Jack headed up, climbing slowly, until the elevator arrived and the doors closed, and then he jogged back to the entry and down again.

The basement door stood unlocked and open and led to a matrix of wood-framed, chain-link storage units. To the far, far left was bicycle parking and a door to the outside, and to the immediate right a laundry room.

Twenty machines, one for each apartment above his head.

He removed the trench coat, which had started out as a bomber jacket, removed the glasses, stuffed them into the coat pocket, tied the arms into a bundle, and strode between storage units, searching the contents from between the wood slats until he found one that looked like stuff had been thrown in at random until it’d reached capacity. He dropped the bundle over the transom where it blended in with the rest, and he continued on to the bicycles, to the basement exit, which led out to a ramp and a small set of stairs, and he stuffed paper into the door’s strike-plate hole to keep the automatic lock from engaging and then carried the umbrella back to the laundry room.

Overhead, the elevator dinged.

He paused, tracking footsteps across the foyer and out the front, then pressed the umbrella handle tight above a hinge and tugged the laundry room door.

Pressure became a vise that cracked plastic.

He tossed the pieces into the trash, shoved the bare aluminum tube against the hinge, and slammed the door. Tube became a shiv that, with enough quick force, would punch a hole between ribs. He hoped to never need it. At the sink he ran the water, traced wet fingers through his hair to strip out the gray, and then he headed up the stairs.

The rooftop was empty but for a small seating area, where a collection of carefully tended patio trees and plants framed otherwise weatherworn cushions.

It’d been a while, it seemed, since anyone had visited.

He peered over the wall into the courtyard proper, and into the small private gardens and patios that nudged into it, and had a clear view of adjacent rooftops and interior-facing windows, and he stood there breathing in the cold, damp air, returning to days he’d been forced to evade Clare in an environment much like this, forced to find her before her nonlethal rounds found him.

He’d been seven the first time she’d shot him.

She’d brushed aside his brokenhearted protests and poked his still welting bruise. “Of course it hurt,” she’d said. “That’s how you remember there are consequences to failure. If you’re smart, you’ll learn to avoid getting hit.”