Damien's file

I had seven sheets laid out and one of them read wrong. It said the counterparties named in the file would sell to her again, in the flat, confident register a real diligence desk writes in, and I had believed it while I typed it. Then I went looking for the chapter that said so, and there was not one. The only reason I caught it was a rule I had set before I started: every line on this file has to trace to a chapter, or it comes out.

The file is Damien Tang's. In chapter two he loses a container terminal to Vivienne Ho, and that evening his family hands him a folder on her: six or seven pages, a structure chart, her firm's recent transactions with the counterparties named, a note on the co-founder, three photographs. The book built that object before I opened a design file. My job was to make the thing chapter two only describes, as it would have looked ten days into a real investigation, and the discipline was narrower than I expected: not what a diligence desk would plausibly write, but what this book has already said, and only that.

A second line went the same way. It was a note on the co-founder, the kind that rounds out a profile, and chapter three said something else about him. Both cuts happened before the first version of the file existed, which is the order I would want every time: read the source, catch the invented lines against it, then lay out the page.

After that the work was obedience rather than invention. The book says there are three photographs, and it says what the only one with her in it shows: the back of her head, at the edge of a trade-press frame. I did not have to decide how visible she should be in her own file. The chapter had decided it. The identity check on the fifth sheet ends the same way, on the one fact a desk actually turns up when it runs the book's own facts about her and stops at the edge of chapter seven, where the free sample ends: nobody anywhere has recorded her dead.

That is what decides who the file is for. If you have read the seven chapters, you are holding the same paper Damien is holding, knowing what he knows and not one fact more. If you have not, you still get something real: a diligence desk being thorough about a woman with almost nothing to find.

It had to be an object rather than pages from the book, because the book is exclusive to Kindle for now and I cannot give its text away past the free chapters. A file Damien is holding in the world of the book is not the book's text. It exists because the story does, built to the specification the story gave.

The file comes with the confirmation email when you join the studio's mailing list, and I would be glad if you hung around after.

Thank you for reading.