The clerk in Miren proved stronger than his fear: he read the letter to the end.
His father did not ask forgiveness. But what astonished Miren even more was that he did not claim to be innocent.
His father confessed: "I forged the record of the First Audit. Not for money, power or glory. I removed one order from it and left the witness field empty. One day the city will try to enter there a person who is registered as dead but still defends the living. I hoped that person would be me. If this letter has reached you, then I was too late."
Instructions followed: which tube of the dead post was still missing from the Bureau plans, which lock in the store could be opened with a broken seal, and which files should never be read by anyone who valued their own voice. Even in the face of death, his father had looked for loopholes in rules and documents.
The final line was brief:
"Do not erase the living, even when the paper demands emptiness."
The lock on the cage clicked.
"You read slowly," Tilya whispered.
She stood on the other side of the bars, holding his spare seal between two fingers. Beside her slouched a man in a filthy coat. Some of his features looked young; others belonged to a very old man.
"This is Marek Sol," Tilya said. "He knows the tubes."
Marek bowed from the waist, but his eyes looked in different directions.
"I knew the tubes," he corrected her. "Then the tubes knew me. Not the same thing."
"Are you an auditor?"
"Was. Sometimes still am. Tuesdays, if it isn't raining."
Miren did not want to trust a madman, but without Marek he could not escape the locked store.
They escaped through the back wall of the store. Marek opened a hatch that did not appear on the plans and led them into a service passage between the copper tubes. It smelt of rust, stale gas and damp paper. Something rustled inside the tubes: letters raced through them so quickly that the walls seemed to whisper.
"Where are we going?" Miren asked.
"Somewhere they haven't yet decided what to count you as," Marek said.
"My case file?"
"Everyone in Lambern has a file. Most of them lie untouched for years. Yours won't close itself."
Tilya slipped easily along ahead of them. Children from the Lower Arches knew every passage, crack and unfinished wall in the city.
"Why did you come back?" Miren asked.
"I have your seal."
"That's a reason to leave, not come back."
"I was told that if you die the wrong way, they'll erase me too."
Now she was being honest.
They emerged into an abandoned sorting room beneath the Bureau. Sacks of letters long since declared undeliverable lay on the floor. Above them hung a sign: "Dead Post. Do Not Open Without an Order."
Marek laughed hoarsely, as if with someone else's voice.
"Best place in the city. Everyone here knows the order will never come."
Miren spread his father's letter out on a crate. The ink had not faded, and that put him on his guard. Ordinary ink would have turned grey in twelve years, but this remained black, as if the letter had only just been written.
At the bottom of the page, where there had been nothing before, a new sentence appeared:
"Reading acknowledged. Version debt opened."
Pain lanced through Miren's wrist. He clenched his teeth, rolled up his sleeve and saw the first letter, black and fine as a printer's serif. It had appeared not on his skin but beneath it, beside a blue vein.
M.
"Will it go away?" Tilya asked.
Marek turned serious at once.
"No. If you're lucky, the rest will be beautiful."
Miren wanted to claw at his wrist, but stopped himself.
He took a blank card from a dead-post crate. Affixed his seal. Instead of his name, he signed his status:
"Miren Ost, deceased witness, temporarily acting in the interests of his own case."
The letter beneath his skin went cold.
Somewhere above, in the Bureau, the alarm bell began to howl: an item of evidence had left its place of storage.
Marek smiled.
"The archive speaks with your voice, clerk. Take care it doesn't start thinking with your head."
A new cylinder dropped from one of the tubes. This time the paper inside was damp and smelt of the morgue.
"Mourning house," Miren read. "Urgent hearing of the last voice. Faceless body."
So the faceless dead man had not yet said everything.
Open in the reader