Aurora had read the newspaper at the bar on via Saragozza at twelve ten on the twenty-ninth of April. She was standing at the counter with the coffee going cold in front of her. The front-page headline: nine hundred and thirty-four million for labor. Below, in two columns: hiring incentives, fair wage, crackdown on digital labor brokerage.

She read the first column. Four hundred and ninety-seven and a half million for the hiring of young people. Bonuses for women up to eight hundred euros a month in the South. Bonuses for the unemployed over thirty-five. Tax breaks for companies that apply the fair wage set by collective bargaining.

She read the second column. Crackdown on digital labor brokerage. The platforms had to verify the identity of whoever made deliveries. Forbidden to hand over one's account. Sanctions on companies, suspension of activity for failure to oversee.

She looked for her category in the numbers. The numbers were in the first column. The second column had rules.

She paid for the coffee. She went back to deliveries.

Eight packages in the afternoon. Twelve in the evening. Roast chicken, sushi, a case of water for a lady on Sant'Orsola. All regular. All on the platform. All clean.

The chat, though, no. The chat was something else. The chat was the reason Aurora had a fixed package of deliveries on Saturday and Sunday, the golden hours, the ones that made the difference between three hundred and eighty euros a month and six hundred and twenty. The package came from Tarek. Tarek was a name.

Aurora got home at eleven forty-seven. Via San Vitale was empty. The bar shutters were down. The electric bike was completely dead. The display read thirty per cent, but the motor hadn't been pushing since the Pratello.

She went up the three flights with the bike on her shoulder, as she had for eight months. She opened the door. She leaned the bike against the magazine rack in the corridor. The bike stood lopsided, the handlebar against the wall. She didn't turn on the main light: only the kitchen one.

The phone vibrated in her pocket. She already knew. She had known since midday.

She took the phone out of her pocket. The "Bologna Sera" chat had one hundred and four members. The group photos were unrecognizable faces, Arabic writing, emojis, a Senegal flag, a stylized bicycle. The numbers were saved with codes: T-1, M-2, A-3. Aurora was B-17. No one knew her by name. Tarek had once written "ciao bella" and then never again, because he had understood she answered badly.

Tarek was a name they passed around. Not a person. A protocol. In two years of Bologna Sera, Tarek had written at different times, in different styles, with different typos. Aurora had always suspected. That night she knew.

Aurora's phone was a Samsung A14 with the glass cracked on the upper right corner. The peeling sticker on the back was from the pizzeria on via Mascarella that closed at two in the morning and where Aurora sometimes stopped to eat a slice of margherita before going home. The sticker showed a pizza with two eyes and a mouth. The eyes were two olives. The mouth was a crooked line. The sticker was losing its corner.

Aurora opened the chat settings. She selected delete. She confirmed. The chat disappeared. She went to contacts. She searched T-1. She opened it. Blocked. Deleted.

Her hands were trembling. They weren't trembling from fear. They were trembling from the round at the Pratello, from the climb up via Saragozza, from the case of water for the lady on Sant'Orsola that weighed eleven kilos.

She was about to turn off the phone when the message arrived. Number with no name. Three dots. Then: "Aurora, you deleted. I saw."

The three dots started again. They stopped. They started again. They stopped. Aurora watched them for twelve seconds. Then she put the phone on the table, face down.

She took off her jacket. She hung it on the kitchen handle. She went to the bathroom. She washed her hands with the Marseille soap her mother had sent from Lecce. She dried herself. She came back to the kitchen.

The three dots were gone. The message was still there.

Aurora opened the chat with the new number. She wrote: I don't work for you anymore.

She sent.

She blocked the number. She deleted the chat. She turned off the phone.

She stayed in the kitchen with the yellow Formica table in front of her, the chair broken on the left side, the charger dangling from the socket, and she understood something the nuns in middle school called knowing what one does not know. She didn't know whether Tarek (or Tarek's Tarek) had really understood. She knew that she had understood. She had understood that the decree was a thing that got signed.

She ate a piece of stale bread with oil. She drank tap water. She had taken out the filter pitcher in March because the filter cost nine euros and lasted a month.

The next morning she turned on the phone at six twenty. No messages. She went down the stairs. The bike was still at zero charge. She carried it on her shoulder to the charging station at Porta Mazzini. She waited for the display to climb to sixty. Then she took the first package of the morning, from a different platform, one with a contract, one that paid five euros a delivery less than the one before.

It was the first day of the decree. Nine hundred and thirty-four million euros in Rome. Nothing for Aurora. For Aurora there were rules. The rules paid five euros a delivery less.