Turning Naomi

Pim is screaming at the bed, and the only thing in the bed is me, and I do the one thing I have left, which is to make myself small and quiet and ordinary, the way you do for an animal, and I say his name in my own voice. Not the cello. The other one. The one I keep in my chest and never spend, because there is no one alive to hear it.

"Pim," I say. "Pim. It's all right."

It is not, and he knows it is not. But the sound stops him. He goes from screaming to a low wire-thin keen, and then he stops that too, and he stands rigid in the doorway with his ribs going like a small machine, and he looks at me, at the bed, at the held-up hands I have not yet put down because I am still afraid that if I lower them they will keep moving, and he does not come closer and he does not run. He stays exactly where the smell of the thing under the surface fades into the smell of the thing on top of it, and he waits there, on the line, and I understand, lying very still in the orange dark, that the dog is the only honest instrument in this apartment, and that what he is telling me is that the answer is not one or the other. The answer is both. There are two of us in here, and one of us has just come closer to the surface than she has ever yet come, and he can still smell where she went.

I lower my hands. They behave. I count the ceiling, because I have to count something. One crack in the plaster the cleaners have never seen, because the rich do not look up. One smoke alarm with a dead battery she never changed. One whippet on the threshold who will not lie down. And no third thing, again, no comforting third, because the body answers the count before I can finish it, soft, fond, from under the breastbone, you can stop counting, Talia, I am not going anywhere, and I lie there until the window goes from orange to grey and I do not sleep again, because sleep is the door I just learned she comes through.

In the morning I am Cosima before I am awake. That is the new thing, and it is the worst of all the new things, worse than the hands, worse than the espresso, because by the time I notice my own mind I have already showered and dressed in the founder's armour and pinned the founder's hair and the body has done it on muscle and I have signed nothing, decided nothing, I have simply been driven, and I catch up with myself in the lift with a travel cup of the espresso I hate already half drunk in my hand. The dog watches me go from the bedroom doorway. He has not eaten. He will not eat while I am in the room.

I make myself say it, in my head, in the keening of the lift cables: I have weeks. The murder is in front of me and it has weeks in it and they are mine to spend, and I am not going to spend them being driven. I am going to spend them turning the room against her, person by person, key by key, until on the autumn night when the hand reaches for the phone there is no one left who will come when it calls and no quiet room to call them to. I have set a crew loose on the studio. That was the room. Today I take a person.

The person is Naomi Adler.

I know her the way I know all of them, sideways, from years of being furniture in rooms where the loud people decided things. Naomi chairs the board the way a good sub-editor reads a sentence: she is the one who has actually read the documents, who is bored by everyone who hasn't, who wants the Meridian deal closed not out of greed but because she is sixty-one and tired and would like the company to be someone else's problem before it eats another person. She is the swing piece. Damien has her vote because she thinks the founder is a liability who films documentaries instead of running a company. If I can move her, I move the board. If I move the board, the deal stops being Damien's clean exit and starts being mine to steer. And a deal that is mine to steer is a deal in which the buried Lantern files are not a thing to hide before Friday but a thing to release on a stage I build.

So the plan, walking into the eleventh floor with the founder's hair pinned and the founder's drink in my hand, is small and specific and the only kind that survives contact: fifteen private minutes with Naomi Adler today, and in them one true thing she did not know, so that the next time Damien tells her I am a liability she has a reason to wonder if he is the one who's lying.

Whether she lets me in the door at all is another matter. Naomi does not take meetings she did not schedule. Naomi schedules her boredom in advance.

Lacey is at her desk outside the office, and she has eaten, I can tell, there is a banana skin folded into a neat brown origami in the bin, and the relief of that is so disproportionate that I have to look at the window for a second to swallow it, and the window does the thing, the half-second wrong smile in the founder's reflection that is not the expression on my face, and I look away from it the way you take your tongue off a hot tooth.

"Naomi's in," Lacey says, low, because she has learned to read my weather now and she is good at it, better than anyone in the building, the quiet competent girl Cosima made cry. "She came up early. She's in the small room with the door shut and she told me to keep everyone off her, which means she's reading the diligence pack. Which means," and Lacey drops her voice another notch, "Damien sent it to her overnight. The provenance pack. The one that's due Friday. He sent her his version before you'd seen it."

The body goes very still around that sentence, and for once the stillness is mine and the sleeper's at the same time, a rare alignment, both of us listening. Damien has sent the chair his version of the Lantern story. The version with the fourteen-month hole in it, the version that ends short of the basement, the version where the work begins the day the founder touched it and there is nothing before. He has gone over my head to the one person whose vote decides everything, with the lie, while I slept and dreamed her dream.

Three things, edged so I do not go down. One: he is faster than I thought, and he is not waiting for Friday. Two: Naomi is, right now, behind that door, reading a story about Lantern that is false, and she does not know it is false, and the one living person who can tell her how it is false is the founder who supposedly told it. Three: I cannot walk in there and say it is false. Cosima cannot. Because the only way the founder knows the pack is wrong is if the founder knows what is in the hole, and the only way the founder knows what is in the hole is if the founder was in the basement, which the founder never was, which only the dead junior was.

I have the truth and I cannot spend it as me, because there is no me to spend it as. I am wearing the only mouth that knows, and it is the wrong mouth, and if I open it the truth comes out as a confession.

"Get me in," I tell Lacey, and the cello does it, even and bored and founder-sure, while underneath I am nothing but a woman watching a door. "Tell her I've read it too and I have one correction she'll want before it leaves the building."

Lacey looks at me. She does not say what we are both thinking, which is that I have not read it, that it went to Naomi and not to me, that I am about to walk into the chair's locked room with a correction to a document I have never seen. She just nods, and stands, and smooths her skirt, and goes and knocks, and I hear the murmur, and I count the carpet between me and the door while I wait, six panels, and Lacey comes back and holds the door and says, "Fifteen minutes," and I go in, and Naomi Adler looks up from a printout with the founder's name on every page and says, without any warmth at all, the way you greet weather, "Cosima. Damien tells me you've stopped being able to remember your own story. So. Correct me."

And on the desk in front of her, turned to face me like a place setting, is page one of the provenance pack, and at the bottom of it, where a careful forensic hand has flagged the gap in the chain, is a printed line I read upside down in a single drop of the stomach, a line in Elliot Sayer's neat reviewer's annotation, that says: earliest verifiable authorship artefact, one physical prototype, currently undisclosed, present in this building Tuesday, last seen in the possession of A. Cole.

She has read it. She is watching my face to see if I knew. And I cannot tell which is worse, that Elliot has found the one piece of proof I told Adam to hide, or that the body, the founder, the sleeper, just felt the cold clean want move under my breastbone like a hand turning over, the same want from the dream, oh, there it is, the part you pull, and for one whole second, looking at Adam's name printed on the chair's desk, I wanted to pull it.