As she debated it in her mind she realized she was going to do it and the longer she left it the harder it would be.

“Would you like to hang your jacket up?” she said to Carter. “You must be warm.”

“Oh,” Carter said. “I wasn’t going to stay long—”

“Have you got something to get back for?”

“Not exactly, but—”

Iona stood. “Come on. Give me your jacket and we’ll have a chat. I’m thinking of writing a paper on planning regulations, maybe you could help.”

“Alright,” said Carter after an uncertain pause.

Iona tried to swallow down the tension in her throat.

Carter leaned forward and removed his jacket.

Iona walked swiftly around to the back of Carter’s chair, gripped his shirt with both hands, and lifted it to reveal what lay underneath. There she saw exactly what the diagrams had depicted—a hatch in Carter’s back, about a foot square—and in that moment she knew everything in the diagrams was true. But she couldn’t ponder this discovery just yet.

“What are you doing?” asked Carter, giving Iona no time to think about what she was looking at—she had to act. As per the instructions she pushed on both top corners of the hatch simultaneously and the hatch fell open.

Carter stopped. That was the only way she could describe it—he simply stopped. He didn’t move or speak or display any awareness of anything.

Iona walked back around to the other side of the chair, still expecting Carter to move at any moment. Her colleague sat motionless, jacket dangling from his fingers. Iona carefully extracted the jacket and hung it on the back of her own chair, then she sat back down and faced Carter again.

Carter stared back at Iona. But he didn’t, Iona now realized, because Carter had no eyes—his head was contoured to suggest eyes but there were no eyeballs or sockets. Neither did he have a nose or ears. A slit was positioned where the mouth should be but it was a crude rendition of a mouth, narrow and almost rectangular. Carter’s features were smoothed over, like a dummy’s head.

Iona moved her chair closer and hesitantly touched Carter’s face. Carter didn’t react. Iona traced the contours of his head. It remained entirely immobile. It was carved from a single piece of wood.

During their acquaintance Iona was sure she had seen Carter smile, frown, sniff, raise his eyebrows—and yet she was looking into a face that could do none of these things. Had it changed when she’d opened the hatch? No, Iona realized—it was just that she was seeing him differently now that he’d stopped moving. His movements had been so human, his manner so real, she’d assumed he was a human being and some part of her mind had filled in the details, stopped her from seeing his real face. This was the face Carter had always had and she’d simply never noticed—had never really looked at him properly. Like a building you walk past every day and you think you know what the upper floors look like, then one day you actually look up and they’re completely different.