Before Miren lay a sheet with a space for his signature, while forty-seven people waited in silence for his decision.
Adal Rovik did not hurry him. The secretaries stood behind the minister, Kaspar Lom trembled beside the press, and Rona still held her pistol, though there was no longer any point in shooting. The forty-seven names on the sheet were printed with identical precision. Nothing in the document suggested that behind each name stood a living person.
"You call this death," Rovik said. "That is imprecise."
Miren did not take the pen.
"And what does the ministry call living people it intends to hand over to the debt houses?"
"Obsolete versions."
The cellar grew so quiet that Miren heard Lida Voss's child breathing. The boy was called Mal. He slept against her shoulder, one small fist clutching the edge of her dirty collar.
Rovik spoke gently, almost wearily.
"The body will continue to exist. Its labour will be credited against the debt. Registered children will receive ration cards. The city will lose nothing."
"Except people."
"A person is more than a body, Mr Ost. A person is an entry, a certificate, rights, duties and a place in the common order. When an old entry threatens that order, it is replaced with a new one. You are a clerk. You should understand the difference between destruction and correction."
Not once did Rovik say that he meant to kill these people. He merely declared their previous entries invalid. But in Lambern, once those words were spoken, a person lost their name, their rights and their freedom.
Lida Voss was the first to rise. Her legs buckled after the sleepless night, but she held the child firmly.
"Enter Mal," she said to Miren.
"Lida," one of the workers whispered.
"Do me afterwards," she said without looking at the others. "Him first. At least let my son not be counted as the remainder of a debt."
Miren felt the letters twitch beneath his skin. A black, slender M and I had already emerged on his wrist. If he signed, Rovik would give him a place in his order. If he refused, the minister would declare him useless even as a dead man, and the forty-seven workers would be handed over to the debt houses.
He took the sheet Rovik had placed before him and turned it blank side up.
"I cannot make the dead living," Miren said.
Something barely perceptible shifted in Rovik's gaze. Not fear. Interest.
"A sensible beginning."
"But they can witness for one another."
One of the secretaries snorted.
"The dead cannot serve as witnesses."
"Correct," Miren said. "Which means we need a witness who is not named in your protocol as the officiating official."
He looked at Rona.
Rona understood him before he could finish.
"No," Otto Krey said from the stairs.
Once again, he had appeared at the worst possible moment.
"Inspector Veyr, you will not sign an unlawful transfer of death."
Rona did not take her eyes off Miren.
"If I sign as an inspector, the ministry will declare it a conflict of duty and annul the document."
"Yes," Miren said.
"If I sign as a private individual, I will be declared a contaminated witness."
"Yes."
"And I will be unable to give official testimony until a commission restores my right to do so."
"Yes."
One corner of her mouth lifted.
"You are remarkably bad at asking for help."
"I am also dead."
"I had noticed."
Rona laid her pistol on the table and removed the slender ring set with lamp glass from her finger. It gave an inspector the right to testify on behalf of the police, and its seal was accepted by every court in the city.
Otto stepped down.
"Veyr."
Rona smashed the ring against the edge of the press.
The glass broke with a quiet crack, and the light inside went out. Rona picked up a shard, cut her finger and left a bloody print on the blank sheet.
"Rona Veyr," she said. "Private individual. Living witness. I see forty-seven living people and one child who must not answer for someone else's debts."
Miren's breath caught.
They worked until dawn.
Miren constructed a chain of testimony. Lida confirmed the identity of the old typesetter, the old man that of the boy with the tag, the boy that of the woman with diseased lungs, the woman that of the porter, and the porter that of Lida. No one testified for themselves. Tilya still held the stolen seal and ran between the table and the press, placing the mark of the Bureau on every new sheet. The Bureau itself had not yet managed to decide whether the seal of its dead clerk could be considered valid.
At first the people spoke quietly, afraid of making a mistake. Then the old typesetter got the porter's surname wrong, and the porter suddenly gave a hoarse laugh through his tears. The woman with diseased lungs began laughing too, immediately coughed and swore. Someone handed her a tin mug of warm water.
The noise woke Mal. Lida tried to rock him with one arm while holding the sheet in the other, but the boy reached for the inkwell and left a tiny fingerprint in the margin.
"That does not count," Rovik's secretary said.
"It certainly does," Lida replied.
The people drew benches together, shared a crust of bread, warmed their chilled fingers over the lamp and carefully checked the names in the testimonies. As Miren wrote, they helped their neighbours ensure that not a single error slipped through.
On the forty-first testimony, Miren felt what the price would be.
A third letter emerged on Miren's wrist.
R.
Another version of him began to speak inside Miren's mind: it smiled less, spoke more coldly and knew how to make people sign away their own losses and thank it for preserving order.
He did not let that version take the pen.
Lida signed the forty-seventh sheet. Not for herself. For Mal.
"He is living," she said. "Small, but living."
Miren applied the final seal.
The press, which Kaspar had operated until then, suddenly lurched of its own accord. The sheets passed through the roller one after another. On each of them, the black words 'died before collection' blurred like wet soot, and a new entry appeared in their place:
"Living. Requires an in-person census."
The people did not shout: they were too tired. They touched the necks from which tags had hung only recently, and wept quietly. Lida kissed Mal's ink-stained finger.
Then a forty-eighth sheet came out of the press.
There was no name on it.
Only a smooth oval in place of a face, printed in grey ink, and a single line:
"Living. Witness absent."
When he saw the sheet, Rovik showed real unease for the first time that night.
"That is why I wanted you to sign correctly," he said.
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