Marek Sol found them in an alley that had not existed that morning.
He sat on an upturned crate, wrapped in three coats at once, though the night was close and smelt of gas. An untitled folder lay across his knees. Marek's face had become almost whole. That was a bad sign: when only one of all his versions remained, Marek would disappear for good.
"You are late," he said.
"Late for what?" Tilya asked.
"For me. I always hoped someone might finally manage to be late for me."
Rona crouched beside him. She did not recognise Miren, but she remembered Marek. Or believed the entry in her notebook instructing her to remember him.
"What's happening to you?"
"There's very little of me left. Convenient, isn't it? Almost a person."
Marek opened the folder. Inside lay the protocol of Miren's father's execution, the same one with the empty field marked "witness". Now Miren understood: the empty field allowed a new witness to be entered even after the execution.
"Your father did not leave you a vindication," Marek said. "He expected you to fill in the field and finish what he began."
The archive voice in Miren's throat said:
"Wording imprecise."
Miren struck himself in the chest with his fist to break the other voice's level cadence. The pain helped.
"Speak faster."
Marek nodded towards Rona.
"Let her read. While he can hear her, the city does not have complete control of his voice."
Rona took the protocol. Her fingers lingered on the empty field for a moment.
"Witness absent," she read.
The ink began to crawl.
"Witness deferred," she read from the altered line.
Marek smiled.
"That's the word they hid. Deferred, not absent."
Three more lines appeared beneath the empty field, so fine that an ordinary eye would have mistaken them for scratches from a bookbinder's knife. Rona turned the sheet towards the grey lamp. At that angle, the letters on the metal became clearer.
"Read," Marek said.
Rona narrowed her eyes.
"First: do not close an empty field with a title."
The archive voice in Miren's throat fell silent.
"Second: do not become the sole witness."
Tilya swore under her breath.
"Third: if an enemy speaks the truth, give that truth a place, but do not let the enemy decide how it is used."
Marek nodded.
"Your father was no saint, and he did not want to be thought one. He feared that one day his crime would be turned into a legend, and that legend used to justify another disappearance."
Miren looked at the lines and recognised his father in them. He did not ask forgiveness or defend himself. He merely forbade them to turn him into a hero whose memory could conveniently excuse new crimes.
"Did he know I would come?" Miren asked.
"No," Marek said. "And that is a good thing. He wrote for anyone who might find themselves in your place and refuse to make a hero of him."
Rona copied the three rules into her notebook. The grey ink tried to replace "an enemy speaks the truth" with "an enemy is useful". She struck out the substitution.
"There is a difference," she said.
Marek smiled wearily. He understood that difference far too well.
He laid his palm over the empty field. His hand became transparent at the edges.
"I was one of the junior auditors who later corrected the consequences of the First Audit. I believed no witnesses could be left behind, or the crack would open again. Then I lived for forty years in three versions of myself, and not one of them was right."
Rona asked quietly:
"What must we do?"
"The empty field accepts only a dead man who chooses the living, and a living person prepared to remember the dead man without making excuses for him. One witness is not enough. There must be two."
Miren understood why his father had not called the future witness a saviour. A saviour would decide on people's behalf, while a witness had to affirm their right to decide for themselves.
"Who is the second?" Tilya asked.
Marek looked at Rona.
"She is. If, by then, she still remembers why."
Rona did not look at Miren and continued reading the protocol.
"I don't remember his face."
"What he did matters more," Marek said. "Deeds are remembered longer than faces."
He removed the old auditor's tag from around his neck. The names on it kept changing: Marek, Mark, M. Sol, unknown. Then every name went dark.
"I have nothing left to pay with."
"You don't have to," Miren said.
The archive voice added:
"Sacrifice accepted."
Marek laughed.
"You see? The city is already in a hurry."
He placed the tag in the empty field. The paper became deep as water. Marek began to disappear, not in body, but one version at a time. First the joking old man vanished, then the young auditor and the homeless prophet. The last to disappear was the version of him that had found the courage to admit his mistake.
"Don't ask the city to bring your father back," he told Miren. "Finish the work for which he broke the law."
The empty field absorbed the tag.
A new line appeared in the protocol:
"Future witness admitted to the Midnight Census. Price: a name in the field."
The bell above the Senate struck.
Once.
One night remained before the Midnight Census.
Open in the reader