The Pulse Radio house had been somebody's pride once. You could see it the way you can see the bones of a good face in an old one — the lobby's terrazzo floor worn pale down the middle, the brass station logo on the wall gone the soft brown of unpolished years, a glass cabinet of trophies and yellowed clippings that nobody had opened in a long time. Radio held on here the way the old hold on, in the stubborn faith that the days that left will think better of it and come back. They would not. But the building did not know that, or knew it and would not say.

A receptionist with a paperback splayed face-down on her desk pointed him down a corridor without quite looking up. "Mr Mathew. End of the hall, door's open."

Joe Mathew was a broad man in his fifties going comfortably to seed, in shirtsleeves, in a cabin lined with reel-to-reel machines that no longer turned. He waved Ethan into a chair with one hand and held up the other — *one minute* — and made two calls, and Ethan, who could no more not-listen than not-breathe, sat and listened.

Mathew dialled on a rotary phone. An actual one, black bakelite, the dial whirring back after each digit, in a world that had stopped making the sound that phone made thirty years ago.

"Joe here. How are we on the coaxial cable shipment?" A pause. "Yeah, payment'll reach you, you know me, man of my word. I need it now — old cable's going. The run from the transmitter to the antenna, it drops out. You get distortion. Voices come through that shouldn't." A laugh, dry, brief. "Ha. No. No such thing as ghosts. Fifty years in this building, never seen one. Just send the cable. Right. Bye."

He hung up, dialled again, the whir and click.

"Afternoon. The new host — where are we?" A longer pause; Mathew's face did something disappointed. "She turned it down? The Cindy girl, the voice?" He sighed through his nose. "Kids today. Her loss. No podcast in the world sounds like a voice coming out of the dark at you, but you can't tell them that. The slot airs end of the week. Find me someone. This week. We'll do a voice test the moment you do. Right. Goodbye."

He was reaching to set the phone down when it rang under his hand, and he picked it up again, and this time he half-turned toward the window, and Ethan caught it only in pieces. "...yeah, he's here now... that good, is he... well, if you say so..." A glance back at Ethan, weighing. "...the old man's books, yeah, I want them done proper, so your name came up..." And a name at the end, dropped easy, that Ethan knew: "...all right, Inanis. I'll hang up now."

He set the phone in its cradle and looked at Ethan properly for the first time. "How long you been at it? The book work."

"Four years."

"Four years." Mathew said it the way men in their fifties say a young man's number, half a scoff and half something gentler. He stood, with effort. "Come on, then."

*

He took Ethan to a small room off the cabin, not much more than a store cupboard with a table in it, and on the table sat three books.

They were in a bad way. Ethan saw that before he touched them — the slumped shape a book gets when its spine has gone, the cover boards splaying loose like something with a broken back. He picked them up one at a time anyway, because you always checked with the hands, and the hands told him what the eyes had. "Spines are gone on all three. The stitching's perished. They'll need pulling apart and resewing, new spine, reback the boards." He turned the top one to the light: an old clothbound thing, the title stamped faint in a typeface from before he was born. *A History of Field Wireless.* "These are a set?"

"My old man's." Mathew leaned in the doorway. "His whole collection. Radio history, signals, all that. He was army — a radio tech, the war and after. Strung wire and fixed sets in places you wouldn't believe. These were his." Something passed over the broad face and was gone. "Do what they need."

"I'll have to take them. The tools are at the Vellum, and at my place — I can't do a proper reback here." Ethan watched the man's face close a degree, the natural caution of a stranger asked to let heirlooms walk out the door, and added, "Tomorrow. Before evening. I'll bring them back myself."

Mathew chewed it over, then nodded. "Tomorrow, then."

Ethan hesitated, and asked — because the rent did not care, because he had eaten cold potatoes for lunch — whether there might be something in advance. Mathew's mouth opened, and the shape of the opening was *no*, the flat reflexive no of a businessman to a kid he'd met four minutes ago —

and a dog came through the open door.

A German shepherd, grey at the muzzle, unhurried, doing the rounds of the room with its nose. It crossed straight to Ethan, and sniffed his shoes, his knee, his offered hand — and then leaned its whole warm head into his palm and rubbed it there, the way a dog does only with people it has decided about long ago.

Ethan scratched it behind the ear without thinking.

And the feeling came.

It came up faint, the way it had come at the bars of the cell — a thin sad tug from somewhere under the floor of him, *one of mine,* small and worn and far away — except the dog was not the source of it, he knew that the way he knew the rest, the dog was only warm and grey and trusting against his hand, and the feeling was coming from *somewhere near* the dog, *through* it, around it, the way a draught comes through a room and you cannot find the window. It pulled at him. Something tried to surface and did not. He had the brief unbearable sense of a word on the very back of the tongue, a name worn off a stone, and then it was gone, and there was only a friendly old dog and his own hand on its head.

He filed it where the rest went, the place that was getting crowded, and he let it go, because there was nothing else to do with it and a man cannot chase a draught.

Mathew was watching. The flat *no* had gone out of his face.

"Bruno doesn't do that," he said slowly. "Not with strangers. Never met you in his life." He looked at Ethan a moment longer, and whatever he saw, or whatever the dog had decided, settled it. "All right. Small advance. Bruno says you're all right, and he's a better judge than I am." He was already reaching for his wallet. "Take care of them, mind. They were my father's. All he left, near enough — him and that voice of his, and the voice is just on the old tapes now."

He said something else, about the father, about the tapes, about a man who'd spent a war listening to the dark for signals — and Ethan, nodding, taking the worn notes, did not catch it, because the faint thing was still settling in him like silt after the dog had moved off to its corner, and he was busy being steady, being normal, being a binder collecting a job.

He wrapped the three books in the cloth Mathew gave him and held them against his chest, the way he had held another book against his chest on a subway the night before, and he thanked the man, and he went back out through the faded lobby into the late afternoon.

The light was going gold and long. He had an advance in his pocket and three dead soldiers' books in his arms and an old man to see when the dark came, and somewhere under everything, quiet as a tide, the harbor he had no name for breathed up the dry streets at his back.

He did not look at the crossword in his jacket. He did not think about the dog. He walked home to fetch his tools, because the work paid tomorrow, and tomorrow he still had to eat.