The solution seemed too easy, but that was precisely why Miren almost yielded to it.
Beneath the letters M, I, R, E, a new line opened before Miren's inner eye:
"Adal Rovik. Obsolete version. Grounds: personal conflict, illegal card, repetition of the First Audit. Recommendation: erase from history before the Midnight Census."
Erase Rovik.
Not kill or execute him. Simply ensure that the city never had a minister who knew how to declare people dangerous to everyone around them. The young Adal would remain a boy with his sister's card, and his later version would disappear. The Midnight Census would not take place in the form the minister had devised.
One signature.
Miren saw far too clearly how it could be done. He had everything he needed: Senna's song, the sister's card, Rona's testimony and the bell of the First Audit. The price would be high, but he was prepared to pay it if the city remained alive.
That was how the auditor version reasoned. Rovik would have reasoned in exactly the same way in his place.
Miren raised the pen.
Rona did not point a weapon at him, shout or say, 'You can't.' Instead, she opened the grey notebook to the page where the sentence about him had appeared that morning.
"Don't trust Miren after midnight," she read.
"It isn't midnight now."
"And already you are looking for a loophole that will let you agree."
The accusation was unfair, but it stopped him.
Miren gave a short, almost angry laugh.
"You have a gift for choosing vile turns of phrase."
"I learn from the city."
On the table, Perr spoke again in his father's voice:
"Son, sign. One man for everyone."
"This is not about one man," Rona said. "With a signature like that, you will claim the right to decide who remains in history."
Miren looked at her, at her mother's empty card in her hand, at Senna, who no longer remembered her sister's laughter, at Tilya clutching the stolen seal and at Perr, through whom the One Outside the Page spoke in other people's voices. Then he looked down at the letters beneath his own skin.
Instead of the erasure sheet, he placed the card of Rovik's sister in front of him.
The same card that, in the room beneath the Senate, had vanished for an instant beneath the grey notebook while Rovik showed them the map of the fissure. Outside the House of Mourning, Rona had pressed it into Miren's palm and said only, "Don't ask whether I am proud of myself."
Now the card lay on top of the organ.
"What are you doing?" Senna asked.
"Not erasing."
Miren took up the pen. The auditor version inside him twitched and tried to pull him back to his previous decision.
He wrote:
"Adal Rovik's sister. Not restored. But witnessed as a person lost by one who remembered her illegally."
This entry did not bring the girl back, undo the Audit or vindicate Rovik. But the memory of his sister had now been witnessed by others. The minister could no longer invoke her as a secret known only to him, one that gave him the right to decide for the entire city.
Beside it, Rona added an unofficial mark from the grey notebook.
Senna, almost voiceless, said:
"I bear witness to the loss."
Tilya brought the stolen seal down on the corner of the card.
The bell beneath the city answered.
The card shuddered and slipped into the tube of the dead post, as though it were being returned to its owner. But the entry had already been made. Rovik could hold the card in his hands again, but the history of his sister no longer belonged to him alone.
Somewhere beneath the Senate, in the room with the glass map, Adal Rovik ceased to be the sole keeper of his sister's memory. He remained a minister, but his private lie had now become a matter of public record.
Perr stopped smiling. In his throat, the One Outside the Page hissed in a newsprint voice:
"Incorrect amendment. Incorrect amendment. Witnesses contaminated."
Miren leant towards him.
"But alive."
For an instant Perr's face returned completely: a frightened boy, hungry, exhausted, alive. He whispered:
"I want to go home."
"We'll enter that," Rona said.
They still did not know how to save everyone and close the fissure. But they could record, one by one, the name and testimony of every living person, so that Rovik and the city could not quietly strike them out.
At the entrance to the House of Mourning, the police lamps came alight again. But the light was not blue.
It was grey.
The same formula appeared on every lamp:
"Midnight Census confirmed. Time remaining: four days."
Rona closed the notebook.
"He knows what we did."
Miren looked at the card of Rovik's sister. A new entry had already appeared on it.
"Yes," he said. "And now he knows we can do it again."
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