Velvet Knives

PROLOGUE The Weight

At twenty to midnight on a Wednesday in July, the forty-seventh floor of Trinity Infoworks had the best view of Mumbai's monsoon skyline, and Krishnan Deshpande was the only man left up there to look at it.

He stood at the glass with a folder under his arm.

Rain came at the window sideways, in sheets, the way it did every year and every year surprised the city.

Below him the towers of BKC were smears of light.

Beyond them, where the sea should have been, there was only black.

His reflection stood in the glass in front of all of it: creased suit, tired eyes, sixty-one years old, a face that had learned to look decisive in photographs.

Twenty kilometres south, in a ballroom in Colaba, four hundred people were drinking to his successor.

He had sent his regrets in a form Meera could use — the Singapore files — and it had the rare advantage of being true.

The files were on the desk behind him. Eleven pages.

A draft, unsigned, with two lines at the bottom for two names.

He had read it four times since dinner. It had not become less true.

His phone lit on the desk. Priya Nair.

We need to talk about the Singapore files. Tonight.

He looked at it until the screen dimmed.

Then he picked it up and deleted it. Some conversations were better left unrecorded.

He had already decided. The draft was what he had decided.

Talking about it now would only drag Priya into the hour, and Priya was careful, and careful people ought to be allowed to stay that way a little longer.

Behind him the lift chimed.

He didn't turn. After hours the floor was biometric.

The list of people who could reach it was short and he could recite it.

The doors opened, waited the length of time it takes a person not to step out, and closed again.

No footsteps. A service car parking itself at forty-seven on a scheduled job, nothing more.

Only the rain, the low hum of the floor's servers, and, across the atrium, an admin terminal glowing blue in the dark of the IT bay.

Unattended. Chair pushed in. Lines of code climbing the screen at a steady rate.

A scheduled job. Some night process doing its rounds.

Deshpande frowned at it the way he frowned at other people's spreadsheets, and let it go.

He put the draft in the folder, the folder under his arm, hooked the umbrella over his wrist and locked his office.

He did not switch off the music. The corridor felt airless.

The cleaners had been through and the carpet had that flattened, hoovered look.

On the reception desk, in the pool of the one lamp left burning, three pens lay side by side — black, blue, red — lined up to the millimetre, caps facing the lift.

He almost smiled. Somebody on this floor still believed in millimetres.

The executive lift waited for him with its doors open.

The polished steel showed him his own face, blurred by the rain sliding down the window behind him.

He stepped in. He pressed G. The doors closed on the trumpet and left him with a fainter version of it, piped through the cabin speaker, thin as a memory of the same tune.

The descent was smooth. Soothing, even. He closed his eyes. Forty-six, forty-five. He thought about what he would say to Priya in the morning and how she would adjust her spectacles when he said it, and what Meera would want to call it, and how many days Singapore would need. Forty. Thirty-nine.

Then the cabin jolted.

His stomach went up while the rest of him stayed.

The lights died and came back amber. He put his palm flat on the Stop button and held it there.

Nothing answered. The floor display flickered between two numbers that were not next to each other.

Somewhere above him metal groaned, once, the sound of a very large thing changing its mind.

At the twenty-sixth floor the lift steadied. He got one breath in.

It dropped again, faster, and the folder went out from under his arm and opened in the air, eleven pages of draft disclosure lifting off the floor around him.

In the strobing amber something small caught the light in the corner of the cabin, down by the seam of the doors — a bright metallic curve, there and gone.

Then a sound under the roar: the brittle snap of something small giving way.

Acceleration pinned him to the wall. The trumpet in the cabin speaker dissolved into static and the static into the long, rising note of the shaft, and Krishnan Deshpande, who had listened to that record for eight years whenever he had to choose, understood in the last second that somebody had chosen for him.

Forty-seven floors up, in the empty IT bay, the admin screen blinked once and went dark.