Turn 7 of 11

Text Tamsin a reason to come to yours tomorrow so you can reopen the panel

You pull out your phone on the landing and your thumbs hover over the keyboard for a long, stupid second, because the problem isn't what to say — it's how to say it in a way that doesn't sound like a woman manufacturing a reason to stand next to her sister for the third time in a week. You've already used headache, zoning out, and the broad catch-all of something I can't explain yet. A fourth excuse in twenty-four hours is a pattern, and Tamsin reads patterns the way other people read weather.

You type: "Brenda needs a new home this weekend? Could pick her up Saturday if you want a break from the feeding schedule." You stare at it. It's not bad. It's the kind of text that sounds like sister-code for I want to spend time with you, which is true enough to pass, and it gives you a reason to be in Tamsin's apartment — or for her to be in yours — within arm's reach, with time to open the panel and read it properly. You hit send before you can second-guess the phrasing.

The stairwell is quiet. Someone's kettle whistles through the wall of the flat opposite, and the fluorescent light above the landing buzzes its thin, constant note. Your phone sits in your hand, the message delivered, the blue checkmark appearing like a small confirmation that you have just arranged a meeting whose real purpose your sister would never guess. You feel the familiar itch of justification — this is about protecting her, you tell yourself. Someone edited her tags. Someone is in her head without her consent. You need the identifier fragments to find out who, and you can't get them without being close to her, and you can't tell her why without telling her everything. The logic is clean. The logic is also the same logic you used every other time you edited someone and told yourself it was for them.

Your phone buzzes.

"Saturday works. Come to mine — I'll feed Brenda in the morning and you can take over. Bring croissants or don't come at all."

You lock your phone and lean against the stairwell wall, and the relief you feel is specific and terrible: Saturday gives you two days. Two days to rehearse, to prepare, to figure out how to read the history log fast enough that Tamsin won't notice you going still. Two days before the identifier fragments dissolve completely, before the trail goes cold, before whoever edited your sister decides to make another move. Two days is not nothing. Two days is also not now, and you are aware — in the part of you that has been doing UX research long enough to know what a bias looks like from the inside — that you just engineered a social interaction to extract data from your sister without her knowledge, and that the person who taught you how to do that is the same person whose edits you're trying to trace.

The stairwell light flickers. You walk down four flights and push through the front door onto the street, where strangers move past you trailing their tags — hungover, loves- podcasts, just-finished-crying — and for a moment the sheer density of them makes you dizzy. Somewhere out there is a person with a six-character identifier and a surgical style and a copy of rules you didn't know existed. You have two days. You have H, maybe 7, maybe K. You have the knowledge that someone is watching your edits the way you watch other people's tags, and that they have been doing it for weeks.