Rovik had come without guards.
He was plainly unafraid of attack. Everything here obeyed formulae and protocols, and Rovik wielded those as confidently as a soldier wielded a weapon.
"You turned off the gas," Rona said.
"I delayed the light so that the hidden audit would not become a street brawl."
"You are preparing the Lower Arches for obsolescence."
"I am preparing the city to survive."
Rona took a step towards him, and for the first time Miren saw her restrained anger become personal.
"Did you know?" she asked.
Rovik looked at the blank card in her hand.
"I knew the official version was more convenient."
He admitted exactly enough for his words to prove nothing in court.
The machines around them trembled again. A new field appeared on the sheet bearing the names of the Lower Arches:
"Auditor of the empty line: required."
Miren felt the letters on his wrist draw towards one another. M, I, R. They were waiting to be completed. He understood: the empty field was waiting for his name.
"No," Rona said.
Rovik did not even turn towards her.
"If Mr Ost refuses, I shall appoint someone else. Someone, for example, who does not consider a refusal to erase people a moral virtue."
"You led him to this door deliberately."
"I left the possibility open. He chose every signature himself."
What Miren hated most was that this too was true.
In theory, Miren could leave. He could close his father's folder and abandon Lida, Mal, Perr, the forty-seven workers and the whole of the Lower Arches to their fate. He could preserve his own memories if he agreed to live among people he had failed to save.
Which meant he could not.
"What is required?" he asked.
Rovik nodded towards the bell.
"The document is already here. There is a witness, though contaminated. The payment will be yours. The debt of the version will declare itself later."
"Very reassuring."
"More truthful than most promises."
The bell produced a metal plate. Miren was being asked to sign not an appointment to a post, but a condition:
"I accept the right to audit empty lines until the Midnight Census and answer with my personal memory for every record opened."
Rona seized Miren by the sleeve.
"If you sign, he gets what he wanted."
"If I don't, he gets the Lower Arches."
"That is his choice, not yours."
"No. It is his trap. But the choice is still mine."
Rona held on to his sleeve for several more seconds. She was not asking him to be careful. She was demanding that he not sacrifice himself by Rovik's rules.
Miren signed.
A sharp pain crushed his chest. A fourth letter appeared on his wrist. E. The name was almost complete, yet remained unfinished, and that frightened him more than the pain itself.
The bell opened the sealed sheets before him.
First he acquired a new ability.
He began to see what lay hidden behind the empty places in documents: the witness Rovik had removed; the crime the Senate had called a "measure"; the child a debt house had recorded as property; the lie the lamp police presented as established fact.
Then he understood what he had paid.
He had forgotten the smell of his father's workshop.
He remembered his father's face and voice. But he could no longer recall the smell of the workshop: coal, oil, damp paper, iron dust, bitter tea in a tin mug.
Miren swayed.
Rona caught him by the elbow.
"What did it take?"
Miren opened his mouth but could not answer at once. He tried to remember his father's workshop, and each time met emptiness where the familiar smell should have been.
"The smell," he said at last.
Rona did not ask him to explain. In her unofficial record, she was trying to preserve precisely what the city took from people.
Tilya tugged at his sleeve.
"We need to go to Lida."
They left the printing works through the Lower Passage. Above, it was still dark, but the Lower Arches were no longer asleep. People stood with candles and makeshift lanterns, holding children in their arms and clutching the restored census sheets that might now become their sentences.
Lida came up to Miren. Mal was awake. He watched Miren gravely and warily, the way small children did when they sensed a shared anxiety but did not understand its cause.
"Judge us," Lida said.
"What?"
She held out the debt ledger from Kaspar's cellar. New pages had appeared in it. They had not been printed. They had emerged among the old ones like mould on bread.
The first page read:
"Lower Arches. Event without witnesses. Sold before the Midnight Census."
The buyer named was not a debt house, a person or a ministry.
Buyer: "The Fields".
Miren turned the page. Names followed, not forty-seven but thousands. These people had not yet been written off, but they had already been sold as future emptiness.
Lida spoke quietly:
"You are the one who sees empty lines now. Tell us, are we already dead?"
People already regarded Miren as a judge simply because he alone could see exactly how they were to be stripped of their rights.
Open in the reader