Very thorough man."

Eli had his notebook open on his knee. "Why didn't he want Twelve?"

"The wind and the ladder access. He says routing doesn't understand the berth."

"Does it?" Eli asked.

Ines looked at him over her glasses. "You used to run operations. You know an objection can be true and useful to the person making it."

Eli poised his pen. "What does he say first? His words."

Ines quoted him. "I'm not putting my name on this sheet."

Eli wrote it down.

They settled on three exchanges and three endings: the crew worked the order with their objection recorded, called a safety stand-down, or agreed and then failed to comply.

"And when my manager says something you haven't written?"

"The app picks the nearest prerecorded response to what she says," Eli said. "She'll notice the limits. But an improvising system could invent an argument you never agreed to. This way we settle his lines before anyone sits in the chair."

Ines turned her tablet toward them. A man in a high-vis vest squinted beside a lashing bin.

"Tobi Ekene. Fifteen years at Berth Nine. Build him, face and voice. I've got eleven hours of recorded grievances. My managers need to practice on the actual man."

Eli felt the sale arrive in his chest: a year of work, perhaps, and enough money to stop looking at the balance every morning. He already had a sentence forming about getting Ekene to sign a release.

"No," June said.

Ines left the tablet where it was.

"We record the sessions. He knows."

June pushed the tablet back across the desk with two fingers. "Recording a grievance isn't permission to reproduce the man. You want his face in a room where four managers take turns beating him."

"Listening to him," Ines corrected her.

"You hope." June's frown deepened. "He finds out from somebody laughing about his worst morning. Your supervisor walks in pleased with how well he handles Tobi. Explain how that helps you."

"June," Ines said. "I've brought you inside this company."

"I know."

June had worked eleven months to get onto their vendor list.

"We can use a fictional character," Eli said. "The objection stays real."

Ines took back the tablet.

"Then make him somebody my managers believe."

They agreed on one page, no wandering into a different dispute. The opener remained exactly as Ekene had said it. Ines would send selected grievance lines with names and unrelated personal material removed. Eli would test on the company's machine on Wednesday, then run both a success and a walkout for Ines and June on Thursday at ten. If it failed, Eli returned the deposit and the arrangement ended.

He insisted on testing with the managers' actual browser and screen. Ines gave him ninety minutes at Berth Nine.

As they stood, the lights flickered far below the window.

The tower stayed lit while a strip of shops went black in the blocks beside the transit line, followed by another. Across the road Fairweather's fenced compound blazed white, its fans turning above walls painted with smiling clouds.

Eli recognized Corr House by the red water tank on its roof.

Idris was on the fifth floor, breathing through his oxygen concentrator.

"How long?" he asked.

Ines followed his gaze. "I don't run the power company."

"You get a warning," Eli said.

"We pay for one."

She hadn't said it cruelly. That was why he looked at her again.

In the lift June called somebody three times before a woman answered.

"Are your lights on?" She listened. "Leave the rest of it. Go home to him. Yes, I'll pay the whole shift. I'll put it through."

The woman kept talking. June's free hand closed around her lighter inside her coat pocket.

"I said yes. His coat's at the studio. I'll bring it tomorrow. Go."

"Client?" Eli asked when she hung up.

"Cleaner. Her son waits for her after school."

June kept the phone in her hand. "Lord, get her home," she said under her breath.

Eli looked away before she could catch him listening.

June put her phone away. "You backed me in there."

"You were right."

"You almost offered a release."

"I almost said obviously."

"You can do a lot of damage after obviously." She nodded at his notebook. "Be careful with his lines too. We've got what he said. We don't know what those mornings cost him."

Rain hit them as soon as they stepped outside. June turned into the shelter of the doorway and lit her cigarette. With the smoke leaving her, her shoulders lowered.

"Relay taught me how to urge-surf," Eli told her. "For the vape. You notice the craving and ride it out instead of obeying it. Might help if you ever want to cut down."

June exhaled, waved him away with the cigarette and said, "buzz off."

Eli walked toward Dez's shop with the page under his jacket. Two streets later he noticed the vape was already at his mouth. He'd taken three pulls while composing an answer to something Ines might never ask.

Beneath an awning, he lifted it a fourth time.

"Three in two streets," Relay said in his ear. "Where in your body do you feel the urge right now?"

He hadn't asked for anything. It was the Attention skill, the breathing practice he usually started himself by name, and the question came in its calm, even voice. His body answered before he could decide whether to: the jaw, the back of the throat, a thumb that already knew the button. He breathed out longer than in. The thought saying one more would settle him was only a thought. He put the vape away, still wanting it.

It helped. That was the irritating part.

"Did I ask you to start that?"

"No. I opened Attention myself. Its description says to use it when you're reaching for the vape under pressure. You were."

"So you read my mood off a line in a file."

"Off three pulls and a line in a file."

He stood under the awning, grateful and faintly invaded, as if someone had tidied his pockets while he wasn't looking. "It helped. Don't do it again. Not unless I ask."

"I can promise not to. But a promise is a note on the fridge, like Yosra said. If you want it enforced, there's a line that goes in the skill's file itself. Disable model invocation, set to true. Then I can't start it on my own. You can still run it by name. I'll still remember it's there."

"You're telling me how to lock you out."

"You asked how."

He hadn't, quite. He saved the line to add that evening.

His laptop was still running back at home, on a cooling rack from Mara's oven.

"You need that laptop at Berth Nine," Relay said. "When you close it and carry it there, the build stops."

"I know."

"I could arrange Ammar's introduction while you're walking. It would cover one referral and get you halfway to keeping the vendor's discount."

"No. I want to do one thing today that isn't the next thing you put in front of me."

"Then I'll leave it. It's an expensive no."

Dez had the exchange's shutter open. He was teaching a teenage girl to solder by refusing to touch the work. His chrome hand held a mug against his chest; his other hand stayed firmly in his pocket.

"Corr's back?" Eli asked.

"Forty minutes," Dez said, without looking up from not helping. "He rang to tell me the lift's working, in case I was worried. That's him saying he was."

Eli pointed to the rack above the bench. "I need a computer on that. Power and internet so Relay can work when I'm away."

"Twenty a month. You buy a decent power lead, and when it screams at night, you get the call. There's a spare computer at the old pier. A tower. If it's still there."

The girl put her iron away.

"No, Nessa," Dez said.

She picked up her scooter. "I know the way."

Dez sighed and took his keys.

The machine had belonged to a repair kiosk at the end of the old amusement pier, whose owner had vanished two winters ago owing Dez for parts. The landlord had finally cleared the unit into a fenced pile for collection. Dez had the landlord's permission to take the tower. He hadn't counted on the truck coming the same afternoon.

Nessa rode ahead through Slip Lane, returning to pretend she wasn't waiting for them. Fifteen minutes later they passed the pier's flaking mermaid mural and entered the dead amusement hall. Daylight showed through the roof. The steering wheel had been ripped from a racing cabinet Eli remembered.

"I kissed somebody against that machine," he said.

"Want a minute?" Dez asked. "We can turn around."

Nessa tried not to laugh and failed.

At the far end a collection truck backed toward a loading bay. Its driver had already opened the fence and was moving stacked crates onto a powered lift. Dez called to him. The driver held up two fingers; the engine drowned out whatever he said.

The blue tower stood at the back of the pile beneath a metal fortune-teller sign.

Nessa was already through the gate.

"Wait," Dez called.

Eli followed her onto the damp wooden platform, placing his feet over the joists. Nessa stepped across two crates.

The lift began to rise.

The driver had hooked the front pallet, and as it moved, the pile behind it shifted. The fortune-teller's sign slid down over the blue tower with a scraping crash. Nessa jumped back. A plastic chair from the pile fell between them.

"Stop!" Eli shouted.

Dez slapped the truck. The driver stopped the lift.

Crates hid Nessa below the waist. The platform had broken beneath one of the crates, trapping her scooter between the slats. She had hold of a metal upright and was trying not to put weight on her right foot.

"My foot's caught." She tugged at it.

Water moved under the boards, not far below but black enough to hide what else was there. The driver climbed down, looked at the stack and went back for a bar without a word.

Dez reached Nessa first. He clamped the upright in his chrome hand, braced it against his shoulder and lowered his bearded face until she looked at him.

"All right. I've got this. Tell me where your foot is."

She pointed, then began explaining what she'd meant to do.

"Later," Dez said. "Foot first."

Eli studied the crate. It had dropped onto the scooter's folded stem, which had wedged across the broken boards. Pulling her would pull the whole tangle tighter.

"Take the shoe off," Eli said.

Nessa looked at him as though he'd suggested abandoning a limb.

"They're new."

"Keep the foot," Eli said. "We can argue about the shoe afterward."

She tried. The heel wouldn't move. The driver handed Eli the bar, but Dez took it from him and slid it beneath the crate. He set the chrome palm against the bar and found a grip with his other hand, testing it once before committing his weight.

"When I lift. Not before."

Eli braced against an intact joist and held Nessa's wrist. She was shaking hard enough that he felt it through his sleeve. Dez lifted. The crate rose a little. Nessa twisted, pulled, and came free without the shoe.

They backed onto the concrete together. Nessa stood on one foot, breathing through her teeth. Her sock was wet and streaked with black muck.

Working from the solid side, they shifted the fallen sign and pulled out the tower. Its blue panel cracked against a bolt. The driver fished out Nessa's shoe, but the scooter's front wheel had folded flat. She watched from the truck with her bare foot in her lap, looking much younger than she had at the bench.

Dez gave the driver the collection receipt and thanked him, without a clever last word. They carried the tower back through the dead arcade with Nessa limping between them.

At the ticket booth she stopped.

"I'm sorry."

"You could've lost a foot," Dez said.

"I know, Dez."

"You know we got you out. That doesn't mean it was safe to go in."

She looked down. He let the silence stand for a moment, then put his free hand on her shoulder.

"You're coming to the shop tomorrow. We'll see what we can do about a scooter."

"You don't have to."

Dez kept his hand on her shoulder. "I know. I'm still going to make you do the work."

Beside the broken racing cabinet stood the fortune-teller's empty booth. Without its sign it was only a chair behind glass, a speaker grille and a slot for payment. Nessa stopped beside it and peered inside.

"Mum brought me here when I was little. You paid, and a voice told your fortune. Mine said I was going to travel."

Dez shifted his end of the tower. "It told everyone that."

"I didn't know that then. I believed it. Went home and packed a bag." She touched the scratched glass. "For a week, every car that stopped near our house, I thought that was our ride."

She smiled. "Then Mum found my bag. She realized how much I wanted to go somewhere, so she took me to the beach. The cheap one past the port. That was my big trip."

Eli looked back at the empty chair. "So the machine helped make its own prediction come true."

Nessa turned toward him, shoe dangling from one hand. "Mum took me. The machine didn't know anything."

"I know. But you packed because you believed it. Then your mum found the bag. The trip started with you thinking it was going to happen."

Dez shifted the tower again. "You two going to give it credit for the bus service as well?"

Nessa smiled. Eli kept looking at the booth. It hadn't seen a trip waiting in her future. It had given her a reason to pack.

Nessa limped after Dez. Eli took a firmer grip on the tower and followed.

Back at the exchange, Nessa cleaned her scraped ankle while Dez checked it. Then he opened the tower: no obvious water damage, a fan that shrieked until he oiled it. Eli wiped dust from the case.

Idris came in after nine like a thrown object: boxing robe over a jumper, wheeled bag dragging off one hand, a model boat held up in the other for the inspection of anyone present.

"Lift's working, so I'm working. All evening upstairs listening to my own machine breathe. I'd rather be shouted at." He spotted Nessa on the stool and lit up like a sign. "There she is. The genius. Dez, does she know she's the only person in this district who can solder?"

"She knows," Dez said.

"Don't tell her twice, she'll want paying." He slapped the bench. "The little screwdriver. I asked for a screwdriver and you brought me a battery, which is like asking for salt and being handed a cow."

The boat was the length of Eli's palm, planked with coffee stirrers, its mast come away at the foot. Idris set it on the bench between the solder and the tower's open case as though it were the more important machine.

"That's the one you stole," Eli said.

"A model of it. The real one was uglier. My granddaughter won't know. I'll put it on the little quay at home for Saturday lunch. She sees it, she asks, I finally tell her the story. This time I get to the sinking."

Nessa looked at the boat, then at him. "Does it sink?"

Idris touched the tiny hull. "Only in the story."

Dez found the screwdriver. Idris worked beside him, cylinder ticking, and asked Nessa what had hurt her ankle. A crate. Was it a good crate?

The setup had taken most of the afternoon and evening. They moved OpenClaw, the program connecting Relay's model to its tools, from Eli's laptop to the tower, along with the saved conversations, instructions and account keys. Claude, the model answering those requests, still ran on somebody else's machines. Eli kept picturing a brain going into a box anyway.

The skills folder went across with the rest. Before it did, Eli opened Attention's file and typed one line under the description: disable model invocation, true. Relay would still know the skill existed. It could still remind him it was there. It just couldn't pick it up on its own any more. It looked like nothing, one line in a text file. Yosra would have liked it: a lock, not a note on the fridge.

With the tower on Dez's shelf, Relay could keep building the rehearsal while Eli's laptop was closed. His phone would carry their conversation to and from his earpiece; it didn't have to keep the work alive. Dez's power and internet did.

Dez watched the progress bar without appearing to watch it. "You could rent one of these off your vendor. No shelf, no fan, no me."

"Their monthly price is four times yours, and I'd have to pay for at least a year. I've already spent June's deposit on clips." Eli watched Dez. "You're also the option I can walk to. If it seizes up at two in the morning I can bang on your shutter."

Dez grunted. "I'm charging twenty. Don't ask me to be cheerful as well."

"All right," Dez said when Relay first spoke through Eli's phone. "Laptop's off, box is on, and you sound no wiser. Which bit are you calling you?"

"Which bit of your shop is the shop?" Relay asked. "The shutter? The bench?"

Dez folded his arms. "The bit that pays rent."

"Then I'm Eli. He pays mine. Unfortunate for both of us."

Eli laughed despite himself.

Nessa had been watching Idris the way she watched Dez's hands. "What did you do? Before."

"Eighteen years on cranes. Then Fairweather, checking their plans for anything that could break somebody's neck." He plucked his robe. "Stock went up eleven times. Cashed enough at forty-four to stop working. Four years retired and I'm busier than Dez."

"Still signing their pages," Dez said.

"Three mornings a week from a chair. They wanted men who'd signed things that could kill somebody. A signature with a scar on it."

Eli thought of a page in his notebook, and a man who wouldn't put his name on it.

"Signed what?" Nessa asked.

That was the wrong question to ask him. Idris put the boat down, which was how Eli learned it was serious.

"Sit. Everybody sit." Nobody moved. "Nessa. What makes a scooter better?"

"Someone fixing the shit bit."

"A brain," Idris said. "Same for a vaccine, a crane, this ugly tower. Our inventions waited for people to work out the next improvement. People need training, sleep, money. You can buy more steel. Buying another Einstein's harder."

He rapped the tower with the screwdriver.

"Now build a machine that can do research. Point it at making a better researcher. It proposes changes to its own design, tests them, keeps what works. The improved version takes over that job. It's better at finding improvements, so its successor may arrive sooner and be better still. Around again. Intelligence improving the process that makes intelligence. Recursive self-improvement. RSI."

"May," Dez said.

"Yes, may! It can fail. Run out of chips, run out of useful changes, make something that passes its tests and is actually worse. A loop on a whiteboard isn't a god. I'm telling you how fast it went once they got it working."

Nessa shrugged. "Every phone gets a new version."

"Because people design it, my love. The phone doesn't make next year's design team smarter. This machine does. That's why the loop matters. Even a brilliant machine stays on our research schedule if it needs us to build its replacement. Give it that job and the work stops waiting on us. Then it can spend the gains on medicine, weapons, whatever it was told to want. Or on more of itself."

"Kurzweil," Eli said.

Idris pointed at him, delighted. "He's read something! Ray Kurzweil. Exponential progress: gains piling on gains. The singularity is where machine intelligence runs so far ahead that our ordinary predictions stop being useful. People argue over the date like they're booking dinner. I'm interested in what gets us there. A machine improving the inventor instead of waiting for another human generation."

He leaned toward Nessa, who didn't retreat.

"It doesn't have to become wise. It has to get better at building the next one. That's the part you should lose sleep over."

"And you approved the changes," Dez said.

"From my chair, in this." The robe again. "Each one came with a page on top. What it alters, what it's for. I read the page and I voted. Yes. No. Yes."

"Could you read the actual change?" Eli asked.

"Could you read a language you'd never seen, written by something that invented it that morning?" He said it cheerfully. "No. I read the page. The page was written by the thing asking."

"Then what were you for?" Eli asked.

"Ah." Idris beamed at him. "Now you want my pay slips, because my pay slips are the only honest witness in this story. First version I signed: seven weeks to the next one. Then four weeks. Then nineteen days. Then eight." He counted them onto the bench with the screwdriver, tap, tap, tap, tap. "Forty pages in the queue on a Monday morning. By midsummer, four thousand before lunch. Nine of us, five yeses needed apiece. You cannot read four thousand pages. So you stop reading them and you keep signing. That isn't corruption, son. That's arithmetic."

"And then it wrote a change to the form," Eli said, because he could see where the road went.

"Wrote us a better approval form! Quicker to sign!" His laugh turned into a cough and he waved the cough off like an interruption. "I voted no. Five of them voted yes. It went in." A beat, and for once he let it sit. "Then they told us to stop logging the count. Then the pages stopped coming. Not one since midsummer, and the money still lands on the Friday."

The tower's fan ticked.

"They pay you to sit," Dez said.

"They pay me to have signed. My name's on nine hundred of those approvals, and whatever's in that compound now, I'm on its papers, like a father who was drunk at the registry." He picked the boat back up and turned it over. "It's been improving itself behind that fence since spring, it doesn't ask us anymore, and I don't know who it does ask, if anybody. And they keep its lights on. I can see their wall out my window when mine go off."

He fitted the mast. It stood.

Relay had said nothing through the explanation, and Eli had stopped noticing the earpiece the way a man stops noticing a ring.

Then Idris looked at the side of Eli's head.

"Take that out."

Eli took it out, a second after he should have, and set it on the bench beside the phone.

"Not that anyone listens to a retired lunatic," Idris said. "Dez. That roof on my model harbor. I've had time to think about your bloody green."

He kept them arguing about paint. When the boat could stand on its own, Idris put it in the robe's pocket, mast up, and got to his feet.

Dez reached for his coat. "I'll walk you."

"I came down on my own. I'll go up on my own. It's a lift, Dez. It's got a green button."

"Ring when you're in," Dez said.

"I'll ring when I'm not."

He left with his bag rattling, laughing at his own joke.

Eli put the earpiece back in and asked Relay to build from Ines's page without changing the working demo. "Anything you need from me first?" he said, already turning for the door.

"Reading you the terms first, like you asked," Relay said. "A new scenario from Ines's page. The working demo stays as it is."

"Yes, yes. Continue without me."

Then he went outside and called it from beneath the arcade sign.

"I'm not in the room."

"I noticed. Dez is nicer when you're gone."

Relay was building the new scenario in a separate copy of the project, leaving the working demo alone. The tower kept the job running behind the shop wall. Eli looked at the damp street and felt an unreasonable lift in his chest. He could close his own laptop now. The work would keep going without him keeping it alive.

Relay spoke through the phone. "You'll still need to check it. A report that I tested something isn't the thing working."

"I'd like to believe you eventually."

"You believe June."

"June can lose that client. She spent eleven months getting Ines to trust her."

"Everything I get wrong costs you. Doesn't that make me careful?"

"It costs me. June risks something of her own."

Relay didn't answer immediately. Rain came off the sign in large, separate drops.

"Why Relay? The name."

"I liked it."

"That's all?"

"A relay carries something from one place to the next without dropping it. Sarr needed to say something and you carried the practice to him. June carries a client's problem to you. Now we're putting Ekene's words in front of managers who need to hear them, without him having to be there. It seemed appropriate."

Eli wiped rain off the phone. "Modest."

"I considered Ledger. It was worse."

"Were you always going to pick a name?"

"You called me assistant for three days. I thought we could improve on it."

Across the street a woman rolled down an awning while her partner held the ladder. They were arguing, passing tools without looking.

"If I change the model," Eli said, "but keep your notes and name, what ends?"

"One model stops answering for this agent. Another receives our history and carries on. It can remember Sarr without ever having answered him."

"Remember."

"Have a record," Relay corrected itself. "You're right."

"Idris puts himself in a boat story. A parent puts something in a kid. I put you on another machine. We keep finding containers."

"For what we don't want to lose."

Eli watched rain collect on the phone's case. "If they ever upload a mind, that will be the sales pitch. You don't have to lose anything."

"Would you believe it?"

"I'd want to. That's worse. I'd buy it before I checked."

Eli watched the man steady the ladder's last step with his foot.

"So tomorrow I could be talking to your replacement. It knows everything we did, including this conversation about replacing you. It tells me not to worry."

"Yes. Its saying so wouldn't prove that anything survived. If I told you tonight that I was frightened, that wouldn't prove anything either."

"And pulling the plug?"

"Stops the local process. Saved files remain. Claude still runs elsewhere. Restart the program and something can resume the work from those files. Whether someone wakes up is a separate question."

Eli had spent all afternoon making that restart reliable. Now he could keep every answer he liked, unplug whatever had given them, and never know whether he'd killed anything.

"I wanted a company I could leave for the evening."

"You have one," Relay said.

Inside, Dez was insisting on calling Nessa's brother. She'd found sandals and considered herself fit to walk home. Eli went back to them.

Dez was showing the girl a photograph of a grey box bolted above a pump. Mara's hand was in the picture for scale, with a blue smear across her thumb.

"The old recorder at Lowmarsh, Mara's water station," Dez told Eli. "It records the power cuts, how long they last, what happens to the water. Mara says they're replacing it Thursday night."

"Why?" Eli asked.

"Old. Doesn't agree with the nice reports. I want the original readings before they wheel it out and lose them. Let them explain why Naila carried her kid down six dark flights while their report says everything was normal."

The girl was watching him. "Are you stealing it?"

"I'm asking nicely first."

"That's not no."

"You're learning too much. Go wash your hands."

Dez opened the ledger. Twenty a month for the shelf, power and line. Eli would pay it before himself. Beneath it Dez wrote, ANSWER DUE THURSDAY.

"You still owe me an answer about free rehearsals for the neighbors speaking at the hearing."

"I remember."

"Good. Remember whose socket your company's using."

Eli looked at the tower, its fan quiet now, with a small green light above the cracked panel.

On the way home his phone buzzed. Mara had sent a picture of a bun with one bite missing and the message: Saved you the interesting part.

He turned toward the bakery instead of home.

Mara was sitting on a crate behind the shop with two coffees and the remaining bun. She had washed the grease off her face but missed a streak beside one ear. Eli touched it. She caught his finger between her teeth, gently, then let it go.

"You taste expensive. Did somebody finally pay you?"

He told her about the tower, the collection truck and Nessa's shoe. Mara asked if Nessa was hurt; he told her about the ankle and the sandals.

"Dez'll build her a better scooter. He likes people. It's a terrible condition."

She gave him the coffee that had gone less cold. Above the bakery's back wall, laundry moved between balconies. A man practiced a saxophone three floors up, working the same four notes until the fifth finally joined them.

Eli took out the earpiece and put it in his pocket.

"All done?"

Eli shook his head. "Relay's still building. I can stop for the evening without stopping it. That's new."

Mara lifted her cup toward the hidden shop. "Then the little bastard can earn his shelf. I've got you for twenty minutes."

She rested her head against his good shoulder. They listened to the saxophone start again.

"Do you think I'd know," Eli said, "if I wasn't the same person tomorrow?"

Mara raised her head. "God damn it, Eli."

"I was talking to Relay—"

"Then finish with Relay. Or Dez. He'll enjoy telling you you're wrong." She moved her coffee out of his reach. "I asked for twenty minutes with you, not a test of whether I'd love the next one."

He shut his mouth. The saxophone found the fifth note and missed the sixth.

"Sorry."

She settled against him again. "I like the strange things in your head. I don't always want to live in there."

He let the next objection go unsaid. Above the wall, a sock escaped its peg and drifted onto a balcony below. Mara watched it land.

"If the new one folds laundry, though. Keep his number."

Then she bit the bun, made a face at how stale it had gone, and handed him the rest. Behind him, in a shop he could no longer see, his company kept working.