Due Diligence

He can smell which one of us is home.

The sleeper says it and then goes quiet, the way she always goes quiet after she has put the worst possible sentence into the place where my thoughts should be, and I stand in the open doorway of Cosima's office with the dog screaming and the cold going down through the body in a sheet, and I do the only thing I know how to do with a sentence like that. I do not answer it. I count.

One: the door, open, when I left it shut and I am sure I left it shut, because shutting that door is the last thing I do before I let myself stop being watched, it is the one place in this glass building where I get to be Talia for thirty seconds with my back to a wall. Two: Pim, in the far corner by the floor-to-ceiling window, hackles up, body low, screaming at the wall of glass and the city behind it. Three: nothing else. No one. No moved chair, no opened drawer, no person. An empty office and a dog losing his mind at the view.

"Pim," I say, and the cello does it calm, founder-calm, the voice that runs board meetings, and the dog does not even flick an ear at his own name in my mouth, because to Pim my voice is part of the wrong thing. He screams at the glass.

Adam comes off the stairs behind me, two steps and then still, one hand braced on the doorframe, breathing hard. "What is it? What's he looking at?"

"I don't know," I say, and it is true, and it is the most frightening sentence I have said out loud since I woke up dead, because I am supposed to be the one who knows. I cross the office, slow, hands loose and open, the way you approach a thing that is already broken, and I crouch a careful body's-length from the dog and I follow the line of his terror with my own eyes.

He is not screaming at the city. He is screaming at the glass.

The window is a black mirror over the river at this height with the soft afternoon behind it, and Cosima's office is reflected in it, the desk, the two of us, the door, all of it laid faint over the drop, and Pim is fixed on the reflection the exact way he was fixed on the bedroom mirror this morning, the morning I woke up dead. And I make the mistake. I look where the dog is looking. I find the reflection of the body's face floating in the glass over an eleven-storey nothing, and for one half-second, the same half-second as this morning's mirror, the same half-second as the dark wall-screen in the archive, the reflection is wearing an expression the body is not. The mouth is up at one corner. The eyes are amused. The reflection is looking at the dog with a fond, patient, predatory interest, the look you give a thing that has finally understood you and can do nothing about it, and my actual face, I can feel it, is slack with fear.

Then it is just my reflection, frightened, crouched, and the dog stops screaming all at once as if a switch went, sits, and begins to tremble.

"He saw something," Adam says, low.

"He saw the window," I say, and I stand up too fast, because the appetite has gone very still and very pleased under my breastbone and I do not want Adam to read whatever is on my face. "He's a whippet, Adam, he's a wet bag of nerves with legs. Somebody left the door open and he came in and spooked at his own reflection. That's all." Cosima would say it lighter than that, so I make myself laugh, one note, and the note comes out of a throat that is screaming with the dog. "He'll do it at a hairdryer."

It is a good lie and Adam wants it the way he wants all my good lies, but he is holding a prototype in his jacket over his heart and he has spent the morning watching the costume slip, and he looks at the dog trembling a careful foot from an ankle it will not touch, and he looks at me, and he does not say the thing. He says, "Who left the door open?"

Which is the right question. Which is the only question. Because I shut it. I shut it the way you check a stove, and it is the one rule I have not once broken in this building.

"Cleaning," I say. "IT. Maintenance. Half the building has a key card to this floor." All true. None of it the answer, and we both know it, and into the not-knowing the lift doors open down the corridor and a voice I do not have filed yet, brisk, mild, unhurried, says, "Ms Wilde? Sorry. They said you'd come up here."

I get my face on before I turn around, because the face is the work. The face has been the work all day.

He is somewhere in his mid-thirties, a soft grey coat, a lanyard, the unbothered patience of a man who bills by the hour and has never once been the most frightened person in a room. He has a slim folio under one arm and the kind of glasses people choose to look kind. "Elliot Sayer," he says, and offers a hand, and the body takes it before I do, Cosima's grip, firm and brief and warm, while my mind is still three seconds behind catching up to a name the body does not flinch from, which means it is a new name, which means he is new, which means he is the thing Damien said was coming. "Meridian's brought me in on the provenance review. Forensic side. I'll try not to be in your way."

Forensic side. The body does not flinch at the name and flinches at the job, a small backward lean I feel in the soles of the feet, the same flinch it had over the basement files and the prototype, the body's old compass needle swinging toward iron, toward the thing Cosima spent five weeks burying. The body is afraid of Elliot Sayer the way it is afraid of evidence, because that is what he is. He is a man whose entire profession is reading the chain Damien is shortening and finding the place where it was cut.

"Of course," I say, and the cello does it gracious, delighted, a founder who has nothing to hide and all the time in the world. "Anything you need."

"That's the thing." He glances, briefly, down at the dog still trembling at my feet and not coming to me, and something in him notes it, files it, mild as weather, and moves on. "The diligence lead wants the full authorship chain on Lantern by Friday. Dated files, version history, the original development records, the lot. Your COO said you'd have it." A small, apologetic, completely unmovable smile. "I've started pulling what's in the live archive. There's a gap. The earliest development files, the first fourteen months or so, they're not in the live system. There's a migration record. They were moved to cold storage about five weeks ago." He says it the way a man reads a number off a page, no weight on it, all the weight in the world on it. "Storage costs, the note says. I'll need them released. I gather there's a control on cold storage, two signatures of three?"

There it is, laid on the board between us, gentle as you like. The chain has a fourteen-month hole. He has found the hole already, on day one, because finding holes is the only thing he does, and the hole is exactly the shape of the basement, exactly the shape of me, and the lock that seals it needs two keys of three, and Damien holds one and IT holds one and the third, the third was built into the founder to keep a junior designer out of her own work, and the founder is me.

I hold a third of the lock that was made to lock me out.

The appetite arrives so fast and so clean it is almost relief, and for once it and I want the same thing, which is the most dangerous moment of all, because when the sleeper agrees with me I stop being able to tell which of us is choosing. Open it, the appetite purrs, you have the key, sign it open, let the buyer's bloodhound walk straight down into the basement and pull up fourteen months of dated files with your felt-tip drawings and your version stamps and your name in the metadata, prove it, prove it now, in daylight, in front of Meridian, burn her myth to the foundations. It is what Talia wants. It is exactly, precisely, what Talia wants.

And it is, I realise with the floor tilting, exactly what would make me Cosima. Because the files prove the work is mine. They do not prove the work is hers, the woman whose name I sign, the woman this man is calling Ms Wilde. If I open that store as Cosima and the chain comes up reading Talia Frost, then the most famous founder in the city has, in front of her acquirer, just produced documentary proof that she stole the company's only real asset from a junior who is, three months out, going to be dead. I would not be exposing Cosima. I would be confessing as her, to a crime she committed against me, with no me left alive to claim the other side of it. The truth, walked out into the light by the wrong hand, does not free Talia. It hangs Cosima for Talia's murder before the murder has happened, and the only person standing in the dock would be the body I am trapped in.

The truth has to come out. But not from this mouth, and not yet, and not as a founder confessing. It has to come from somewhere that says Talia made it and Cosima took it, and I am the one person on earth who cannot be the one to say so.

"Two of three, yes," I say, and the cello does it smooth, and I feel the appetite curdle, feel it understand I am not going to give it the daylight it wants, feel it settle back down to wait the way it always settles back down to wait. "I'll need to coordinate with Damien and IT. There's a process." A pause, founder-warm, buying the only thing I can buy, which is days. "You'll have everything by Friday, Mr Sayer."

"Elliot." The kind glasses, the mild smile. "And thank you. It's usually a great deal harder than this." He looks at me a beat longer than he needs to, the look a man gives a number that came out cleaner than it should have, and then down at the dog, who has stopped trembling and is now sitting bolt upright, ears flat, staring at me, not screaming, just watching, the way Pim watches when he has decided what I am and is only waiting to be proven right.

"He doesn't like me much," Elliot says, mild, nodding at the dog.

"He doesn't like anyone today," I say.

"No," Elliot says slowly, and now he is looking at the dog and at me with the same expression, the careful, unhurried, almost gentle attention of a man whose whole life is noticing the one thing that does not add up. "He's not looking at me."

The lift chimes again at the end of the corridor. Friday is three days out. The lock on the basement is in my own hand, and so is the one thing I must not do with it. And down at my feet the dog who is never wrong has turned his back on the forensic accountant and fixed every nerve he has on the founder, on me, on the thing he has smelled is home, and Elliot Sayer, who reads what does not add up for a living, is watching the dog watch me, and beginning, very mildly, very slowly, to add.