The turnstile said no before Agata Brzezicki had finished deciding to be brave.
She had planned the whole walk. She had planned it in the infusion chair at Saint Francis in June with a bag of something the color of cranberry juice dripping into the port under her collarbone, and she had planned it again in August when her eyebrows came out in the shower in two soft gray commas, and she had planned it one last time at a quarter to six this morning, standing at her kitchen counter in New Britain eating dry toast because that was what her stomach would still agree to. Park on the fourth level of the Church Street garage, where the spaces were wider.
Take the skybridge to Trumbull Street. Come down the escalator into the lobby of Stanhope Tower at seven-forty, before the eight o'clock crowd, so that whoever looked at her would look at her one at a time. Do not wear the wig.
The wig was hot and itched along the hairline and made her look like a woman in a commercial for a bank. Wear the gray wool trousers that were too big now and the navy blazer and let the fuzz on her head be whatever it was, which was about half an inch long, soft as the inside of a dog's ear, and a color her fifteen-year-old daughter had diplomatically described as "pewter." Tap the badge. Push through. Ride to twenty-two. Sit down at her desk, turn on her monitors, open the alarm queue, and be the person she had been for fourteen years before the person she had been for nineteen weeks.
She tapped the badge. The reader on top of the third turnstile gave her a red ring of light and two short, flat beeps, and the glass paddles stayed closed in front of her knees like a pair of hands.
It was not an alarming sound to anyone else. People got the red ring every day. They tapped too fast, or held the badge against the side of the reader instead of the face, or had their badge stacked with a credit card in a wallet sleeve so the two chips argued. The man in the camel coat behind her sighed the sigh of a man whose morning had been delayed by four seconds, and moved to the next lane, and went through on a green ring and a single soft chirp.
But Agata had chosen those readers. She had sat in a conference room in 2021 with a vendor's sample case open on the table and tapped forty different credentials against six different models until she could tell them apart with her eyes closed, and she had picked the ones that were in front of her now for their read range and their tamper switches and because the error tones were distinct enough that a person who knew could hear what was wrong. One long tone meant the card was unknown to the system. A rising pair meant the card was fine but the person was trying to come in at an hour or through a door they were not allowed. Two short flat beeps meant the system knew exactly who she was and had decided, on purpose, that she was not to come in.
She tapped it again anyway, because the body does what it has rehearsed. Red ring. Two flat beeps.
There was a line of turnstiles, eight of them in brushed steel and smoked glass, between the escalator and the elevator banks. Beyond them the lobby rose three stories to a coffered ceiling and a chandelier from a hotel in Montreal. On the far wall, above the elevators, the words STANHOPE MUTUAL were set into the stone in bronze letters each a foot and a half high, and under them in smaller letters, SINCE 1871, which was true, and WE KEEP OUR PROMISES, which was a slogan from 1994 that no one had had the heart to sand off.