Rowan did not answer the voice.
He pulled the viewer plug with his good hand. The lamp died, leaving Dorian’s hand suspended in Mara’s sight after the image itself had vanished. Rain pressed silver needles through the broken warehouse windows.
“Rowan Saye,” Iris called again. “If you’ve acquired a death wish, bring it indoors. It’s dripping on my stock.”
Mara let out the breath she had kept behind her teeth.
Iris stood in the loading doorway in a man’s oilskin coat, one shoulder dark with rain. A leather satchel hung across her chest. Behind her, the costume warehouse rose in aisles of headless royalty and boxed wars.
Rowan bent over the viewer. “You alone?”
“Only in the spiritual sense.” Iris glanced toward the yard. “Three men came through wardrobe asking after a stolen reel. They had Dorian’s security authority and Nico’s blood on one cuff.”
Mara looked at her.
“Not much blood,” Iris said. “He was still making speeches when they put him in the car. Apparently martyrdom needs rehearsal.”
Rowan lifted the reel from the spindle. His injured hand failed to close around the metal can.
Mara caught it before it struck the table.
His palm had bled through the strip of lining she had tied around it. The cloth was black now, glossy at the centre. He reached for the can again.
“No.”
“Mara.”
“You have one functioning hand. Use it to be offended.”
She set the reel on the table and began winding the loose film by hand. The frames clicked softly over her fingers. Rowan steadied the spool with his wrist, changing the angle each time the torn flesh pulled. He did not hurry her. Outside, men moved between buildings with lamps, but he watched the film edges and warned her whenever a split perforation approached.
“Three inches,” he said.
She slowed.
“There.”
She eased the damaged section past the guide. His thumb rested against the reel’s rim, not touching the image. He had spent years arranging falls that looked fatal and were not. Even hurt, he knew exactly how much pressure a fragile thing could bear.
Mara wound another turn because looking at his hand was easier than looking at him.
Iris shut the loading door. “Tender. Impractical. Move.”
“Where?” Mara asked.
“Old mixing room. The locks predate Dorian’s belief that a key card is a personality.”
She led them between hanging ranks of costumes. Wet wool and camphor thickened the air. A painted cavalry coat brushed Mara’s cheek. Rowan walked behind her, his good hand at the base of the reel can, never quite taking its weight from her.
At the far wall, Iris pulled aside a rack of funeral dresses. A narrow steel door waited behind them.
“Subtle,” Rowan said.
“I inherited the department from men who hid liquor in sound equipment.” Iris fitted a key. “They understood architecture.”
The mixing room had no exterior window. Its walls were padded with cracked cork, and its console had been dismantled until only a row of dead switches remained. Iris set a portable lamp on the floor, opened her satchel, and removed a hand viewer, a splicer, two rolls of tape, and Mara’s time card.
Mara stared at the card.
The final punch was blank.
“Payroll closed the vault clock stations fourteen minutes ago,” Iris said. “Emergency audit. Dorian’s order.”
“He can’t close the day before shift end.”
“He can close a throat before the sentence ends. Machines are easier.”
Mara took the card. Her clock-in mark sat at the top, clean and ordinary. Without the second punch, payroll could call the shift incomplete. A missing day was small. That was what made it dangerous. A hundred and eighty days could be killed one harmless correction at a time.
“The main payroll clock?” she asked.
“Administration. Still live until midnight, unless Pike has improved his timing.” Iris looked at the reel. “You have twenty-seven minutes.”
Rowan leaned against the gutted console. His face had gone pale beneath the rain. “We view first.”
“We copy first,” Mara said.
“With what?” Iris tapped the dead equipment. “The duplication room is under guard. That viewer is all we have, and the reel is wet.”
Mara opened the can.
A dark crescent of moisture had crept between the outer layers. The film smelled sharp and sweet. One section near the leader had whitened where the emulsion had begun to lift.
Iris crouched beside her. “If we run it, we may strip the image.”
“If we wait?”
“It may weld itself into a very expensive bracelet.”
Rowan held out his good hand. “Splice out what we saw. Preserve the rest.”
Mara looked at the reel. The frames already viewed included Dorian’s demand, Alden’s warning about a ledger, June turning toward the camera. Evidence that Dorian had searched for her before the fire.
The unviewed film might contain why.
“No,” she said.
Rowan’s jaw shifted. “That section is known.”
“Known to us. Not provable without it.”
“The rest may be worse.”
“That is not a technical objection.”
“No.” His gaze stayed on her. “It’s a live one.”
She fitted the reel to Iris’s hand viewer.
Iris gave a gravelly sigh. “Fine. Let’s murder history in order.”
She threaded the leader. Mara knelt at the viewer, Rowan close enough that the damp sleeve of his coat touched hers. Iris turned the crank.
The small screen fluttered alive.
Dorian’s pale hand remained on the chair. His voice came from the viewer’s tinny speaker.
“Tell me where the girl is.”
Alden looked older than Mara remembered him from public photographs. Firelight, or lamplight made to resemble it, moved along one side of his face. June stood behind the camera; her sleeve crossed the edge of the frame.
“You drew the papers,” Alden said. “You know why I won’t.”
The crank stopped.
Iris’s hand remained on it.
Mara heard rain travelling through a drainpipe inside the wall.
Rowan said, “Keep going.”
The film jerked forward.
Dorian stepped partly into view. Younger, leaner, his hair wet and his collar open. He did not look like a visitor. A folder was tucked under his arm.
“I drew a service condition,” he said. “Not a disappearance.”
Alden’s laugh was exhausted. “You wrote a lock and object because I used it.”
“The ordinary-name provision was meant to establish competence. It was meant to survive a challenge from Celeste.”
Mara’s fingers tightened around the viewer casing.
Dorian had written it.
Not the codicil, perhaps. Not the share itself. The lock.
One hundred and eighty payroll days under an ordinary employee identity. A condition she had treated as Alden’s private test, cruel and protective in equal measure, had come from the man who could close clocks by telephone.
On the screen, Dorian struck the folder against his palm.
“If she is in danger, the condition is void. Tell me where June took her.”
Alden leaned forward. “You don’t get to name danger after selling it the key.”
The image buckled.
A pale blister raced across Alden’s face.
“Stop,” Iris snapped.
She ceased cranking, but the heat had already caught the softened emulsion. Film clung inside the gate.
Mara reached for the release. Iris knocked her hand aside and opened the housing with a screwdriver. A smell like hot sugar filled the room.
“Lamp off,” Rowan said.
Mara killed it.
Darkness swallowed them. Metal clicked. Iris swore under her breath.
From the warehouse came the bang of a door thrown against a wall.
A man called, “Post-production security. Remain where you are.”
Iris pulled the viewer gate free. In the portable lamp’s low glow, six inches of film hung from it, twisted and bare. Alden’s face had become a translucent smear.
“How much?” Mara asked.
“Enough to make a court call it damaged and a liar call it altered.” Iris cut the ruined strip loose. Her shears closed once, cleanly.
Boots moved through the costumes outside.
Rowan pushed away from the console. “Other exit?”
Iris pointed at the cork wall. “Behind it. Service passage to administration.”
“You first.”
“I own the key.”
“You also own two usable hands.”
She looked at his bandage, then at Mara. “The pair of you are a badly matched cut. One rushes every entrance, the other refuses to leave the scene.”
A fist struck the steel door.
Mara rewound the surviving film. The wet layers resisted. Rowan took the can from beneath her hands, bracing it against his ribs while she guided the reel inside.
“Leave the viewer,” he said.
“It has residue in the gate.”
Another blow bowed the door inward.
Evidence. Alden’s image, softened into a stain. Dorian’s voice might remain in the soundtrack strip. She reached for it.
Rowan caught her wrist.
“Not worth your fingers.”
His grip was careful despite the urgency, his thumb placed where it would not bruise. That precision again. Not gentleness performed for gratitude. Work he knew how to do.
Mara looked once at the warped strip.
Then Iris overturned the portable lamp onto it.
Flame travelled blue along the emulsion.
“What are you doing?” Mara hissed.
“Giving them the theft they came to find.” Iris kicked the viewer beneath the console. “Go.”
She tore the cork panel aside. A black passage opened beyond it.
The steel door latch split as Mara climbed through. Rowan followed, pulling the panel into place. Iris remained on the other side.
Mara turned back. “Iris.”
“Clock out,” Iris said. “I’ll give them an old woman, a burnt reel, and an edit too ugly to believe.”
The panel closed between them.
The passage was narrow enough that Mara’s shoulders brushed both walls. Rowan moved behind her, breathing through his teeth. She wanted to ask whether his hand had opened again. Instead she counted turns, doors, the changing pitch of footsteps overhead.
At the end, a ladder rose to a hatch.
Mara pushed into the administration basement. The payroll clock stood beside the stairs, its brass face bright under a single bulb.
Five minutes to midnight.
She slid her card into the slot.
The mechanism hummed but did not punch.
Rowan came up beside her. Blood ran from his cuff and tapped the concrete.
Mara tried again.
The clock returned the card with a red line printed across the blank space.
EMPLOYEE STATUS SUSPENDED.
Above them, the administration doors unlocked one after another, travelling down the corridor in a measured sequence.
Rowan took the card from her and read it. Then he looked toward the stairs.
Mara watched the minute hand climb.
Dorian had not needed to find the girl.
He had only needed to find her clock.