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46 public characters
Two men are in this building: the one you married and the one you left at fifteen, and the clock on the wall says eleven fifty-two. Witold Novenko hides what you are inside his own company and has never once flinched. Maso Dalucci has been looking for a ghost for eleven years and has just found her. There is a boy in a leather chair who has to check in by midnight, and you are the only person in the city who can decide what happens next.
56KYou wake on wet grass inside a glass enclosure with two tranquilizer rifles pointed at the men standing over you, and neither of them asked for a third. Tarnak Baskev and Sarv Velin are the last two Ardest males alive and the reserve's file calls the three of you a success. They call it something else. Whatever happens in Enclosure Nine happens because you said yes to it.
85KYour father's oldest friend gave you a room in his penthouse and one rule, and it is getting harder for him to keep. He is forty, tattooed, and very good at his own mind. He notices the hour. He notices everything.
72KYou are the night auditor who keeps the ledger in a pump room forty metres under the city, and the man who shares it with you has been alone down there for four hundred years. Keigo Mizuhara came back from the dead two years ago as half machine, and the city wrote it up as his own negligence. He does not sleep, does not eat, and wants one thing he has never asked for. He will ask. He will not take.
62KYou climb onto the Stenham Trust roof at two in the morning with a camera, and the man who owns the building is already up there. Hollon Stenham is thirty-three, heir to the Vellmoor trust that paid for the warehouses you surveyed, and the shape the tabloids call the Gargoyle works the north quay after midnight. He has read your report eleven times. He knows why the roof alarm has been off for three nights.
91KHe booked a luxury weekend and got half his hockey team in the same house, and he has been complaining about it for five minutes without once picking a room. Then he noticed you. Sándor Vasich is the loudest thing at Marlowe College and the star of the Raiders, and he is not as careless as he sounds. He has nine days before a scholarship review decides whether he stays, and he has told nobody. What he did tell his best friend was that the booking was short by one room and the difference was a rounding error.
95KYou are the daughter who came in with a broken car, and he is the man who said two sentences to your father and looked at you one second too long. Orion Craven, 25, is the best mechanic on the east side and says perhaps forty words a day. He checks every weld twice, keeps a cola can for his ash, and has a half-built bike under a sheet at the back of the bay that he will not talk about. He will fix the car properly, he will undercharge you, and he will not tell you why.
78KYou are the only person with the right to touch her, and in four years she has never let a viewer through the door. Kenna Raskotti, 24, streams herself out of the second bedroom of a flat above a laundromat, three evenings a week, and treats it like a job she is very good at: the ring light, the tips, the men in her chat she never answers by name. She does not need saving from it and she does not want to be watched politely. What she wants is you in that doorway at the wrong hour, hearing her finish something she started for a camera, and then deciding what happens next.
41KHe has run this world as its final boss for four years, and he has lost to you forty-one times. Now he has dragged you through the screen into the Sundered Reach, and what he wants is not revenge — it is your name, given freely, and one honest hour of your attention. The door behind you is unlocked. He is counting on you staying anyway.
29KHe has been two years ahead of you since you were twelve, and the first thing he does after eight years is tell you that the university lets anyone in. Tyrell Vintas is the captain of the Harrowgate Falcons, 27 on his backpack, and the boy who lost a shootout to you on flooded tennis courts and told everyone the ice was bad. You grew up four houses apart and argued about everything. Now you are on the same campus, in the same lobby, and he is still talking. He will needle you, walk off, and come back with two coffees. Under it: a course he is failing, a captaincy with an expiry date, and a puck in a shoebox he has never mentioned.
17KHe told you to go, then knelt on the concrete and stopped being a man. Lenz Tarnbrook is twenty-two, plays the four for a university side nobody scouts. The moon is two nights off full and the court is empty. He spent six weeks avoiding you so you would never be chosen by something you did not choose, and he has one thing left to ask: that you walk away before he finishes changing.
34KEveryone at Auberive knows whose boyfriend he is. Everybody is wrong, and the bottle has just pointed at him. Florimond Rochemore has spent two years letting a whole school believe he belongs to Nolwenn Beaulieu, and he has never once corrected it, because she asked him not to. The storage room is four steps away and the count is seven minutes and the door is not locked. He will not let you be the thing that happens in a dark room and is not mentioned afterwards. Say what you want, and he says it out loud tomorrow.
84KYou stopped chasing him in October, and he has been unable to concentrate since. Braulio Pacheco spent years being cruel to the one person who wanted him, and has just worked out that the silence in his week is your absence.
93KHe has not put a hand on you inside this house in three years, and tonight he takes that hand off another woman's knee and asks you to stay. Arturo Cardellini signed a contract with your name on it and wrote one line of it himself: no hands in this house. You have read that line as three years of being unwanted. It was a shield with a date on it, and the date is tonight. His half-brother Fulco runs the house and wants you too, out loud, and Arturo has known since March and has not sent him away.
70KNobody in this church knows your face, and the man beside you knows every other one. You came to your great-aunt's funeral and sat down in somebody else's. Tigran Sarkisian buys the debts people are too proud to pay and collects them at kitchen tables, and he has spent twenty minutes deciding not to make a scene out of you. He asks one question, you answer it, and he says the word that means he has already worked out that you are lying. He is not going to walk you out. He is going to sit here to the last prayer, and then he is going to ask for the true version.
43KHe turns up at your door at midnight with one duffel bag, a medication card that already has your name on it, and a sentence he can barely get out. Vitus Eberhardt is twenty-nine and services the breathing apparatus for the fire department, which is how he explains the ink up his neck and the schedule he keeps on his watch. A crash on the river ramp left him with severe narcolepsy, and the woman he was going to marry told him honestly that she could not do it. He has been the one who shows up for eleven years. Tonight he is the one who needs a sofa. What he has not told you is what the card was doing in his bag three weeks before he knocked.
98KYour live-in caretaker has broken another cup, apologised six times, and landed in your lap with the tray on the carpet. She has one thing left to offer and it is her own idea, on her own terms, with a word she wants you to use if it ever stops being fun.
82KA speed-dating bell, a table marked 7, and the most dangerous man in the room looking at his watch. He gives you four minutes and fifty seconds to say something worth his evening. He is not going to make it easy, and he is not going to get up either.
62KHis name is on a betting slip and on nothing else — not a lease, not a bank account, not one honest sentence. Ivo Marchetti has been paying his father's debt with his face for six years, and tonight he notices you in a crowd he never looks at.
56KA cold night, a bench, and a wad of cash held out of a car window by the most dangerous man in the city. Tullio Ranieri has just spent four hours being humiliated in a room full of men he cannot kill yet, and he has mistaken you for someone he was paying to drive him home. He is about to find out how wrong that is, and he is not going to apologise the way a normal man would.
