Lydia edges back as Hari and the other two approach: she glances behind herself and finds the railing that runs around the edge of the rooftop. There’s no fire exit she can see. She’s trapped at one end of the U: there’s nowhere to go.
The two men with Hari are muttering to each other while eyeing her and grinning and Lydia senses something malevolent about them. They’re nothing like the people Hari was hanging out with back in Halifax: heavily tattooed and overdressed for the heat in garish, shiny jackets, worn open over metallic shirts. They half swagger, half stagger, clearly inebriated, and in fact Hari looks wasted too—tired and grimy, his face slack. All three of them look like they’re on kettin.
One of the shiny-jacket guys trips on a vent and stumbles and his shiny jacket gapes open, allowing Lydia a glimpse of the gun stuffed in his pocket. She looks at his mate and sees how one side of his jacket hangs lower than the other: he’s got a gun too. Her glasses take account of her heart rate and register she’s alone with three men and has nowhere to run, and a note pops up telling her to double-blink if she wants to call the police, and Lydia does so. She doesn’t even need to speak: her location and images of the situation are automatically attached.
She assumed she was being watched by the cops already, and maybe she still is—but surely they’d react pretty quick when they saw this? Wouldn’t they swoop the moment they saw Hari heading her way? She never thought she’d be wishing for more police surveillance.
“So this is the girl you fucked back in England?” asks one of the shiny-jacket guys.
“Oi,” says Hari, looking embarrassed.
“She’s venny,” says the other, taking another step towards her. He could reach out and touch her from here and she feels acutely afraid that he’ll do so: something in his eyes suggests that’s his intention. A notification pops up in her glasses saying the police will arrive in approximately six minutes, and hopefully that’s accurate but six minutes is a long time to stand here and not get thrown off a roof.
“Hey, Cale,” says Hari, seeming to belatedly realize how close his companion is to touching Lydia. “Don’t do that, mate.”
The guy called Cale doesn’t move back, and instead his mate takes a step towards Lydia too, looking her up and down in that way guys do when they’re saving the image for later and don’t care that you know it.
“Oi—guys,” says Hari. “Come on, I said be cool.”
Cale shoots him a venomous glance. “You’re fucking telling us we’re not being cool?” He turns back to Lydia and, as if it’s a private joke between her and him, says: “Prick.”
Lydia looks past the two strangers to address Hari: “Have you been following me?”
“We followed you up here, yeah,” Hari says, “but—”
“And how long have you been following me?”
“You’re stalking this girl?” says the other guy to Hari.
“No,” says Hari. “Fucksake, Miro, don’t say that—” He implores Lydia. “He’s joking, he’s been with me since yesterday, he knows I haven’t been stalking you.”
“How the fuck did you find me?” says Lydia.
“I … saw you down by the periscopes, like, fifteen minutes ago.”
“You’re saying it’s just a coincidence you found me here?”
“Yeah, it is. I came over to talk to you, but you were already heading inside the building so we waited for you on the steps, then Cale saw you on the roof just now so we came up.”
“OK but … what the fuck are you doing in New York?”
An explosion of laughter from Cale and Miro. “You said she was a friend, man,” says Miro.
“Shut the fuck up,” replies Hari.
Miro turns sharply and fronts up to Hari. “Don’t fucking talk to me like that.” He feigns a punch and Hari shrinks back. Miro laughs hard, and is joined by Cale and eventually by Hari himself. They seem to be having those surges of mood and energy you get on kettin, and they might do anything at any moment. The cops’ ETA is now four and a half minutes. Lydia still wants to know what’s going on here, but for the moment the guys’ attention is off her so she’s not going to rock the boat.
Abruptly Cale turns back to her and says, giggling, “He came here because of you.”
Lydia lets her eyes slide to Hari. “All this way? Just to see me?”
“Not to see you,” says Hari, exasperated, “because of you. Talking to you made me realize I’ve never seen anywhere, and I kept thinking about it, and I had some money from when my dad died—”
“Why didn’t you tell me you were coming?”
“You didn’t give me a contact.”
Actually yes, she remembers very deliberately not doing this. “It was just a one-off—”
“I got that,” he says, keen to cut her off, “and that was fine. I came here to see the city, I just … couldn’t stop thinking about it.”
“I hope I didn’t build it up too much.”
He gives her a fried, exhausted, euphoric grin. “It’s incredible.”
“Glad you’re not disappointed. So it’s my fault for painting such vivid pictures with words, is that it?”
“I didn’t say that—”
“I was joking. So the police haven’t talked to you?”
Lydia didn’t fully consider these words before speaking them: If she had, she would have anticipated Cale and Miro’s reaction. They glance at each other anxiously, then Miro says: “Hari? You talked to the cops?”
“No!” says Hari. “No, no—why would—”
“They’ve been looking for you for days,” says Lydia. “How’ve you avoided them all this time?”
“Why are they looking for me?”
“Because they think you murdered my boss.”
Hari laughs. “What?” Then his expression changes as he realizes this time she’s not joking.
“Fuck!” says Cale. “That’s core as fuck, man.”
“Why do they think I murdered your boss?”
“Because you arrived into New York a few hours before he was killed,” says Lydia. “Haven’t you heard about this? It’s all over the feeds.”
“My feed’s out, it’s a roaming problem—why do they think I killed him just because I got here the day he died?”
“Because the cops think I passed on information about him and how to get round our security when I was back in Halifax, maybe—which I didn’t, obviously but—”
“Do you think I did it?”
Lydia is distracted: Cale and Miro have retreated slightly, and she’s wondering if they’re conferring over chat and if so what they’re saying.
“You do think I did it!” Hari says.
“No,” Lydia replies, snapping back to the conversation. “If you’d done it you wouldn’t hang around waiting to be arrested, would you? And you wouldn’t come up to me, the only person in the city who knows…” She trails off. The only person in the city who knows him. And he’s approached her on a high roof, accompanied by two armed men. She glances nervously behind herself, then blurts: “I’ve called the police, by the way.”
Cale and Miro hear this and dart towards the bottom of the U, to the doorway that leads back down. Hari sees them go, halfheartedly shouts at them to stop—then turns back to Lydia. “What’d you call the police for?”
“Because you fucking scared me!”
“I just came over to say hello—”
“On a high roof, completely wasted, with Tweedletwat and Tweedlecunt in tow—who were those guys?”
“I met them in the bar at the hostel, and I didn’t know anyone, and they seemed like guys who’d give me, like, an authentic experience of the city.”
“I’m assuming they got you to pay for all that authenticity?”
“Yeah…” Hari looks down at the rooftop, the grubby solar panels offering a dim reflection. “To be honest they were scaring me but I couldn’t get them to piss off.”
Lydia smiles, gestures to the door they just disappeared through. “Five minutes with me and they’re gone. You’re welcome.”
Hari’s not amused. “Man, I can’t fucking believe you called the cops on me.”
“How have they not found you already? How’ve you avoided them all this time?”
“I didn’t even know they were after me.”
“But they can facerec anyone, especially if you’ve been wandering all round the tourist spots; but you’ve managed to not get picked up for two whole days without even trying? It doesn’t make sense.”
There’s a momentary silence between them, and in the midst of this they both notice the sirens approaching. A note pops up to tell Lydia it’s taken the cops five minutes and fifty-three seconds to get here, and it invites her to rate this service.
The cops are anticipating a tense standoff, but Hari doesn’t give them one: he doesn’t resist arrest or threaten to hurl Lydia from the roof if they don’t back off, but kneels down with his hands raised as instructed. Every device in the block is flooded with a message telling everyone to stay where they are.
“I’m sorry,” Lydia tells Hari while they’re waiting for the cops to emerge onto the roof. “They’d have got you eventually anyway, when you went to catch the hopper back.”
Hari doesn’t answer.
“When were you planning to go back home? To Halifax?” Lydia adds.
“I thought maybe I wouldn’t have to. I thought maybe I could stay here.”
“Do you know how hard it is to—”
“Yeah, I know how hard it is to get leave to remain, thanks. But it happens, doesn’t it? People stay here—you did.” There’s a note of pleading in his voice, as if she might help him. But she’s not sure she can, or should, or wants to.