The mask was custom-made, Italian leather, dyed to match the colour of Silas Winterbourne's skin as closely as possible. From three feet away, no one could tell. From three inches away, they could. Silas made sure they never got closer than three feet.

It was November 1922, and the trading floor of Wall Street was a roaring sea of men in dark suits, their voices rising above the ticker tapes and the shouting and the electric excitement that made the air itself feel alive. Silas stood at his desk on the seventh floor, his face hidden behind the mask, his eyes calm beneath the brim of his hat.

"Winterbourne!" shouted Tommy Callahan from the next desk. "You seeing this? Rubber's about to blow. I'm telling you, buy the—"

"I'm not interested in rubber," Silas said quietly.

"You never are. But you're always right. That's what gets me."

Silas didn't answer. He was looking at the ticker tape, watching the characters crawl across the paper like a message from another world. He had learned to read the market the way a sailor reads the sea—not by predicting the waves, but by understanding the currents beneath them.

He had learned this in the Pacific, six months ago, when the SS Veridian went down in a storm that came out of nowhere.

The memory was not painful. That was the strange thing. Silas had expected it to be. He had expected to lie awake at night, haunted by the image of the ship going down, by the sound of men screaming, by the cold water filling his lungs. But he didn't. He had seen death, and death had looked at him, and then it had looked away.

After that, nothing on Wall Street frightened him. Not the losses, not the margins, not the men in power who thought they could bend the market to their will. Silas had looked into the abyss, and the abyss had blinked.

"Mr. Winterbourne."

The voice came from the doorway. Silas turned slowly. The office had emptied by now—it was past seven—and the great room was filled with the golden light of a New York autumn evening.

The woman standing in the doorway was someone he had seen before, though they had never spoken. She worked on the tenth floor, in the securities division. She had dark hair and dark eyes and a way of moving that made Silas think of water—smooth, inevitable, impossible to resist.

Her name was Daisy. He had learned it from a colleague who had seen her name on a memo. Daisy Chen. She was American-born, though her parents were from San Francisco's Chinatown. She spoke three languages and could read a balance sheet faster than any man on the floor.

Silas had never spoken to her because he wore the mask. Some things, he had decided, were better left unknown.

"I was wondering if you'd like to have a drink," Daisy said. "There's a place on Broadway. They don't ask questions."

Silas studied her face. She looked nervous. She looked brave.

"Why me?" he asked.

"Because you're the most interesting person on this floor. And because I'm tired of pretending that the mask makes you someone else."

Silas was silent for a long moment. Then he took off his hat.

"Meet me at eight," he said.

The bar on Broadway was dark and warm and smelled of gin and cigarette smoke. Daisy was already there when Silas arrived, sitting at a corner table with two glasses of whiskey. She didn't flinch when he sat down. She didn't look away.

"Tell me about the ship," she said.

So he told her. He told her about the storm, the sinking, the thing in the water that had torn through the hull like it was paper. He told her about the cold, the dark, the moment when he thought he was going to die.

"And when you thought you were going to die," Daisy said quietly, "what did you feel?"

Silas looked at her across the table. The candlelight caught the gold in her hair, and for a moment he saw something in her eyes that he had not expected: understanding.

"I felt nothing," he said. "And that was the most terrifying thing of all."

Daisy nodded slowly. She took a sip of her whiskey and set the glass down.

"I know what it's like," she said, "to look at the world and see nothing. I do it every day, on this floor, in this city. Everyone is smiling and shaking hands and talking about profits and growth, but underneath—" She stopped. She looked at Silas's mask. "Underneath, we're all just trying to figure out how to keep going."

Silas reached up and touched the edge of the mask. He had never taken it off for anyone. Not the doctors, not the tailors, not the men at the bank who asked questions they shouldn't have asked.

"What if I told you," he said slowly, "that underneath this mask, I'm not even human anymore?"

Daisy smiled. It was a small smile, but it reached her eyes.

"Then I'd tell you that neither am I."

They drank until the bar closed. They did not discuss the market. They did not discuss their careers or their futures or the things that mattered on Wall Street. They talked about the sea, and the stars, and the strange loneliness of living in a city of ten million people and feeling completely alone.

When Silas walked home at three in the morning, the streets of New York were quiet. The gas lamps cast long shadows on the wet pavement, and the air smelled of rain and coal smoke. He touched the mask as he walked, feeling the leather against his skin, and for the first time since the accident, he wondered if the mask was protecting him from the world or from himself.

He would not take it off. Not yet. But he knew, with a certainty that surprised him, that one day he would. And when he did, Daisy would be there to see what lay beneath.

New York stretched before him, glittering and cold and full of people who were all, in their own way, wearing masks. Silas Winterbourne walked into the city, and for the first time in six months, he did not feel alone.

// OTMES-v2-Code: TI=58.00 | M1=5.0,M2=6.5,M3=5.5,M4=6.0,M5=7.5,M6=3.0,M7=3.0,M8=6.0,M9=4.0,M10=7.0 | N1=0.70,N2=0.50,N3=0.50 | K1=0.40,K2=0.80 | R=0.40,I=0.55 | θ=45.0° | Classification: T4-沉沦级-JazzAge