The House of Mourning was singing before they entered.
Not Senna. The house itself. The black plaques on its façade trembled with the wind, the underground gas and the footsteps of the lamp police surrounding the street. Each plaque bore the name of someone who had died without family. That night the names merged into an anxious, discordant hum.
Otto Krey stood at the door with a squad.
"The house is closed by order of the Ministry."
Rona walked past him.
"Suspended inspectors are hard of hearing when it comes to orders."
He caught her by the arm. The auditor version inside Miren instantly suggested declaring Otto temporarily non-existent, opening the way without wasting time. The solution seemed quick and even just.
He clenched his fingers until they hurt and signed nothing.
Rona freed her arm herself.
"Don't," she said to Miren without even turning round. "I saw your face."
In the main hall, Senna sat at a small organ. Perr lay before her with a face that held uncertainly, like a badly glued mask. He was breathing, but every breath left grey letters on the sheet.
"They started with him," Senna said. "He is the easiest way to reach the old voice."
"What voice?"
"The one you are both looking for."
Miren understood.
His father.
Rona understood too and made no attempt to stop him. She knew how dangerous it was for Miren to hear his father's voice, but allowed him to make the decision himself.
Senna laid her fingers on the keys.
"To sing the First Audit, I will have to give up the last sound I have kept from the time when I could still see."
"What sound?" Tilya asked.
Senna smiled faintly.
"My sister's laughter. From before I went blind."
Tilya drew in on herself and lowered her eyes.
"Don't."
"I must," Senna said. "Otherwise they will do to the city what they have already done to us: force everyone into the silence that suits them."
The song did not begin with words. First came the sound of water in the pipes. Then a child's cough, the muffled stroke of a bell and the voice of Miren's father.
He did not ask forgiveness.
"The witness must be alive," his father's voice said. "If you leave only the convenient ones, the city will become precise and dead."
Another voice, young, almost a child's, answered:
"If we leave everyone, the fissure will enter the city."
Adal. Not yet a minister, but a boy with his sister's illegal card in his pocket.
Under the song's influence, the hall changed. Before them appeared the same circular printing works as it had been during the First Audit. Miren's father stood by the bell, Rona's mother aimed a lamp at the metal, and the young Adal pressed his sister's card to his chest. The commission demanded that a single version be left. The witnesses demanded that the living truth be preserved.
And then Miren's father committed his crime.
He entered the witnesses where the commission had already left an empty field. He forged the document that was meant to prove no living people were present. He knew he would one day be executed for it, and signed anyway.
Rona's mother turned the lamp to give him time.
The young Adal saw it and made a choice of his own.
He betrayed them only after the fissure had closed, the city had survived and the witnesses had been preserved at least in an illegal copy. Many years later, he built an order in which he reserved the right to make such choices for himself alone.
Senna's voice grew quieter and quieter.
Senna was turning pale. She still remembered that she had once heard her sister laugh, but the sound itself was already fading from her memory.
A sentence appeared on Perr's sheet:
"Miren's father was a witness cut out of the record."
Rona was furious, but continued carefully forming every letter.
Miren no longer expected his father's simple vindication. As a child, he had dreamt of hearing that his father was innocent. Now it emerged that his father had knowingly broken the law to save people, and that truth was harder to accept.
Senna played the final note.
Perr opened his eyes.
He spoke in the voice of Miren's father:
"Son, sign the void."
Miren froze.
The voice was indistinguishable from the real one. It was exactly as Miren remembered it from childhood, when his father had taught him not to trust beautiful paper: the same rasp on the final word, the same weariness.
Rona struck his hand.
Not hard. Just enough to make him blink.
"That is not him."
Perr smiled someone else's smile, though his face was his own again.
"The witness disputes. The witness is contaminated. The witness wants her mother back."
Rona went pale.
The One Outside the Page was speaking of her pain now.
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