Saoirse meets me outside the Royal Mile site at two. I told myself I was only agreeing because the building is my responsibility. If something happened there that affected nine people, I should know about it. The fact that the woman from my nightmare is waiting under the scaffolding has absolutely nothing to do with it. Daniel sees us coming.
“This the client?”
“No.”
“Council?”
I look at him. He lifts both hands. “You have the face you make when somebody from a committee emails you.” I have apparently been working with Daniel too long.
“This is Saoirse.”
She shakes his hand. Daniel gives me a look that says he will ask questions later. I ignore him. The building is empty apart from three contractors working upstairs. Saoirse walks slowly through the ground floor, not touching anything.
“What are you looking for?” I ask.
“I’ll tell you when I know.”
I almost object, then decide I prefer that to another confident answer she can’t support. Near the eastern corridor she stops. I know that corridor well. We opened it up during the renovation, removing two partitions so the old building could breathe into the newer extension. Saoirse closes her eyes.
“What?”
“Someone stood here.”
“Hundreds of people have stood there.”
“One of the nine.”
I wait. She opens her eyes.
“A Healer.”
I don’t ask how she knows. I have already used up my patience for impossible things today. We find the woman an hour later. Her name is Helen Fraser, thirty-nine, a physiotherapist who attended a private event here the week before. She agrees to speak to us at a café around the corner.
“I thought I was having some kind of episode,” she says after Saoirse explains why we’re there. “For six minutes, I could feel everyone.”
“Emotionally?” I ask.
“No. Physically.”
She rubs her palms together.
“There was a man across the room. Guardian designation. I knew before he told me. When a tray fell, my body moved before I decided to move. I caught it.”
“That doesn’t sound unusual.”
“I was twenty feet away.”
I stop. Helen gives a nervous laugh.
“Exactly.”
She tells us another woman, a Scholar, suddenly knew which medication Helen’s patient needed even though she had no medical training. A man classified as an Architect could feel the panic of someone standing outside the building. Then, after six minutes, it ended.
“Did anything happen before it started?”
Helen thinks.
“Nothing dramatic.”
“Anything at all.”
She looks at me.
“There was a sound.”
“What kind?”
“Not loud. More like…” She searches for the word. “A hum.”
I glance at Saoirse. Her face has changed. She heard something too. Back at the site, I pull up the plans on my tablet. Saoirse stands beside me as I zoom into the ground-floor layout.
“That corridor,” she says.
“What about it?”
“The feeling was strongest there.”
I study the plan. The old building and the extension meet at that point. Three circulation routes cross. Two stairwells feed into the same axis. I designed it deliberately so people coming from separate spaces would meet naturally without being forced into one narrow passage. A connection point. I hate the thought as soon as it appears. Saoirse leans closer to the screen.
“You designed that?”
“Yes.”
Her eyes move across the plan.
“You connected four separate parts of the building through one centre.”
“That is what architects sometimes do.”
“Emre.”
I look at her. She isn’t impressed. She is worried. For the first time, I understand why she kept staring at the building this morning.
“What?”
She points at the centre of the drawing.
“That is what your chart looks like.”