Empire of Gilded Shadows

Chapter 5

POV: Zara Ellis

She found the rooftop by accident on her third day.

She had been looking for the bathroom and taken a wrong turn at the east end of the floor, a habit, apparently, wrong turns in this building and found instead a grey metal door with a push bar and a small sign that said Roof Access, Authorised Personnel Only. She had pushed it anyway because the sign said authorised personnel and she had a building access card now, which she considered a reasonable interpretation of the term.

The rooftop was nothing special. A flat expanse of concrete and HVAC units and the particular gravel that covered rooftops in New York the way snow covered other things, consistently, indifferently, regardless of what was underneath. There was a low wall around the perimeter and beyond it the city, enormous in every direction, the way New York was always enormous when you got above it, not beautiful exactly, or not only beautiful, more like something that had stopped caring whether you found it beautiful and was simply, massively, itself.

She ate her lunch sitting on the concrete step beside the door. Twelve minutes. Then she went back inside.

She came back the next day. And the day after.

By the end of the first week it was hers in the way that unremarkable things become yours when you're the only one who uses them. Nobody else came up here. She checked, subtly no footprints in the gravel except her own neat line from door to step, no signs of previous occupation. The roof belonged to the building and the building belonged to Damien Kroft and Damien Kroft apparently had no interest in it, which meant for forty minutes every weekday at noon it belonged to Zara Ellis.

She ate her lunch. She made her calls. She looked at the city.

On Thursday of her second week she called her mother.

Lena picked up on the third ring, which meant she had been doing something, reading, or talking to the nurse with the opinions about daytime television, or sitting in the hospital garden if the weather allowed. She was always doing something. This was one of the things Zara held onto most carefully about her mother: that illness had not made her passive. It had simply rearranged her activities into a smaller radius.

"There she is," Lena said.

"Here I am." Zara shifted on the concrete step, pulling her coat closer. February had not yet decided to become March. "How are you feeling?"

"Excellent. They've started me on the new medication. My hands tingle slightly."

"How slightly?"

"Like a mild electrical charge. Very invigorating, honestly."

"Mum."

"I'm telling the doctor on Friday. Don't give me that voice." A pause, warm, brief. "How's the job?"

"Good," Zara said. And then, because Lena had a way of waiting that made it very difficult to stop at good: "Better than I expected."

"Better how?"

She thought about this. Better was a complicated word when the thing you were comparing it to was a composite of exhaustion and financial calculation and the specific grinding worry of someone whose contingency plans had contingency plans. Better here meant something more precise than improved, it meant sufficient in ways I didn't anticipate. It meant she was using her mind in a room where her mind was actually required, which was different from the diner and the dry cleaner's and the courier work in the way that warm was different from not-cold.

"The work is real," she said. "There's a lot of it and it matters and they expect you to be capable."

"And are you?"

"Obviously."

She heard her mother smile, not saw, heard. Lena's smile had a sound to it, a small adjustment in her breath, a quality in the silence that followed. She had learned to read it over years of phone calls, had catalogued it the way you catalogued anything you couldn't afford to miss.

"What about the glacier?" Lena said.

"The..."

"The glacier with the briefcase. That's what you called him."

She had said that the first day. She had not expected it to be retained and deployed. She looked at the city below, at the specific geometry of midtown from above, and considered how to answer. "He's..." She stopped. "He reads things," she said finally.

"Most people do."

"Not like this. He reads the way you'd read a contract. Everything. He doesn't miss things."

"Does that bother you?"

"No," she said. And found, saying it, that it was true. Most people's attention was an imposition. His felt like, she reached for the word and couldn't quite find it. "It's just different," she said.

Lena made the sound she made when she was filing something away. "Has he been unkind?"

"No."

"Has he been kind?"

Zara thought about the coffee. The coffee that had appeared on her desk on the first morning, taken exactly as she took it, without explanation or announcement. She had not mentioned the coffee to Lena. She had not mentioned the coffee to anyone, had turned it over quietly in her mind for two days, examining it from different angles the way you examined something you didn't yet have a category for.

"He's professional," she said.

"That's not what I asked."

"I know."

A pause. Not uncomfortable, Lena's pauses never were. They had the quality of someone setting down something heavy and giving you space to pick it up yourself.

"How are your hands?" Zara said. "The tingling, is it both or just one?"

She heard the smile again, softer this time, the one that meant I see what you're doing and I'll allow it. "Both," Lena said. "More the left. I've decided it means the medication is working very hard and I appreciate its dedication."

"That is medically dubious."

"I'm allowed to have my interpretations. I'm the one with the tingling hands."

They talked for twenty minutes. Lena described the hospital garden, the early crocuses, which had appeared prematurely and were now facing the consequences of February's opinion of optimism. She described the nurse, Adaeze, who had started last week, who had strong opinions not only about daytime television but about the correct way to make rice, which was a subject Lena also had strong opinions about, resulting in an ongoing and apparently enjoyable debate. She described a book she was reading, a history of a woman she'd never heard of who had done something remarkable in a century that hadn't been designed for remarkable women, and wasn't that always the way.

Zara listened to all of it. She listened the way she always listened to her mother, completely, storing it, because Lena's voice was something she had learned not to take for granted the way you learned not to take for granted anything that could be taken.

She did not say: I traced the insurance provider five layers deep and found a Kroft subsidiary at the end.

She had discovered this yesterday. Had been reviewing her benefits documentation, a habit, she always reviewed documents in full and had followed the provider chain out of professional curiosity and then out of something less comfortable than curiosity when the chain kept going, parent company to parent company to parent company, until she arrived at a name she recognised. She had read it twice. She had read it a third time. She had sat at her desk for a moment that was longer than she could account for and then she had closed the document and gone back to work.

She had not stopped thinking about it since.

"I should go," Zara said. "I have twelve minutes left."

"Twelve? You're very precise."

"The roof is cold and I have a 1pm."

"You're eating on a roof?"

"It's the best lunch spot in the building. Nobody else uses it."

"The best spots always have nobody in them," Lena said, with the satisfaction of someone confirming a theory. "All right. Call me on the weekend."

"I will."

"And Zara..." The particular pause that preceded advice. "Don't let the big building make you small."

"I know, Mum."

"I mean it. You're allowed to take up space. Even in rooms that weren't built for you."

"I know."

"Good." A breath. "Go finish your lunch. I love you."

"Love you too."

She hung up and sat for a moment with the phone in her lap and the city below and her mother's voice still in her ear, the warmth of it, the particular steadiness, the way Lena said I love you like it was simply a fact she was reporting, accurate and unremarkable and therefore more solid than if she had made an occasion of it.

She finished her sandwich. She put her phone in her pocket.

She thought about the insurance documentation. She thought about five parent companies and a name at the end of the chain and the timing of it, six months ago, before she'd worked here, before she'd walked off the wrong elevator, before any of this had been anything. She thought about an upgrade to her mother's hospital floor that had happened quietly and completely without the involvement of Zara Ellis and had improved the quality of Lena's care in three specific ways she could identify.

She thought about what it meant when someone did something like that and didn't tell you.

She stood up from the concrete step and brushed off her coat and looked at the city one more time, its enormity, its indifference, its willingness to contain any number of things without comment.

She went back inside.

She walked across the floor to her desk. She sat down. She opened her computer. Through the glass wall of his office she could see him at his desk, reading something, his attention complete, his hand moving occasionally to make a note. He did not look up.

She opened the document she'd been working on before lunch. She found her place. She went back to work.

She said nothing.

She understood, with the particular clarity of someone who had spent years reading the difference between what people did and what they said, that some things were not for confronting. They were for holding quietly, for examining in private, for filing under the specific category of who someone actually is when they think they're not being seen.

She filed it.

She looked at him once through the glass, just once, briefly, the way you glance at something you're trying not to look at and then she looked at her screen.

She worked.

The afternoon passed. The city turned slowly in the February light. Outside, somewhere across the city, her mother was sitting in the hospital garden with crocuses that had arrived too early and a nurse named Adaeze who had opinions about rice, and the tingling in her left hand was either a side effect or the medication working very hard and she had decided it was the latter because she was Lena Ellis and that was how she moved through things.

Zara typed and made calls and drafted and filed and did the work the day required.

She did not look through the glass again.

But she knew, with a certainty that had nothing to do with evidence and everything to do with the specific way she understood people, that she was already paying very close attention to who was on the other side of it.