She showered fast, dried her hair enough that it would not drip down her collar, and pulled it back tight. Grey T-shirt, the soft one with the collar that had gone slightly out of shape. Dark jeans. The white leather sneakers she had cleaned the night before with a toothbrush at the kitchen sink, which she would have been embarrassed for anyone to know. Then the jacket, off its hook by the door. It was black, heavy, worn pale at the elbows and along the zip, and it had been hers for eleven years. It still smelled a little of the garage where she and her father had spent two winters rebuilding the bike, of oil and cold and the paraffin heater he refused to replace. She zipped it halfway, looked once in the hall mirror, and did not change anything.
In the elevator down she checked the tyre pressure on her phone's notes app, where she kept a log, and then laughed at herself for doing it.
The garage under her building was dim and smelled of wet concrete. The bike was where she had left it, against the far wall, under a cover that had a rip in one corner she kept meaning to patch. She pulled the cover off and folded it into the pannier. The café racer was black and low and a little absurd, older than she was, with a tank she had stripped and painted three times before she got it right and a seat her father had stitched himself out of an old leather sofa he found in a skip. People at traffic lights asked her about it more than she would have liked. She knelt and checked the rear tyre with the gauge she kept in her jacket pocket. It was fine. She took a photo of the gauge reading and sent it to her father without comment.
The ride across the city took twenty-six minutes. The rain had settled into the fine, persistent kind that did not seem to fall so much as hang in the air and wait for you to move through it. She went down the long avenue past the shuttered market, the tyres hissing on the wet tarmac, the visor misting at the edges each time she stopped. At the lights by the river a delivery driver in a van pulled level with her and gave the bike a long look, then gave her a longer one, and she knew without turning her head the exact expression on his face. She had seen it all her life. Surprise first, and then the small recalculation, and then sometimes a grin and sometimes something else. The lights changed and she left him behind.
The city got taller as she went. Old brick warehouses turned into converted lofts with bike racks outside, and the lofts gave way to glass. Calder Point was twenty-two floors of it, blue-grey in this light, the top few storeys lost in low cloud. She had come here twice before, both times in the evening, both times through the front doors with a visitor sticker on her chest. This morning she followed the ramp down the side of the building into the car park, past a barrier arm that lifted for her because Priya had registered the plate on Friday, and down to the second level, where a sign said ARDENT RESERVED in faded yellow paint and half the bays were empty.
She parked in the corner by a pillar, killed the engine, and sat for a moment with the helmet still on, listening to the engine tick as it cooled. The garage was very quiet. Somewhere a pipe dripped. She took the helmet off, ran a hand over her hair to check it was still where she had put it, and locked the helmet to the bike with the cable lock. She was not going to carry it around all morning like a fishbowl.
Priya Raman was waiting at the steel door marked STAIRS / LOBBY, holding a lanyard in one hand and her phone in the other, and she looked up with the slightly wild brightness of a person who had been awake since five and had already had one bad conversation. She was twenty-nine, Nadia knew from the onboarding paperwork, and she had been the one who answered every email over the last six weeks within the hour, including one Nadia had sent at two in the morning.
"Ms. Kerr. Hi. Good morning. You found it."
"Nadia," Nadia said. "Please. And it's a car park, I didn't need a sherpa."
Priya laughed, a little too quickly, and then looked at the bike over Nadia's shoulder and forgot whatever she had been about to say. "Oh. Wow. Is that yours?"
"It is."
"Gerald said you rode. I thought he meant, like." She made a vague gesture. "A scooter."
"He's never seen it. He's going to be disappointed."
"I don't think so." Priya held up the lanyard. "Okay. So. I have good news and bad news."
"Bad news first."
Priya winced and handed her a white plastic card. It was a proper executive badge, the good thick kind with the Ardent logo embossed in silver in the corner and a hologram strip down one side. Her photo was on it, the one she'd sent in for the onboarding file, slightly overexposed. Under the photo, in neat black capitals, it said NADIA KERRR. CHIEF OPERATING OFFICER.
Nadia looked at it for a while.
"Three R's," she said.
"I know."
"That's a lot of R's."
"I know. I'm so sorry. I checked the form, I promise I checked the form, it was right on the form. The building's print office did it on Friday afternoon and nobody looked at it until I opened the envelope this morning." Priya's ears had gone pink. "I emailed them at six."
"It sounds like a pirate," Nadia said. "Nadia Kerrr." She rolled it out, low and growling. Priya made a noise somewhere between a laugh and a cough. "Honestly, I'm tempted to keep it."
"Please don't. Celia would actually die."
"Celia's the HR director."
"Celia's my boss. She's very nice. She's very particular about spelling." Priya took the misprinted badge back, carefully, as if it might cause more damage, and slipped it into her coat pocket. "So that's the bad news. The good news is they're reprinting it right now, and the building management office said it would be ready by quarter to nine. And in the meantime." She held out the lanyard.
It was plain navy, the cheap woven kind, and on the end of it hung a white card with no photo and no logo and no name, just two words printed in black in the middle: TEMP — ARDENT. It had a slightly worn edge, like it had been in and out of a drawer for years.
"It's for contractors, usually," Priya said. "Or when someone forgets theirs. It should get you through the gates. I had security turn it on this morning." She hesitated. "I think they turned it on."
"You think."
"I asked them to turn it on."
Nadia put the lanyard over her head. The card settled against her chest, about where the zip of the jacket stopped. It weighed almost nothing. She looked down at it, the blank white face of it, and thought that it was probably the most honest badge she would ever wear. TEMP. Everyone was, if you waited long enough.