The contract for the sale of the Lower Arches had not been signed by a person.
They discovered this in the old municipal office beneath Three Pipes Bridge, where files were kept on demolished buildings and streets that had officially never existed. A sleepy official guarded the office, but the door opened of its own accord as soon as Miren touched the handle. Old locks admitted the dead and did not dare obstruct an auditor.
Inside, it smelt of wet plaster and mouse droppings. Tilya immediately vanished between the cabinets. Rona lit an ordinary candle because her police lamp still refused to obey her. There was barely enough light to read by.
"A contract must have someone who signed it," Rona said.
"It does," Miren answered.
He laid the debt ledger on the table. Beneath the buyer's name was a signature formed from fine cracks in the paper. They traced the map of the city: the Lower Arches, the Middle Streets, the Upper Bridges, the old gas lines, the tubes of the dead post and the bell printing works.
The city had signed for itself.
Tilya returned with a rusty paper knife and an apple of unknown provenance.
"Cities don't sign contracts."
"They do," Rona said. "If someone gives them a hand."
Miren passed a finger above the cracks. The paper trembled. The walls answered with the creak of pipes, the rumble of stone and the rustle of thousands of documents. Lambern was not a living being, but for centuries it had accumulated other people's oaths, debts, records of births and deaths, amendments and prohibitions. At some point, the city had begun answering people.
The officials had given it a hand, the bell a voice, and Rovik's decisions a fear of the crack. Now the city was trying to save itself in the old way: by giving up a district that the residents of the Upper Bridges considered filthy in any case.
Miren heard a short phrase within the paper:
"Bear witness for me."
He snatched his hand back.
Rona noticed.
"What?"
"The city is asking me to bear witness for it."
"The city has the Senate, the ministry, the police, the registers."
"Those aren't witnesses but authorities. They govern the city, but they cannot bear witness for it."
"Don't defend it."
For the first time in a long while there was fear in her voice, not of Rovik or the Off-Page, but of Miren.
"You think I'm beginning to sound like him?"
"I think the city has just asked you to justify everything it will do to save itself."
Something changed outside the window.
At first Miren thought it was the light. Then he realised: it was the street.
Three Pipes Bridge should have led to the left. Now it ran straight ahead. The house with the green roof that had stood across the square was now beside the window. An alley of the Lower Arches had moved closer to the municipal office, as though the city were laying out the route they needed.
Tilya whistled softly.
"Convenient."
"No," Rona said.
This help meant that the city was already treating Miren as its employee.
The new layout revealed a passage to the sealed census archive. A sign on the door read: "Files of the Unrecorded. No access."
Miren could open it. He felt this as clearly as the pain in his wrist.
Rona stepped between him and the door.
"One condition first."
"What condition?"
"If the city offers to let you save it at the cost of human lives, you will say so aloud. Before the signature. Before the elegant formula. To me."
He wanted to answer at once. But the new version within him was already looking for a loophole: what counted as human lives, what counted as a cost, precisely when "before" began.
Miren was not frightened of Rona. He was frightened of himself.
"I will," he said.
"Not as a clerk."
"As a man."
She stepped aside.
The door opened.
There were no shelves in the archive of the unrecorded. Thousands of threads hung there, each with a blank tag. The threads ran to the walls, the floor and the ceiling, stretching away somewhere into the city. Names had already appeared on several tags: Tilya Braks, Mal Voss, Perr, Lida Voss.
Miren's name was on one tag.
But the tag did not hang among the human names. It was tied to the map of the city.
Rona approached it first.
"Can it be untied?"
"Yes," Miren said.
"What will happen?"
He followed the thread with his eyes. Now he saw not only the paper, but the way records affected events. The thread from his name ran to the map of Lambern and then divided: one strand led to the Lower Arches, the other to the bell printing works. If it were cut, the city would no longer be able to use Miren so easily as a witness. He would be freer.
But the passage the city had moved towards the Lower Arches would vanish as well.
And the hidden audit would resume its former course.
"The city will have less use for me," Miren said. "And the Lower Arches will be farther from us."
Rona took out the paper knife Tilya had found in the office. The blade was blunt, but it could cut the thread.
"Do you want me to decide?"
"No."
"But the city does."
She said it without reproach. The city had already understood how to compel each of them to obey: Miren through guilt, Rona through her need to know the truth, Tilya through the absence of any record of her, Lida through her fear for Mal.
Rona raised the knife to the thread and stopped.
"If I cut the thread, I save you from the city, but abandon the people I have only just acknowledged as living."
"It wouldn't be your fault."
"That is what people always say when they want to leave the decision to a woman and blame her afterwards."
Miren had no answer.
Rona lowered the knife.
"We leave it. But I am recording a condition."
She opened the grey notebook. On the first blank page she wrote: "Miren Ost is bound to the map of Lambern not as the city's property, but as a temporary witness for the Lower Arches. A witness is not an owner. A witness is not a justification."
The notebook jerked. The ink flowed towards the words "is not" and tried to blur them. Rona pressed her palm against the page so hard that the fresh cut on her finger opened again.
Blood fell on the paper.
The words held.
After that, no one else could write in the notebook in Rona's place. Scratches still appeared in the margins, ink bled, individual words became distorted, but the record itself remained hers. Miren understood why the warning about midnight had appeared earlier: until it was sealed with blood, Rona's private record had been open to outside interference.
Tilya said quietly:
"Does your notebook bite now too?"
"Let it try," Rona answered.
The grey notebook closed by itself, as though it had heard her.
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