The message landed in the building group at 9:46 p.m., and within the hour the tower had appointed itself a court. CONFIRMED CASE IN 4B, the secretary wrote. PLEASE TAKE PRECAUTIONS. He meant it kindly. He had no idea what he had unlocked.
By ten the chat had two hundred messages. Who were they? Did they go out? Someone had seen the delivery rider go up to the fourth floor — was that them, were they ordering food while the rest of us stayed disciplined? A photograph appeared, blurred, of a masked figure in the lobby that morning; eleven people declared it proof of something. The word irresponsible was used, and then the word disgusting, and the temperature in two hundred separate flats rose by the same degree.
Malini watched it scroll from her sofa on the sixth floor, thumb hovering. She knew who lived in 4B, more or less. A nurse, she thought, or a doctor — she'd seen the scrubs in the lift, the exhausted eyes above the mask. She knew that the boy in 4B sometimes answered the door alone. She knew that the fear in the chat was real, and that real fear is the most flammable thing a building holds. Her thumb hovered over the keyboard. Whatever she typed next, two hundred people were waiting to agree with it.
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