When the gas went out in Lambern, the city seemed to return to the past.
The lamps on the bridges and at police posts went dark, along with the signs, the census chapels and the windows of the debt houses. In the darkness, only water, breathing and footsteps could be heard. The people of the Lower Arches were accustomed to managing without light, but panic broke out on the Upper Bridges.
Rona tried to light the police lamp, but it would not work without the ring. The glass inside the lantern clouded over.
"Rovik?" Tilya asked.
"Who else could switch off a city and call it a precaution?" Rona replied.
A cylinder dropped from the tube of the dead post. It bore the seal of the Ministry of the Census.
Miren opened it.
"In view of the threat of version chaos, a covert audit of the Lower Arches is being conducted. Disputed persons are required to remain where found. Movement without light will be deemed a refusal to bear witness."
Lida and Mal were in the Lower Arches. Forty-seven workers whose rights had only just been restored had been ordered to sit in the dark and await the ministry's decision.
Tilya was already standing by the hatch.
"We won't make it through the streets in time."
"Then how do we get there?" Rona asked.
"Through the old service passages."
She opened the hatch, and the smell of copper, damp and old paper billowed out. The tubes of the dead post beneath the mourning house descended, rose towards the Middle Streets and divided at the old gas main. Tilya knew those passages as well as other children knew the way to the bakery.
"You won't fit through there," she told Rona.
"I will."
"You're an adult."
"Today that's a temporary status."
Miren climbed in first: the hatch had opened only because of his status as a dead man. Engraved on the copper cover were the words: "For the undelivered only." A living person would have been burnt, but Miren's hand felt only cold. The letters M, I, R on his wrist darkened.
The tubes were cramped. Tilya went ahead, checking the marks stamped into the walls at every turn with the stolen seal. Rona followed Miren and did not once ask them to stop, though she struck her shoulder twice and nearly cried out. Senna stayed with Perr to keep him from speaking in someone else's voice again.
The old tubes hummed with the movement of the city overhead. The gas had been shut off somewhere above them and the pressure had dropped, which was why the lamps would not light.
"Here," Tilya said.
They emerged into the old main. A sign hung on the wall: "Closed since the First Audit. Entry forbidden to the living."
"How fortunate," Miren said.
"Don't start enjoying your status," Rona said.
"Too late. It opens doors."
"And then those doors will close behind you just as easily."
At the end of the main stood an iron door without a handle. It had no lock. Only an empty field for the witness's name.
Miren pressed his palm to it. Nothing.
Rona pressed hers to it. Nothing.
Without asking, Tilya struck the field with the stolen seal.
The door opened.
"I told you: I'm nowhere," she said. "Sometimes it helps."
Beyond the door lay a printing works nothing like Kaspar's establishment. Kaspar's presses thundered and people worked there, but here the silence was absolute. The walls of the enormous circular hall narrowed towards the top like the inside of a bell. A black metal clapper hung in the centre, surrounded by presses holding sheets of thin, dark metal. On some sheets the names were still legible; on others they had been ground away. Some sheets remained blank, and it hurt to look at them.
"The Bell Printing Works," Rona whispered.
Miren knew of it only from rumours. Clerks' children were told that the names of those who had survived the First Audit had once been printed here. If a name was absent from the metal sheet, a person might live another day, a year or ten years, but the registers would gradually cease to recognise them.
A folder bearing the surname Ost lay on the furthest press.
Miren approached it slowly. Inside there was neither an indictment nor any evidence that his father had sold the city, as the teaching copies claimed.
There was a record of a district's rescue.
Miren's father was listed not as a criminal, but as the author of an unlawful certificate. He had forged neither a death certificate nor an alibi, but entered witnesses who had not actually been there. Because of that entry, the people marked for erasure had kept their names.
And at the bottom, beneath the last metal line, stood that same empty field:
"Future witness: ________"
Beside the field was a recent notation.
Not his father's.
Rovik's.
Miren read it aloud, and his own voice sounded like a stranger's:
"Leave vacancy open until the Midnight Census. If the son appears, use in place of the absent witness."
Rona swore quietly and with utter matter-of-factness.
"He was waiting for you."
"He was waiting for my father's son," Miren said. "A man whose name could close the empty field."
Above them, through the stone, came the first stroke of the Senate's great bell. The gas did not return. But the presses around them began to wake. The metal sheets trembled, and a new line appeared on one of them:
"Covert audit begun. Lower Arches: prepare for obsolescence."
Tilya clutched the stolen seal.
"Lida's there."
Miren closed his father's folder.
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