She clicked out of the gif and returned to the thumbnails. Switched playlists so she could hear Chris Isaak singing “Wicked Game,” a song that always placed her on Karachi’s beach at night, the moon low and full, the sand cool beneath her feet and Babar’s lips warm as he kissed her out of sight of the rest of the party; she had kept her eyes closed, imagined someone less safe than a boy her parents trusted her with. Now, eyes wide open, she scrolled and clicked and zoomed in. She knew men like Hammad, had grown up with so many of them, continued to meet them through Maryam, who had held firmly on to her childhood connections. He was shallow and vain, that was written all over him. Perhaps cruel, perhaps corrupt, why pretend vanity was likely to be his worst characteristic? But that hand on his wife’s hip, the way she leaned into him, the posed perfection of it all—he kept his affairs discreet, starting things up with women in faraway countries he might visit on work for a few days a year, and she turned a blind eye when he slipped up. Zahra remembered his hand on her torso, the first sexual touch of her life, and shivered—memory becoming anticipation.

  The word Maryam had dropped into her consciousness, and she pushed it out. Thirty years ago, and she didn’t have to know anyway.

  Just for the record, I’ve always been completely appropriate, she wrote in the messaging app.

  It was the middle of the night in Singapore. She ate her dinner, watched two episodes of Line of Duty, spent a good while texting with a group called Keeping It Real made up of four women friends who hadn’t known each other a decade ago but were now in daily conversation about their triumphs and irritations, the TV shows they were watching, the people on social media they despised for their attention-seeking behavior wrapped up in the guise of good politics. (They were her social media filters, these friends, sending her screenshots of anything that seemed amusing or enraging or necessary to be aware of.) She told them about her exchange of messages with a man from long ago and they cheered the return of frisson to her life. One of them said she admired Zahra’s ability to keep sexual relations in a little corner and get on with everything else; another said thank god for Zahra’s clandestine entanglements, otherwise she’d be too impeccable to bear. The third, Rose, who worked with Zahra, said, these messages are on an encrypted app, right?

  She was reading in bed when her screen lit up.

  I’ve been watching you online

  Creepy

  Self-improving

  I’ve learned so much about the evils of ID cards

  She smiled at that. She’d recently been the keynote speaker at a human rights conference in Belfast, where she’d spoken of the civil liberty implications of the government’s plans to introduce the cards. She’d been in a trouser suit, largely hidden behind a podium. While he was watching that, she had been looking at him on a beach with his shirt unbuttoned.

  Glad to provide civic instruction

  What can I provide you with?

  I can’t think of a thing

  You’ve been thinking about it

  Tell me what you’ve been thinking

  Goodnight, Hammad

  Goodnight, Goddess

  A tall steel gate in an unpromising street in King’s Cross led into a cobblestoned yard dominated by a structure that looked like two shipping containers made primarily of glass piled on top of each other. These were the premises of Venture Further—a conference room and smaller meeting rooms in the downstairs container, the offices of the three partners and seven other employees upstairs. Bike racks, a ping-pong table, and rough-hewn wooden tables for coffee-sipping and chitchat in the yard fostered the impression of a company that was youthful, convivial, and open to ideas.

  Sometimes it was exactly that, even if there was never time for mere chitchat in the yard. The company funded start-ups, and Maryam loved nothing more than the optimism and energy that came at the beginning of the process, ideas shimmering, waiting to be guided toward their potential. Other days, and today was one of them, you could start the day failing to convince your co-investors to enter another round of funding for something flawed but fixable, and then move on to ejecting a young founder-CEO from his own company, except it wasn’t his own, as she’d had to point out in an ugly, tear-filled meeting, it belonged to the investors, and if the founder-CEO consistently failed to listen to any of the advice that would have allowed him to make a success of it, then Maryam and the rest of the board could remove him from the equation and see what profit could yet be salvaged from the wreck of his dreams. He’d called her a cunt on his way out.

  At least the sun had finally emerged, and she could hold her next meeting at a table in the yard, drinking coffee from the PhD-level coffee machine that no one but the office manager knew how to operate.

  Fat girls don’t stay on front pages, Golden Boy had said, but he hadn’t counted on the girl’s father with his “caramel skin and long lashes,” as one columnist gushed, and that Habib Ali air of decency. The occasional mutterings from all sectors of the media about the corrupting influence of social media on children had found a face and a voice in the guise of a British Pakistani psychiatrist, so eloquent about the harm done to his daughter, his anger that it had been allowed to happen, his fear for all the young girls and boys to whom it was happening right now. He seemed to be everywhere—The Guardian, Good Morning Britain, The Daily Mail, Mumsnet, gal-dem. Tomorrow morning he was due to be interviewed on Today, and rumor had it that he would shift his focus from a generalized demand for social media companies to “do better” to a call for government to include language in its forthcoming Internet Safety Bill that held tech bosses responsible for the hate and bullying allowed to proliferate on their apps. The phrase “criminal charges” was being thrown about. A petition had already been drafted in the name of his daughter, calling for government action, but petitions didn’t bother Maryam. Soft-spoken men with an air of decency who were championed by both the left- and right-wing media did. Metro had called him the Nation’s Favorite Dad.

  “Shut him down,” the prospective buyer of Imij had said, and venture capitalists with stakes in other social media companies, including her co-partners, said the same.

  Eleven minutes after he was due, the man she was waiting for strolled into the yard, looking particularly Golden Boy with a recently acquired tan.

  “All this irritation is making my gut act up,” he said, raising a glass bottle in salutation. “Kefir,” he added, and offered the bottle to her after sipping directly from its mouth.

  “I don’t have long,” Maryam said, keeping her tone mild so that he’d think she was indifferent to his power plays.

  “Sorry, sorry,” he said, with public-school-boy contrition. Maryam had been his first investor, the first to believe his vision of what was possible for Imij, and he treated her with a courtesy, sometimes even a deference, that he extended to no one else.

  “You’ve tried again to set up a meeting with him?” she said.

  “He’s still adamant that he’ll only have a conversation when we send him proposals to change not only our policies on bullying but also our algorithms.”

  The algorithms were the shark under the water in all this. The man’s daughter—Tahera was her name—had started to look at self-harming posts after the pig-girl image went viral, and very quickly, her father claimed, her feed was flooded with related content, pushing her over the edge. Thankfully, very little could be proved about Imij’s algorithms, and most media outrage continued to center on the bullying. For the moment, at least.

  “What does he want us to do, subvert the entire give-people-more-of-what-they-want ethos of the internet? It’s undemocratic, that’s what it is.” He wasn’t looking at her while he spoke, swiping his fingers along his phone screen.

  “I hope that’s not the proposed strategy you’ve come to talk to me about.” She waved her coffee cup at the office manager, who was knocking on a window upstairs to tell her that she had a conference call starting in a few minutes, hoping this would indicate both that she was coming up soon and that she needed a refill.

  He smiled as he passed her his phone, and she saw something of Saba in his expression—the joy of knowing an unpleasant secret—before she looked down at the screen.

  There he was, the Nation’s Favorite Dad, sitting at a wooden table much like the ones in the yard, leaning close to a copper-haired woman who wasn’t the wife from the front page of the newspapers. Her hand cupped his face, his mouth pressed against her palm.

  “This was the day after his daughter was released from hospital,” Golden Boy said, very pleased with himself. “Imagine, she’s at home with her bandaged wrists and he’s out there doing this.”

  “Is it genuine?”

  “God, yes, of course. I’m not an idiot.”

  “Is it from Imij?”

  Golden Boy made a vague movement of his head that ended as a nod.

  “And how did you find it? I assume he didn’t put it up on his profile page.” The Nation’s Favorite Dad had an Imij account, but he’d taken down all the pictures he’d previously posted—mostly of flowers—and replaced them with a screen that said #JusticeForTahera #ChangeNow against a black backdrop.

  “Gift horses, mouth.”

  “Sometimes a gift horse is a Trojan horse and if you look in its mouth you’ll see the soldiers hiding inside ready to slit your throat while you sleep at night.”

  “No one will ever know.”

  Almost certainly true. Anyone with an Imij account—or even an anonymous user—could find a photograph on a public account and choose to draw attention to it. There would be nothing to link it back to Imij’s facial-tagging feature, which allegedly gave users control over who could tag them, was only activated for those who had opted in to the tag function, and absolutely didn’t give any face-tagging powers to the Imij CEO beyond his own account.

  “You clever boy,” she said to Golden Boy, who sat taller at the compliment. It was possible he had a crush on her. The offer of the kefir bottle from his mouth to hers took on a different shade of meaning. “Show me? It’ll be our secret.”

  He smiled, delighted. Men like him always wanted to show off the toys they’d built.

  He opened the Imij app, entered the account name @KoffeeKraave into the search bar, and scrolled down to a picture of a man—older, Japanese—smiling formally at a camera. He was in a cafe, chalk-written menu on the wall above his head. The tags identified him as @Koffee Kraave’s grandfather. Golden Boy sat back, watching her as she looked at the photograph. She zoomed into a corner of the image. Behind the man’s shoulder, a couple sat at a table at the far end of the cafe, caught in a moment of intimacy.

  “Such exceptional face-tagging features,” she said, waving away the office manager, who was approaching with a cup of coffee.

  Golden Boy smiled and made a gesture like curtains closing, to say that was as much as he was going to say.

  “So, next steps?” he said.

  She AirDropped the picture from his phone to her own. “I’ll take care of it,” she said, standing up. She tapped her watch and he said of course, apologies again for being late. When she looked back from the entrance to the Venture Further offices, he was sitting on a ping-pong table, swigging from his kefir bottle, legs splayed, the April blue sky his backdrop. Master of the Universe. His face had never known, would never know, anything like the expression of the couple in the picture at the cafe. Open, unguarded, given the illusion of safety by a strength of feeling for each other that made everything else disappear.

  The world was exactly as her grandfather had always taught her it was. Terrible and brutal, unforgiving. But she also knew the truth that followed on from that, which he had failed to understand: Hold close the ones you love, protect them. There is no other source of light.

  Unexpectedly last year, middle age had announced its onset in the form of blurred words on the page and a backache that burrowed deep and didn’t want to leave until an osteopath performed an exorcism. So now Zahra’s office had been augmented with reading glasses, an exercise ball, and a ridiculously expensive orthopedic chair. She took off her glasses, stood up from the chair, rolled the ball out from under her desk, and bounced up and down on it, lengthening her spine, working her core. Layla’s ceramic sculpture looked at her from a bookcase near the door—an old, heavyset woman whose naked body had lost its battle with gravity, sitting with her hands on her knees, head thrown back in laughter. “You’re right, it is absurd,” Zahra said, getting off the ball mid-bounce. She pulled the privacy screen over the whiteboard that took up one long wall of her office and rolled up the blinds covering the floor-to-ceiling windows that looked out onto a street market, noisy with lunch clientele from around Victoria.

  Office workers queued beside the blue-tented kiosks, their presence altering the character of the street for a couple of hours every afternoon. The paella and curries were doing brisk business, though once summer set in, the wraps—Greek, Mexican, Lebanese—would dominate. If summer set in. Some years it seemed to pass London by entirely. And yet, it was true, she did love London’s weather, its changeability. Astonishing, the extent to which this city had stolen into her heart. Some days a particular quality of light would make her catch her breath and think, April, or July, or October, or whatever month it was in which the light looked as it did in no other month, no other place in the world. Right now, the afternoon light was falling softly. She’d often read about such light in books while growing up but hadn’t really understood what it meant until she came to England. Softly wasn’t a word you’d ever think to use about the afternoon light in Karachi, which ran the gamut from bright to harsh.

  “Have you heard of the High Table?” Rose said, entering the office with her usual brisk manner. Rose was head of Legal and the person Zahra called when something awful happened in the world and it was essential to speak to someone who responded to it emotionally exactly in sync with you. Rose’s Bognor Regis upbringing was about as far from Zahra’s Karachi childhood as possible, and yet it was one of those friendships that was wholly explicable to the outside world.

  “Is this another dig at my Oxbridgeness?”

  “No. I just had lunch with Clare.” Clare was a mutual friend, an investigative journalist for openDemocracy. “It’s a new elite donor club for the Increasingly Shameless Party. Pay two hundred thousand pounds into their coffers and win yourself unprecedented levels of government access.”

  “They really are shameless,” Zahra said, kicking the exercise ball toward Rose, who booted it under the desk with a deftness that came from weekends spent playing football with women half her age. “Which arseholes are giving them two hundred thousand pounds?”

  Rose raised her hands toward the ceiling. “Shockingly, they seem to be dragging their feet about declaring their donations.”

  “God, it’s dispiriting.” She had seen four Prime Ministers come and go in her time at CCL, and with each change of administration she and her team had effectively lobbied for changes in legislation—even when the governing party had a parliamentary majority there were always rebels or restive backbenchers or the ones who put civil liberties above party loyalty. The rolling back of anti-terror laws, amendments to the Hate Crimes Bill, an end to the Snoopers’ Charter—all these were, in part, CCL victories. Britain was a different place, a better place, because of this office. She’d made her father so proud.

  But there was a new character to Westminster now—all rebels had been expelled from the party, and those who remained were in lockstep with the new government and its sky-high popularity in the polls. It was hard to see when or how any parliamentary victory would come again. As for legal victories, it was clear the government was planning to sidestep court rulings wherever it could, while working on legislation to curtail the power of judges.

  “Stop being self-indulgent,” Rose said with the brisk impatience of someone who had been in enough wars, personal and professional, to know how luxurious a position despair was. She walked across to Zahra’s desk, extracted a chocolate-covered McVitie’s from a drawer, and retreated to her office down the hall.

  She thought she should be allowed a few minutes of self-indulgence. At a conference last night, the Home Secretary had amped up her line about Zahra “siding with criminals” to “siding with criminals and terrorists.” This in reference to CCL’s campaign against the Anti-Protest Bill, as it had come to be known, though the government had a far more euphemistic name for it: Security and Sentencing Bill. Zahra knew from overheard comments in the office that the online abuse had peaked again.

  She returned to looking out the window. There was a narrow corridor between one blue kiosk and the next, through which she could see Azam, the baker’s assistant, in the doorway of Scrummy across the road. She waved at him and he walked out to the pavement, pointed at himself and then at her, and tapped his watch, raising his index finger. She nodded, yes, of course he could come and see her for a minute. Azam often came into the CCL offices midafternoon with lemon bars and brownies from the morning bake, insisting they would go to waste if his favorite English people didn’t eat them—everyone with a British passport was “English people” to Azam, including his wife, who had been born in Kabul like him but had come to London as a child. He couldn’t wait to become English people himself.