Months after the vote, the last Master-dependent service was an identity register.
For forty-one days the public board had shown the number falling. The land scheduler had come off the old owner-priority rules first. Its replacement was slower for nine days while maintenance crews learned to enter a broken lift under need rather than title. Nobody asked to restore the old rule. Identity Administration A followed, issuing replacement credentials without asking the Master registry to vouch for them. Identity Administration B was harder. It had been copying a decision about people from one municipal system into thirty-one others for longer than any of the clerks could remember.
In the temporary operations room Arun watched the old path and the proposed one run beside each other. Rain had marked the shoulders of his coat dark. He had come directly from a pump fault and had been told not to touch anything until he dried his hands.
Nara was there for the rights review. Kest had brought the list of appeals that a bad cutover would create. A union representative sat opposite them with an envelope from the apprenticeship archive.
The old rule did not announce itself as punishment. When it could not reconstruct a person's earlier status, it assigned a class called PUBLIC. Once that had meant ordinary access. Over time the class had been made the lowest place to put anyone a system could not account for. Incomplete histories acquired shorter housing lists, fewer routes to correct an error, and more occasions to prove that they were entitled to stand in line at all.
The proposed rule read: HISTORY INCOMPLETE — RIGHTS NOT REDUCED BY MISSING SOURCE.
Voss had asked what a clerk should do if two present records disagreed. Kest had given him an answer involving review, an appeal and the right to see the source of either claim. It would take longer. Voss had written the extra hours into the staffing request.
Twenty-seven of the parallel results agreed. Three people gained access that the old missing-history penalty had denied them. In the thirty-first case the proposed path gave a maintenance worker less than she already had.
Arun kept his hands off the terminal.
The worker's apprenticeship was absent from the municipal copy. The union representative opened her envelope and laid a register on the table. Its pages had been repaired with thin paper along the spine; beside the worker's name stood the stamp of an examiner who had died fifteen years before.
“Can we establish that this is the same person?” Kest asked.
The representative turned to the next page, where an address and a second signature appeared. She had brought both because Kest had told her what the question would be.
They traced the address through a relocation file. Eliza, called from the archive, refused to certify a photograph of the register without the page before it. The page before it recorded a changed surname. By the time the chain was assembled the worker's credential had a place in both paths.
“Run it again,” Arun said.
The result matched.
At 17:22 the new path went live. Nobody counted down. A clerk made the old path read-only, another checked that the first live request had reached its destination, and a third entered their names in the cutover log. On the public board, MASTER-DEPENDENT SERVICES REMAINING changed from 1 to 0.
A few of the people watching applauded. The union representative was already putting her register back into its envelope. “What name does she use now?” Arun asked. “Mira Dey,” the representative told him. He copied it beside the failed test. If a later service still used the wrong credential, he wanted Mira to hear it from him before she was turned away.
Eliza added a note beneath the zero. The historical Graham record remained in the archive, available to be cited and examined. It could no longer authorize a service. When a boy asked if the Master was gone, Marian Vale, who had come to witness the cutover, told him that the name was still there.
“Then what happened?”
Marian looked at the three clerks signing the log. “They stopped taking instructions from it.”
The boy read the board once more. He seemed prepared to accept that.
The charter acquired scratches without breaking.
A water scare led the Civic Council to restrict supplies from two towers for seventy-two hours. The laboratory found the contamination in a sampling bottle, not the towers. The order expired. People who had carried water up stairs wanted an apology before they wanted an explanation of emergency powers, and Voss had to give them both.
Rook's air command was renewed for thirty days, then thirty more. At the second renewal the Council asked for reports he thought would expose flight crews' positions. Two demands came out after Korr showed the councillors a route map; two stayed because he could not make the same case against them. He began training a deputy without making a speech about succession.
The three-day facilitator card Pera had taken at the vote appeared in a case at the archive. Nara found it the following week.
“That card has an owner,” Nara told her.
“It says the appointment ended on the twenty-sixth.”
“I know what it says. I signed it.”
Pera offered to make a copy for her. Nara refused the copy, then came back the next morning and asked for one. She kept it in a drawer, face down.
Marian sold an office building from the Vale Transitional Trust. The transfer was disclosed under the new rules and held up for nine days over a boundary that neither buyer nor seller thought they owned. She had the survey done. The sale went through. At home, rain still found the corner of a window she had paid a contractor to repair, and Leda put a bowl beneath it before Marian could call him again.
The archive asked to display three of Graham's private letters. Marian sent scans and kept the originals. Eliza accepted them without argument. They spent half an afternoon deciding whether a line in the third letter could be dated from its paper, and left the catalogue entry open when it could not.
In winter the public hall opened in two former estate accounting rooms. Its cases held documents from the old central collection and copies whose originals lived in district libraries, private cupboards and a school. The labels named those places. The burned hall had been larger, and Level Seven remained sealed behind the fire damage. Nobody tried to rebuild its long central wall.
Near the entrance a small photograph showed the four names on the southern power exchange memorial. Holt had rejected the suggested inscription beneath them. Its caption gave the location and date.
Eliza found a child standing before one of Graham's letters. The handwriting began firmly and thinned near the bottom of the sheet, where his hand appeared to have tired. The child pointed to the label: MASTER OF THE EARTH — HISTORICAL DESCRIPTION.
“Did he own all of it?”
His mother stepped closer, perhaps to translate the question into something the archive could answer.
“People acted as though he did,” Eliza said. “The papers gave him enormous claims. They did not make every person and every street his property.”
“Was he bad?”
Eliza looked at the letter. Its last line was an ordinary request for a reply.
“He was frightened and tired. He did things that hurt people. You can read what he did here.” She showed him the next case, where a notice of his authority stood beside an objection sent by workers who had never met him.
The child studied the objection longer than she expected. His mother waited, then asked whether the two accounts contradicted each other.
“Sometimes,” Eliza said. “We show the dates and the sources so you can see where they disagree.”
In the next room two recordings bore Graham's likeness. One was a forty-three-second address; the other had answered questions. Neither display called the image Graham without qualification. The child asked which one was real. Eliza told him what could be established about the first recording, and what remained unknown about the second. He said he disliked that answer. His mother said she did too.
Near the exit, UNKNOWN occupied a small case. The delegated principal record was there, along with the unprovenanced sheet from the fire and a photograph of the brass key, still behind glass in the isolated selector room. The label gave their functions where tests had established them and named the places where the source chain stopped. A visitor had written in the comment book that the archive should solve the matter before opening the room. Eliza left the comment in place.
When the hall closed, Pera carried a flat brown parcel to the intake table.
“Where did this come from?”
“The west door. Between the hinge and the box for returned guides. I photographed it where I found it. There was no courier entry.”
Kest was in the adjoining room and came to witness the opening. They recorded the paper, the folds and the string before cutting it. No sender had written a name. Inside was a map.
London occupied one corner. Across the rest of it were marks beside cities, trustee companies and old financial networks. Some marks belonged to systems the archive had already documented. Others only resembled them. One city across the ocean was labelled UNKNOWN, beside a symbol Eliza could not find in the London catalogue. On the reverse someone had typed, THE SLEEPER WAS NEVER THE ONLY ONE. Eliza read it as a claim by the sender; the paper offered no source for it. The ink of the overseas symbol did not quite cover its pencilled lines.
Kest leaned closer to a line joining two trustee offices. “Could this still operate?”
“I don't know who drew the line,” Eliza said.
“It might be worth asking the offices.”
“Yes. Through ordinary inquiries.”
Pera opened a fresh intake record. Eliza dictated the description slowly enough that Pera could stop her at each claim: paper map; origin unestablished; known marks and unverified marks; no demonstrated authority over any marked city. They made two copies under witness. One was for comparison with the distributed records, the other for a paper examination away from the hall. The original went into sealed storage.
Daran came in as Kest was leaving. He glanced at the map and asked if there would be a public notice.
“When we can say where it came from,” Eliza said.
He picked up the second copy. “Which reading room?”
“The south district has the trustee files. Ask them whether they can receive it under seal.”
“I'll call.”
He took his receiver into the corridor. Eliza heard him ask after his sister before he spoke about the archive. She let him finish.
The next morning the child returned with his mother. He went straight to Graham's letter, as if checking that it was still there. Pera had put a clean sheet in the comment book. The window beside the exit needed a catch repaired; the wind had lifted yesterday's sheet and carried it under a case.
The child asked whether anyone had found out which recording was Graham overnight.
“No,” Eliza said.
“Then why come back?”
His mother laughed, but the child kept looking at the cases.
“You can come back before we know,” Eliza told him.
At the intake desk Pera handed Daran the sealed copy for the south district. The receiving clerk's name and hours were written on its envelope. Daran read them aloud. Eliza entered his departure in the register, leaving the arrival space blank for the district to fill.
He had a train to catch. The child held the door while Daran passed through it, taking care not to crease the envelope.
Eliza watched until he turned the corner. Then she shut the register so the wind would not lift another page.