Warehouse Seven was empty by the time Matteo reached it, and that, he told her afterwards, was the worst part.

He came back to the villa at nine in the morning with salt on his cuffs and gray under his eyes, and found her in the library exactly where he had left her, with the green ledgers open and the blue notebook beside them. He did not sit down. He stood at the end of the long table and gave his report in the flat clear voice of a man reading out a weather forecast. The doors of the warehouse had been left unlocked. The floor had been swept and scrubbed. Sixty drums had been taken, and whoever took them had been careful to leave the racks neat and the lights off, as though they had meant to be thanked for their manners. Gavin, who had watched through the night from the roof of a bonded shed, had seen a van go out along the coast road toward the north at ten past four, riding low on its springs.

"So we know where they went," said Sienna.

"We know which direction." He rubbed the bridge of his nose. "I've told Marco to put a man on the road. It will cost a week of patience, and I seem to be short of it."

She looked at him for a long moment, at the shadows under his eyes and the careful way he was not looking at her mouth. They had not spoken of the quarter inch of air. They did not speak of it now. But when she pushed her chair out and went to the sideboard to pour him tea, she tested it with her back turned so that he would not see her hands, and when she set it down in front of him, he said "Thank you" so quietly that it might have been a different word.

They worked through the afternoon. They worked through the evening, side by side, with the Vance Maritime lots copied out on a clean page and a second column beside them, in his slanting hand, of everything the house knew about the three small consignments. It was not much. It was never much. Sienna thought that the only thing worse than a clue that points nowhere is a clue that points everywhere, and the pencil in her fingers had gone blunt.

She went up at eleven. She shot the bolt. She lay in the green room with the lamp off and the sea muttering against the cliffs below the balcony, and she did not sleep.

It was ten past two when the house woke.

She had been lying on her side with her eyes open, watching a strip of moonlight creep across the carpet, and she heard it before she understood it. Feet on the stairs. A great many feet, running, and under them the bass thud of a heavy man taking steps two at a time. A door banged somewhere in the east wing. Then Marco's voice in the corridor outside Matteo's room, low and urgent and unlike itself, saying, "Sir. Sir. It's Seven. It's all of Four."

She was out of bed before the sentence ended.

She did not stop to think. She dragged her cardigan on over her nightshirt and shoved her feet into the first shoes she found, and she snatched the key from the bolt and was in the corridor with the door standing open behind her. The long passage was lit by a single lamp. Halfway down it, a door stood wide, and in the doorway stood Matteo with his shirt half buttoned and a boot in one hand, listening to Marco with a face she had seen only once before, in a long bright room above the quay. All the expression had drained out of it. What was left was very still, and very precise.

He saw her. He did not stop speaking. He finished the instruction he was giving, three clipped sentences about the fire service and a second car and someone named Gavin, and then he turned and said, in quite a different voice, "Sienna."

"I'm coming with you."

"No."

"Clause seven." She had not known she would say it until it was out. She stood in the lamplight with her arms folded across her cardigan and her hair coming down her back, and she heard her own voice ring in the passage like a struck glass. "You said we do not decide for each other. You wrote it on a blackboard. You put a fourth rule under mine in your own handwriting. I'd like to know what it was worth."

Marco, who had been about to say something, closed his mouth. He looked at the ceiling.

Matteo looked at her for a long moment. She watched the struggle go across his face, and it was not the struggle of a man who wanted to win. It was the struggle of a man who wanted to put her in a locked room and had just realized that this was precisely what he must not do. His jaw tightened. His hand closed on the boot until the knuckles stood out.

"In the car," he said at last. "You stay in the car. You do not leave it for any reason. If I tell Marco to drive you away, he drives you away, and you let him. Those are my terms."

"Agreed."

"I mean it, Sienna."

"I know you do." She held his gaze. "I said agreed."

He drew a breath and nodded. Then he took his overcoat from the hook by the stairs, the long dark wool one that smelled of cedar and sea air, and without a word he held it out to her, open, like the door of a house. She slid her arms into it. It came down to her ankles. It was still warm from the draft of the hall, and she did not let herself think about why that mattered.

The black car took the hill road like a thrown stone.

Sienna sat in the back with her hands pressed between her knees and watched the city come up out of the dark. At first there was nothing, only the sleeping avenues and the shuttered shops and the occasional lamp in a high window. Then, as they dropped toward the harbor, a faint, dull, flickering color began to stain the underside of the clouds. It grew as they came down Cypress Hill. It turned from rose to orange to a deep angry red. When the car swung onto Saint Brendan's Quay, the whole eastern sky had gone the color of a forge, and the air through the half-open window tasted of smoke.

Matteo sat beside her with his elbows on his knees and his eyes fixed on the red glow. He said nothing at all. His left hand had found the signet ring on his right and was turning it, slowly, round and round, and she did not think he knew he was doing it.

She thought of the pier at sunset, and of the way he had stood with the wind in his hair and said, I'd rather hear it from you. She thought of a long bright room, and a man on his knees. She thought, with the part of her mind that never stopped counting: this did not happen.

"There was no fire," she said quietly.

He did not turn his head. "No."

"Last time. There was no fire at Pier Four. I would have known. It would have been in the papers."

"There was nothing." His voice was barely audible over the engine. "I have gone back over it a hundred times. The Santa Ilaria. The driver in the ditch. This. None of it happened. A quiet autumn, a dull ledger, a wedding." He closed his eyes. "I changed something. I do not know what. And the whole shape of the thing has begun to come loose in my hands."

She put her hand over his.

She did not decide to. It was simply there, on his clenched fingers, warm against the cold ring. He went completely still. After a moment, very slowly, he turned his palm over under hers and held on.

The car stopped at the barrier. Beyond it, Pier Four was burning.

It was a sight she would remember all her life. The long timber sheds that ran down to the water had caught like paper, and the flames stood forty feet high against the sky, roaring with a deep, steady, hungry sound like a wind in a chimney. Black smoke boiled up through the glare and lay in a vast stained blanket over the whole harbor. Sparks fell on the water and hissed. The heat reached her through the glass of the car, a dry, pressing, enormous heat, and when Marco opened the door for Matteo it came in like a hand across her face.

There was a crowd. Dockhands in vests and shirtsleeves, a few women with shawls over their nightclothes, a clutch of men in uniform who must have been the fire service, standing around a single pump that was still being unrolled. Someone was shouting. Someone else was running with a bucket that was absurdly small against all that red. Over it all hung a high, thin, terrible sound, and it took her a moment to understand that it was a man screaming a name.

"Anselm! Anselm!"

Matteo was already out of the car. She saw him cross the cobbles in six strides and take a gray-faced foreman by the shoulders, and she saw the man's mouth move, and she saw, even through the glass, what the words did to Matteo's face.

Marco came back to the car and bent to the window. His broad calm face was streaked with soot. "Miss Hale. Two men were sleeping in the office annex at the end of Seven. The night watchman and a boy of nineteen. Nobody can reach them. The fire service says the roof will not hold."

"Is he going in?"

Marco did not answer. He did not have to. Beyond the glass, Matteo had thrown off his jacket, and a dozen dockhands had gathered around him with wet sacks and buckets, and a thin man in a gray coat was pointing at a door at the end of the shed, where the smoke came out of the seams like a thing alive.

She was out of the car before she knew she had moved.

It was the smell that did it. It reached her as the door swung open, a thick, sweet, acrid smell with a bitter edge, and every cell in her body that had been trained for six years in a basement laboratory went off at once. It was not wood. It was not tar. It was a solvent fire, and a bad one, and the thin oily smoke that poured out of the annex was not the kind of smoke a man could breathe for ten seconds and walk away.

"Stop!" she shouted. "Don't go in! Don't let anyone go in without a mask!"

The nearest dockhands turned. Their faces were red in the firelight, and puzzled, and some of them had already pulled their sacks up over their mouths. She ran across the cobbles in a dead man's overcoat, past the fire pump and the shouting foreman, straight to the place where Matteo stood.

"The smoke," she said. She was out of breath, and her voice cracked. "It isn't ordinary. Whatever was stored in there, it's a chemical fire. A wet sack isn't enough. It will get through. A man can go down in half a minute and not know it. They need a proper respirator, with a filter, or they will die on the floor."

He did not argue. He did not ask how she knew. He looked at her for exactly one second with those dark, steady eyes, and she saw him believe her, wholly and instantly, as a man believes the ground.

"Marco," he said. "The masks."

"In the boot, sir. Two."

"Get them." He turned to the men with the sacks. "Nobody goes near that door without one. Put the buckets down. You'll cause a panic, and you'll kill each other." His voice did not rise, but it carried across the quay. "Do as the lady says."

There was a pause. Then, one by one, the men stepped back.

Marco came running with a canvas satchel. Inside were two black rubber respirators, heavy and old-fashioned, each with a pair of fat round canisters and a rubber strap. Sienna caught the first one, checked the seal with her thumb, looked at the stamped date on the canister, and shoved it at Matteo.

"It's good for twenty minutes," she said. "Maybe fifteen in that. Hold your breath on the way in and don't take it off for anything. If you feel dizzy, you come out. If you cough, you come out. You don't go back for a second look, whatever you hear. Do you understand me?"

"Sienna."

"Do you understand me?"

He was already pulling the straps over his head. His voice came muffled, flat and calm, from behind the rubber. "I understand."

He soaked his own overcoat in the water trough, wrung it out, and threw it over his head and shoulders like a cowl. He took one long look at her. It was not a look she knew how to name. And then he turned and walked into the fire.

Sienna stood on the cobbles with her hands pressed to her mouth.

Marco had gone in behind him with the other mask, in a wet jacket, without a word. The door at the end of Seven had swallowed them both. A great black pall rolled out of it and lay along the ground, and above it the roof began to make a low, deep, shifting sound that she felt through the soles of her shoes. She counted. It was the only thing she could do. She counted in her head as she counted every anxious thing, one, two, three, four, hold, out for six. At sixty she lost her place and began again.

A dockhand beside her was crying quietly. A woman in a shawl was praying. Somewhere behind her the fire pump coughed and caught, and a thin white arc of water leaped against the flames and was swallowed. The heat pushed her back a step, then another. She stood her ground and counted.

Three minutes. Four.

She was nearly at the end of the fifth when the black smoke at the door of the annex parted, and a shape came lurching out of it, bent double, with another shape slung across its shoulders.

It was Marco. He was carrying a man in a night shirt, a thin old man with a gray beard, limp as a sack of flour. He laid him down on the cobbles beyond the heat and dropped beside him on his knees, tore off the mask, and began, with hands that shook, to breathe for him.

Behind him came Matteo.

He was walking very slowly. The wet coat on his shoulders was smoking. In his arms he carried a boy of nineteen or twenty, long-limbed and gangling, with his head lolling back over Matteo's elbow and one bare foot trailing. He walked as a man walks under a weight he has refused to put down. He made it six paces from the door, clear of the worst of the smoke, and then his knees gave out. He went down onto the cobbles with the boy still in his arms and bent over him, and for a second she thought he had been shot.

Then the mask came off, and he began to cough.

It was a terrible cough, deep and tearing, the cough of a man whose lungs have been scraped raw. He coughed until she saw his shoulders heave, until he had to brace himself on one hand against the stones. And she saw the other hand, the right one, the one with the signet ring, curled against his chest, and the skin across the back of it was red and shining and already rising in a great pale blister.

She ran.

She did not remember crossing the quay. She remembered the cobbles hard under her shoes, and the heat, and the roar of the fire in her ears, and then she was on her knees in front of him with her hands on his face. His skin was hot and slick with soot. His eyes were red and streaming. He looked at her as though he were trying to remember who she was.

"The boy," he rasped. "Is he..."

She looked. The boy had rolled onto his side and was retching onto the stones, thin and gray and terribly alive. A paramedic had run up with a blanket. Someone was shouting for oxygen. The old watchman had begun to cough too, a thin, wheezing, wonderful sound.

"They're breathing," Sienna said. "They're both breathing. Matteo. Look at me."

He was looking at her.

"You promised you'd come out if you felt dizzy."

"I did." He tried to smile. It was a ghastly effort. "I came out."

She did not know which of them moved first. She would think about it a great deal afterwards, in the long quiet of the green room, and she would never be certain. Only that one moment she was kneeling in front of him with her hands on his face, and the next she had pulled him against her and was holding him with both arms, hard, with her cheek against his sooty hair and her eyes shut and her whole body shaking. His good arm closed around her back. His hurt hand hung in the air beside her shoulder, careful not to touch her, trembling. She felt his breath rasp against her neck, and the great shuddering of his chest, and she heard her own voice, strange and cracked, saying over and over, "You idiot. You idiot. You absolute idiot."

"I know," said Matteo.

It was not desire. She would be clear about that later, with the ruthless honesty she brought to everything. There was nothing in it that a lover would have recognized. It was only the dumb blind clutch of a creature that has seen another creature walk into fire and come out again, and cannot yet believe it. They held on to each other on the wet stones of Pier Four, with the burning sheds roaring a hundred yards away and the sparks raining down on the water, and for a long moment neither of them said anything at all.

At last she drew back. She looked at his hand.

"That needs water," she said. "Cold, running, for twenty minutes. Not ice. Don't touch it. Don't let anyone put anything on it."

"Later."

"Not later."

"Sienna." He caught her wrist with his good hand, very gently. "Later. Please. I have to see to the men."

He got to his feet. He swayed once, and she put a shoulder under his arm without being asked, and he leaned on her a little, openly, in front of two hundred people, and neither of them mentioned it.

The fire burned until dawn.

By four o'clock the roof of Seven had come down in a great shower of sparks, and the brigade had pushed the flames back from the neighboring sheds. By five the worst of it was out. A gray and bitter light was growing in the east, and the harbor lay under a long gray scarf of smoke. Anselm and the boy had been taken away in an ambulance. The crowd had thinned. Matteo sat on an upturned crate by the barrier with his burned hand wrapped in a wet cloth that Sienna had made a paramedic provide, and Marco stood beside him in a ruined jacket, with his big hands hanging at his sides.

He came to find her at the car.

He did not speak at first. He held out his open palm. On it lay something small, and dark, and twisted, and she did not recognize it until the gray light caught it. A metal can, a flat red jerrican of the kind sold at any chandler's, buckled and blackened at one side, with the neck of it still sealed with a blue cap.

"It was behind the annex," said Marco quietly. "Against the back wall, under the stairs. The fire service found it. The cap was never opened."

"Then it's not what started it."

"It's what was meant to be found." His gray eyes were very tired. "Someone wanted us to think it was petrol. A simple fire, a simple crime, a man with a grudge. But the burn was wrong. You said so yourself, miss. It was something else."

She closed her fingers around the cold metal and held it against her chest.

"Does he know?"

"I'll tell him," said Marco. "When he's had a cup of tea."

They drove home in the first pale light with the harbor falling away behind them. Matteo sat with his head against the seat and his eyes shut and his ruined hand cradled in his lap, and she sat beside him with the jerrican in her coat and her heart still going too fast. She looked at his profile. The soot was streaked across his forehead and the line of his jaw. A tiny cut, red as a thread, ran along his lower lip.

She had known, for twelve months, exactly what would happen on the fourteenth of September. She had known what the glass would taste of and what the room would smell of and which of his hands would be in hers. She had carried the whole of it, like a map, from the first morning she woke in the lab.

And tonight, for the first time, she had been standing on a quay with a man walking into a fire, and she had not known what would happen. Not one second of it. She had counted her breaths and prayed to nothing in particular, like any woman in any shawl.

It was the most terrifying thing she had ever felt.

It was also, she realized, with a slow cold turn of her heart, the first time since she had opened her eyes that she had been truly alive.