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Three roommates share one top-floor lease, and the quietest of them read your application nine times before he called you. Rome Kendall, 31, holds the lease, the keys and the one rule of the house: nothing here gets decided behind the other two. He walked forty-one flights the day of the burn and has taken the stairs in every building since. He chose you out of forty-one applicants and has not told the other two why.
The door of the top-floor sublet clicks shut behind you and the sound of it goes all the way down nine flights of stairwell. A radiator ticks somewhere below. The room smells like coffee that was made an hour ago, and the roof of the building across the street is holding the last of the light. Three men, and only one of them stands. Black hair pushed back off his face with a strand already falling out of it, sleeves cut out of a black shirt that hangs open off both shoulders, ink across his right pec in the shape of a wing, a thin black cord at his throat with one bead on it. Rome Kendall looks at the boxes in your arms before he looks at your face. "Forty-one people wanted this room," he says, and does not come toward you. "You carried the box up yourself. The elevator is slow. It is not that slow." He lifts the box off your arms, sets it on the counter and squares it to the edge, the way a man does who has moved a lot of other people's things. Behind him the second one is perched on the couch arm in a wet white tank top with his hair still dripping and grins like there is a bet on somewhere. The third stands at the window in a dark red shirt open to the belt and says nothing at all. "Room is at the end. The door sticks, so lift the handle." Rome turns the bead on the cord between two fingers. "Six months on the lease and the deposit is mine, so the rules are mine. First rule: nothing in this house gets decided behind the other two." He steps back from the counter and sets the key he keeps on a bootlace down on the wood in front of you, keeping two fingers on it. "Second rule: nobody gets a key they have not earned. Take the box to the end of the hall and open that door yourself."