Episode 01
The thread
He posted it at ten past three in the morning, which is the hour at which every bad idea in human history has looked like courage.
Nineteen posts, on his phone, on the same patch of floor. He told me later he hadn't been trying to convince anyone of anything. He'd been trying to get it out, the way you'd lance something, and the internet was the nearest surface.
It went, more or less:
ok so. for a year the floor has felt wrong. everywhere. like a board has been taken out from under the whole city and nobody can find which one. except directly under me, where it's fine
i also see things. not the future. things that happened. a train station at 2am with a painted ceiling. a rock walking up a ramp. three kids in overalls laughing at something enormous. an old man in slippers with a paper bag
there's an office. it's on fire and everyone's used to it. there's a coffee machine that makes a noise like it's thinking about you. there's a plaque, and a sticky note stuck on the plaque, and the sticky note says mind the step
i have never been to any of these places
i have not had a job in a year. i'm two months behind on rent. my benefit stops on the 9th. i know exactly how this reads and i'm posting it anyway because i've done the version where you say nothing for a year and it does not work
And, at nineteen:
ah. there you are. welcome back. my grandmother says that every time i walk in and i've started hearing it in other people's voices
Then he put the phone face down and slept four hours, which was the last decent sleep he got for a fortnight.
Two rooms noticed. Neither knew about the other.
The first was the ordinary internet, doing the ordinary thing: four hundred thousand people by Thursday, a name by Friday (Floorguy), a subreddit by Saturday. Most of it was kind. Several hundred people wrote gently about therapy, and a woman in Osaka wrote three paragraphs about the ground under her mother's house that he's kept.
The second room has four desks in it, off the lobby at the Zentrale, and its whole job since 2009 has been reading what the world says about itself. Marguerite's idea; she had to fight for it. Her argument was that the crowd isn't in the room any more.
They don't look for the word dragon. That comes up eleven thousand times an hour and is always fantasy football. They look for the specific and the wrong.
At 03:51 on Thursday somebody put a screenshot in front of Marguerite with two lines highlighted. The plaque. The sticky note.
"That's ours," said Marguerite.
"That's ours from the inside," said the man at the desk. "Nobody outside this building has ever described the sticky note."
Rose was in Berlin with a show in previews. Ricky was in Berlin because Ricky had been in Berlin four times in a year. Bob was in Berlin in a hotel bathrobe.
Marguerite made one call and said eleven words: "He's been in Berlin the whole time, and he's posting."
He was robbed on the Saturday, about six in the evening, in the passage by the Ringbahn.
Three men. He never got a proper look at any of them and has never pretended otherwise. They were speaking something from the east block, he couldn't tell you which, and said so, and the officer wrote down osteuropäisch, which isn't a description of anybody and went into the file as if it were. It also, as it turned out, wasn't a description of the people who sent them.
They took his phone and eighty euros and the little tin. One of them put a hand flat on his chest and held him against the wall while it happened. Not hitting him. Holding him. Which is somehow the worst version.
The eighty wasn't his. That's what kept him awake. He was four months into an arrangement he'd never meant to have, with a crew who call themselves Prima Bella, a name chosen, as far as anyone can establish, because somebody liked a pizzeria sign. They front you the tin, you bring back the number, the difference is yours. Nobody signs anything. Nobody threatens anybody. It runs entirely on the number being small enough that not bringing it back would be insane.
He knew, in the passage, that these were the people whose tin it was. It took him eight days to work out why.
Here's the reasoning, and I want you to sit with how stupid it is, because a great deal of this book runs on somebody being confidently wrong for about a week.
Forty thousand people in this city had seen the thread by Thursday. Some of them worked for Prima Bella. And what a certain kind of twenty-four-year-old sees, when a man he knows goes from nobody to four hundred thousand views in seventy-two hours, is not a person coming apart in public. It's numbers. It's a channel. It's a guy who's obviously making money now, because that's what happens, everyone knows that's what happens, there was a man last year who—
They thought he was a streamer.
That's it. That's the whole motive. Three men in a passage on a Saturday evening, taking a phone and eighty euros and a tin that already belonged to them, because somebody upstairs had decided Floorguy was holding, and because it's very easy to send three men and almost impossible to un-send them.
He walked to the station on Sonnenallee because it was four hundred metres away and because he's the kind of person who thinks you're supposed to report things. Also, if we're honest, because a police report is a piece of paper, and he was raised by a woman who believed a piece of paper is a thing you can show somebody.
The robbery was over in forty seconds. Nobody was hurt.
And in the middle of those forty seconds a thing happened that he didn't put in the report, and hadn't told anyone about, and that had been happening since the night in the Columbiahalle.
He calls it the true faces. I've asked him for a better name and he's refused, on the grounds that it's exactly what it is.
Since the awakening, an hour and forty minutes in a concert hall where the floor of the world was briefly fine, he's been able, sometimes, without warning, to see a little way through things. Not thoughts. What comes off a person for half a second is the shape of what they're actually doing: the errand, who it's for, the thing behind the face that the face was hired to stand in front of.
It isn't a spy's gift. It arrives when it likes. It has told him that a woman on the U8 was going to a funeral she dreaded, that a man in the Späti was three days from proposing, and that his landlord genuinely likes him, which he found harder to sit with than either of the others.
And in a passage by the Ringbahn, with a hand on his chest and a phone going into somebody's jacket, the third man's face came off.
Behind it was not a robber. It was a young man on an errand he didn't care about, faintly embarrassed, running somebody else's instruction. And the instruction had a shape, and the shape had a name on it that Kappa knew, because he'd been buying a tin from it every three weeks since spring.
Half a second. Completely certain. And worth, to anybody taking a statement in a bright room, precisely nothing.
I want to be careful here, because this is the part people get angriest about and almost everyone in it behaved reasonably.
The officer was twenty-six and thorough. Time, place, three men, the language, the phone's IMEI, which Kappa knew by heart because of course he did. Forty minutes, competent by every measure that exists.
Near the end he asked the ordinary question. "And what were you doing in the passage at six in the evening?"
Kappa had exactly one honest answer and three reasons not to give it.
The answer was: I know who sent them. The reasons were that the sentence after it has a crew in it, and the sentence after that has his best friend's little brother in it, and that if anyone asked how he knew, the truthful reply was that a man's face had come off in a passage and he'd seen the errand behind it, which is not a thing you say in a police station in the same week four hundred thousand people have read your thread about the floor.
So he did the other thing. He'd been awake most of a week, had a hand on his chest an hour earlier, and spent four days being asked by strangers to do the voice. He said the true thing, which was that he'd been selling a small amount of weed. And then, because he was shaking, and because it had been building for a year, he said the other true thing.
"The floor's felt wrong for a year. Everywhere. Except under me."
The officer stopped writing.
He wasn't unkind. I want that clear. He went and got a colleague, and the colleague came back with a phone in her hand and the thread open on it, because two hundred people in that building had seen it that week and one of them had put it in the group chat with a laughing face.
"Sind Sie das?" she said. Gently.
"Yes."
And after that it wasn't a robbery any more.
Nobody ever looked for the phone.
That isn't a metaphor and I'm not going to make it one. There's a file with an IMEI in it in a station on Sonnenallee and nothing was ever done with it. No cameras pulled. Nobody walked the passage. When Marguerite's people got into the system four days later, the robbery had been closed with a code that means insufficient basis to proceed.
What had been done, in the forty minutes after he mentioned the floor: his name run three times, his address added to a watch list used for something else entirely, and the word Konsum written in a box, which turns a man held against a wall into a man buying drugs in a passage.
He came in a victim and left a category. Under an hour, and nobody broke a single rule. They let him go at half past nine with a case number and told him to get some sleep.
And at 18:52, while he was still giving the statement, somebody who wasn't the police ran his name from a terminal that doesn't log queries. We only know because a woman with a trolley of box files went looking afterwards, and because the terminal does in fact log them, in a way nobody has audited since 1987.
Ricky found him on the Sunday and made a complete mess of it. I've heard the story enough times to tell it kindly.
He had a street, a bakery in a photograph, and one step on a wet pavement from a year earlier. He went up and down that street for six hours. At about four a man came out of a door with a bag for life, and Ricky's foot came down, and the floor was fine, solid all the way down, for the first time in a year, and he did what a person does when he's been looking for something for twelve months, which is all of it at once.
"Excuse me — sorry — can I talk to you for a second—"
Kappa had been robbed nineteen hours earlier, been in a police station until half past nine, slept about three hours in four days, and was, at that moment, on a subreddit with four thousand members.
"I'm not doing the voice," he said, and kept walking.
Ricky followed him for eleven metres saying "no, listen, the floor, the floor—", which is, in fairness, exactly what a person from that subreddit would say. Then he stopped himself, and stood in the middle of the pavement, and let him go.
He rang Ilse from the corner. "I found him and I frightened him."
"Good," said Ilse Varga. "That means he ran, and a man who runs is a man who's still deciding. Do not knock on his door. Wait until he wants something."
It was the correct instruction. It cost them four days and very nearly everything, and she has never once said otherwise.
The trouble is that somebody else was watching that street.
From their side: a man who owes you nothing much goes from nobody to four hundred thousand views in a week. You send three lads to collect what you've decided he must be making, and instead of going quiet he walks into a police station and spends three hours in it. And the next afternoon there's a stranger on his street, big, foreign, wrong shoes for the neighbourhood, walking up and down for six hours and then talking to him.
That reads one way to a nervous twenty-four-year-old. It's the wrong way. It isn't an unreasonable wrong way.
Sami rang Abu about it on the Sunday night, and Abu (this is the part he hasn't forgiven himself for, and Kappa has told him eleven times there was nothing else he could have said) told his brother the truth, which was that he had no idea who the man on the street was.
They swatted him at ten past six on Monday morning.
The call came from a burner, lasted fifty-one seconds, and was, technically, very good: a man at that address, a weapon, shouting, somebody else in there with him, a caller who hung up mid-sentence. That's the exact recipe. It's on the internet. It's used most often by teenagers against streamers.
What arrives, when that call is made in that city about a flat already on a watch list, is not two officers with a clipboard.
They came through the door at 06:14. He was asleep on the floor. There was shouting in a language he speaks perfectly well and couldn't understand a word of, and a light, and a knee, and at some point his cheek was against the boards and he could feel (of course he could, he is what he is) that the floor under him was the only completely solid thing in Berlin, and he started laughing, and couldn't stop.
That's the detail that decided the next four days. Not the shouting. Not the arm. A man face down on his own floor at a quarter past six, laughing, telling nine armed officers that it was fine, everything was fine, the floor was fine, look, feel it.
No weapon. Nobody else in the flat. Two of them were extremely apologetic within ninety seconds.
And there was still a man on the floor who wouldn't stop laughing or talking about the ground, and a file with a closed robbery in it and the word Konsum and a watch-list entry and two neighbour calls from the week before.
So they took him in. I'm not sure what else anyone was supposed to do. I've thought about it for eight months.
Twelve hours. That was the order: for assessment, at a clinic in the north of the city, a thing that exists to keep people alive and which does keep people alive.
Everyone in that building was decent to him. The doctor who took his history was unhurried and asked good questions, and at the end she said, kindly, that she thought he was exhausted rather than ill, that being woken by armed police is not a symptom of anything except being woken by armed police, and that she'd like him to sleep somewhere safe for one night and would see him at nine.
It was the first time in a year, he said, that anyone had listened to the whole thing without their face changing. He cried about it in the corridor, from relief.
Then they took him down to the ward, and there was a dog.
It was in the wrong place. That's the first thing. A dog in a service corridor at eight in the evening, in a clinic where no dog has any business being, no handler within thirty metres, and it didn't look up when they passed and it didn't need to.
Kappa stopped walking.
He had no words for it then and has good ones now: it was the only thing he'd seen in a year that was listening back. Everything else in the world had been furniture. That animal, ears flat, eyes somewhere else entirely, was paying attention to him the way a microphone pays attention.
"Sind Sie okay?" said the nurse.
"There's a dog," said Kappa.
"Ja," said the nurse, in the voice of somebody making a note.
Housekeeping. It's the only thing in this book that needs prior knowledge and I've already used it up once.
The ninja aren't a legend. I explained them, too briefly, in the last book: eleven thousand years ago some men in a walled city took the thing out of people's heads and put it into animals, and it never worked, and then it worked once by luck, and then, over generations, it started happening by itself, because a gift that's been stolen that many times apparently gets bored and goes public.
They're everywhere the watching is done: police, border posts, ports, the secret service of every country that has one, which is every country. A dog at an airport that finds things a little too often. A cat in an embassy. Somebody's parrot.
Most governments don't know what they've got. They know they've got a very good dog.
A few know exactly, and those few have a room, on no organisational chart, with one job: notice things that ought not to exist, and decide what to do about them.
The old one used to say this was the most dangerous arrangement in the world, and not because the people in the room are evil. Because they're frightened and under-resourced, and a frightened man with a budget will always, always choose the tidy option.
The dog in the corridor filed a report at eight in the evening.
It said, as near as that kind of thing goes into a language: the thing from the video is in this building and it is not a video.
They came for him at four in the morning.
Two men, correct in every particular. Right lanyards, right forms, a transfer order countersigned by somebody real, a van in the ambulance bay with the right plates. The night sister checked the paperwork twice because she was good at her job, and it was perfect, because the room that made it has been making perfect paperwork since before the country existed.
What she couldn't check was that the clinic he was going to had no bed booked and no record of him, and that the van's route, reconstructed later by a woman with a trolley of box files, went out of Berlin to the east and didn't stop.
She woke him gently. He's kept that.
"Herr Kral," she said, "es geht weiter."
Ricky was in the ambulance bay because of a dog.
Not that dog. A different one; the elves' mother's second cousin, so to speak. There's an arrangement between the Alliance and a certain number of animals in that city that is nine hundred years old, involves no words, and consists mostly of the animals doing whatever they like and occasionally telling somebody something. At eleven that night a magpie landed on the railing of Frau Adler's drained swimming bath and sat there for eight minutes.
"There's a room," said Frau Adler, coming down the ladder faster than a woman of her age has any right to. "There's a room in this city with people in it who have a dog's report on your man, and they've had it three hours, and they don't investigate. That's not their function. Their function is tidiness."
"What do they do?"
"They finish things," said Frau Adler. "Go."
He got there at 04:06. The van was loading.
Here's the whole of his decision, in order, as he gave it to Ilse afterwards. It takes longer to read than it took to make.
One: that's him, in the doorway, in a paper gown and his own coat, a man on each arm. I know that face. I followed it up a street on Sunday saying floor at it like an idiot.
Two: they're not police. Police don't do this at four in the morning with the engine running.
Three: there's a rule about the other shape and it's absolute. Never in public, never near ordinary people, never where it can be filmed. There are eleven cameras on this building.
Four: if I cross this yard as a man, it's two against one and it becomes a fight, and he's in the middle of it, and whatever's asleep in him wakes up in a fight.
Five: if I cross it as the other thing, there won't be a fight. Nobody fights that. They'll simply leave.
Six, the one he's not proud of, and which I think is the entire reason he's any good at this: I've been looking for you for a year, and if I'm four seconds late I'll have to live in a world where I was four seconds late.
So he changed shape in an ambulance bay in Wedding at six minutes past four in the morning.
It's on the internet. Of course it is. Nine seconds from a car-park camera, grey, high angle, watched about four hundred million times and taken apart frame by frame, and the settled adult consensus is that it's the best compositing anyone has ever done on security footage, and that the giveaway is the rain.
The rain, apparently, doesn't behave.
The rain is the only part of that footage that's completely real.
There was no roar. Ricky was trying very hard to make no noise at all, which is why it looks so calm, which is why the internet is so sure it's fake. What the two men saw was a yard with a very large thing in it. They did the arithmetic everyone does, let go of him, got in the van, reversed it into a bollard, and left.
And Kappa, alone in an ambulance bay in a paper gown, looked up at fifteen feet of the wrong thing.
And ran.
He got four steps.
Then something in him that he'd never met, that had been asleep under a lid since before his mother was born, that had woken for an hour and forty minutes in a concert hall and gone back down, sat up.
No light. No sound. Ricky says describing it is like describing the moment you stop being able to remember a word. One second he was moving; the next, the concept of moving wasn't available. Not paralysis. Paralysis happens to a body, and his body was fine, his body was furious. What stopped was the arrangement between him and the ground. His legs had been an argument he'd been winning with a floor for nineteen years, and the floor said, politely, no, and fifteen feet of dragon went down on wet tarmac like a warehouse sitting.
Kappa stopped at the gate. Turned round. He was, Ricky says, more frightened than the thing on the ground.
"What did you do?"
"I did?"
"You're on the floor!"
"I know I'm on the floor!"
He tried to get up. The tarmac declined to be involved. Rain went down the back of what he was currently using as a neck. Eleven cameras kept recording. And Ricky did the only thing available, which was to stop being fifteen feet of anything, fast, which hurts.
What was left was a soaked nineteen-year-old on his hands and knees in an ambulance bay who couldn't stand up, shouting, at the top of his voice, at a man in a paper gown:
"I just want to talk!"
A window opened on the second floor. A voice suggested, in German, that they take it elsewhere.
Kappa didn't run again. I've asked him why about six times and the answer has improved with age; the first version was "because you can't run twice", which I think is the true one.
He came back across the yard and stood over him at a careful distance. Barefoot, in a gown, in the rain.
"You followed me up the street on Sunday."
"Yes."
"You said the floor. About nine times."
"Yes."
"Are you real?"
"Yes."
"Are you going to eat me?"
"I'm a dancer," said Ricky, with enormous dignity, from the ground.
Kappa put his hands on his knees and made a sound that was mostly relief and partly something else: the noise a person makes when a year of being gently told he's ill ends in nine seconds on wet tarmac.
"Do you want to get up?"
"Very much."
And whatever it was let go, all at once, like a held breath, and Ricky's legs came back so suddenly that he sat down properly in a puddle, and the two of them stayed where they were, four metres apart, breathing.
"You're the one from the station," said Kappa.
Ricky went very still.
"Grand Central. Two in the morning. There was a rock, and there were kids, and you were—" he made a shape with his hands, big, and dropped them— "that. And you breathed on it and it didn't work and they laughed at you. I've seen it maybe forty times. I've never been to New York in my life. I've got two rent notices on my table and I sell weed to students, and I know what your grandfather's kitchen smells like." His voice went. "So either I've lost it, or you're going to say something now, and I need it to be the second one, because I've run out of the other."
The rain came down. Somewhere a bollard was being reversed off.
"There's a coffee machine," said Ricky, "at a place called the Zentrale. It makes a noise like it's thinking about you."
Kappa sat down on the kerb in a hospital gown next to a stranger and put his face in his hands.
"Oh thank god," he said. "Oh, thank god."
They went to a döner place on Hermannstraße at five in the morning because it was open, and because Bob turned up in a taxi with actual trousers.
It was not how anyone had planned it. There's a folder at Varga's with APPROACH on it in Ilse's handwriting: nine pages on consent and shock and the correct order in which to say things, by people who've done this three hundred times. Ricky had read it twice. What actually happened was two soaked men at a plastic table at dawn, one explaining badly with his hands and the other saying "sorry, go back" every ninety seconds, and a knee-high creature eating chips.
"So you're a dragon."
"Yes."
"An actual dragon."
"It's not as good as it sounds."
"It sounds fantastic."
"It's mostly night shifts."
"And there's an agency that looks after old things. And a girl who sees two days into the future, and she's the singer, the one on the posters at Kotti."
"That's Rose."
"Of course it is." He laughed, badly. "And the dog?"
"The dog," said Bob, with his mouth full, "is a colleague."
Kappa put both hands flat on the table.
"And what am I? Because you haven't said. You've said all of that and you haven't said the thing, and I can feel you not saying it, which is new, that's new for me, I've never been able to feel anyone not saying anything before this week."
And here's the part that matters more than the dragon or the van or the four hundred million views, and it's the reason this chapter is as long as it is.
Ricky didn't know.
Not wasn't allowed to say. Didn't know. Nine pages on how to tell a person what they are and not one line for the box, because the box has been empty for eight thousand years, and the woman who runs Kralle had said I have no name for this out loud, twice, to his face.
"I don't know," said Ricky. "That's the honest answer, and I'm giving it to you first because everything after this is going to be people being certain at you. Nobody knows. The woman I work for has been doing this two hundred years and doesn't know. The kobold doesn't know. The thing in the shoebox in my hotel room has been pointing at you since the second it was born and it doesn't know."
"There's a thing in a shoebox."
"There's a thing in a shoebox."
"Right." Kappa nodded slowly. "So nobody knows what's going on."
"Nobody's known what's going on for a year," said Ricky. "That's the actual situation. I've been lying awake about it since I was nineteen." He turned his cup round on the table. "But I know what you do. Do you want that instead?"
"Yes."
"The whole world's floor has been soft for a year. Everywhere. Every city, every building, every stage I've ever stood on. Like a board's been taken out from under all of it and nobody can find which one." He looked up. "You're the board."
Kappa didn't say anything for a long time.
"That's why it's fine under me," he said at last. "It's been fine under me the whole year. I thought I was the broken bit."
"No," said Ricky. "You're the bit that isn't."
Outside, the rain slowed. Four kilometres away a small thing in a shoebox sat bolt upright and said, to a girl who could see two days out:
"He's talking to him."
And in a room that's on no organisational chart, a man read a report from a dog, and a second report from two colleagues about a van and a bollard, and looked for a long time at nine seconds of security footage in which the rain does not behave.
Then he picked up a phone that only goes to one place.