The public rarely notice the ground beneath their feet, and thank God for that. It was awful: a laminated sheet of cream-coloured plastic stained brown along the regular routes. Each person in the airport, a stranger hoping like hell to be anywhere else as soon as possible, but together they were a ceaseless army of Nikes, Oxfords and Jimmy Choos. The crud they dragged in from the street and out of the planes smeared off their soles and onto the floor. But this wasn’t the part of their debris Ashley Gardner was interested in, even though it was the part she spent the most time with, using mop and bucket, working the skin off her hands.

The skin cells fascinated Ashley the most, shed by the billion. She had heard the average person lost two million every hour, so even if your layover was only the run from one gate to another you still left a part of yourself behind on the floor and between the fibres of the grey carpet that soaked them up beneath the waiting room chairs. Not to mention the hair—about a hundred strands a day, so at least a few lost while you dragged your carry-on bag with its wonky wheels past News Amuse and into the bar. You might not remember the weather flickering through the thick windows or what flavour muffin you choked down while you waited to board, but the airport remembered you. It kept you, at least a bit of you, turning to dust beneath the feet of new strangers.

Even if Ashley spent the rest of her life sweeping up she’d never catch every cell. And she’d spent long enough. She’d worked at the airport ever since giving up on high school. Almost three years as an airport janitor meant over two trillion skin cells lost and one hundred thousand hairs. There was more of her in this impersonal building than in the apartment she called home.

*-*

Ashley would have missed the ring if the woman hadn’t looked at her so desperately. There was trouble at the check-in desks and the food court had exploded with angry travellers who weren’t hungry so much as empty, unsatisfied and stuck where they had only meant to pause. Ashley had been ambushed. One moment she was sweeping cells in a lonely corner, and the next she was pushing through a hostile crowd, bumping shoulders with suit jackets and Hawaiian-print blouses.

The woman was almost in line. It was difficult to tell where the queue was with all the trudging and shoving going on, but she was near Hello Sushi! and infuriating someone behind her. The woman looked Ashley in the eye and a current flashed between them, recognition on the woman’s part, panic for Ashley.

Duck your head, dodge right.

Ashley followed through with the thought and slipped past the line to the other side of the chaos where the woman couldn’t follow. She was sure she didn’t know her. She should have been content with that, but the flash of desperate recognition was blazing in her mind.

She neared the wall and nudged herself and her broom forward, using the long-handled dustpan to clear the way for her feet. The strangers let her go by. She was at the edge of the food court, beside the staff entrance to the back of the restaurants, when she heard the clunk of metal against the inside of the pan.

She leaned and saw a glint among the skin cells and hair she’d collected through the building. She reached thumb and finger into the mess without any squeamishness, grasped the ring and brought it near her face.

For a moment she focussed only on its interior edge: the long gold curve where the remains of whoever had worn it last must be stuck, holding their evidence. Then she turned it and examined its scruffy sheen. It was a plain band and it had been worn for some time. Ashley was small, sometimes mistaken for a child, and the ring slipped easily onto her thumb. She couldn’t tell if it was a woman’s or a man’s. She’d never worn a ring like this herself.