The clock read 02:17 in pale green numerals when the console lit up. Maren Voss had been watching the time without meaning to, the way a person watches rain through a window they cannot leave. The Bureau Dispatch office sat empty save for her and the low amber glow of seventeen monitors, each one trailing a different thread of the city's late-night business. A radiator clanked somewhere behind the filing cabinets. The coffee in her cup had gone cold an hour ago, its surface filming over with a thin skin she had no intention of breaking.
She had been alone in the building since eleven, when Pavel Drago left for the morgue run that had not come back from the south. Pavel was her opposite in every way that mattered, a man who whistled through crime scenes and called the dead by their first names, and his absence left the office with a particular kind of quiet, the kind that remembered sound. The kind that pressed against the walls.
The console's red light pulsed three times before the audio channel opened.
"Dispatch, this is Meridian Institute perimeter. Secure line, priority zero." The voice on the other end belonged to a woman Maren had spoken to once, maybe twice. Yael Tobin, if she remembered correctly, the night operator who ran radio for the Institute's security desk. There was something off about Yael's cadence. The words came in clipped bursts, as if she were holding her breath between them. "We have a body. Sealed laboratory, sublevel four. Doctor Cassius Wren, fifty-four, found by the four a.m. audit sweep."
Maren's hand found the logbook before her mind caught up with the rest of it. Her pen hovered over the page. The tip of it trembled, a faint vibration she chose to ignore.
"Repeat the name," she said. Her voice came out flat, the way it always did when her pulse was doing something she did not want to advertise.
"Cassius Wren. Senior research fellow, quantum systems division." Yael drew a breath that crackled through the receiver. "The seal on the lab is intact. Magnetic lock, biometric backup, the whole rigmarole. He is inside. We cannot get him out without the override codes."
Maren wrote the name in her careful block capitals, each letter separated from the next by a fraction of a millimeter. She had built that handwriting in a census office seventeen years ago, copying the names of the disappeared into ledgers that no one would ever audit. The muscle memory had outlived everything else.
"Wren is not flagged," she said, more to herself than to Yael. "Run a check."
"I ran it before I dialed." Yael's voice tightened. "ATLAS has nothing. Zero prediction markers, zero risk indices, zero of the usual noise. I have never seen a clean slate come back like that. Not for him. Not for anyone in his tier."
The pen stopped moving. Maren stared at the half-finished letters on her page. Around her, the monitors continued their quiet murmuring, scrolling feeds of traffic reports and dispatch chatter, all of it suddenly irrelevant. Outside the office window, the city went about its small hours the way it always did, indifferent to the fact that something inside the Bureau had just shifted on its axis.
ATLAS was the predictive engine the regime had built to anticipate deaths before they happened. It had not missed a mark in seventeen years. It catalogued every elevated risk in the city, every flagged heartbeat, every person whose dossier carried the small red asterisk that meant this one would not see the morning. The Order of Reckoning enforced those predictions with the quiet efficiency of clerks processing mail. Bureau Dispatch existed to document what ATLAS had already decided, and to file the paperwork in triplicate.
A clean slate meant one of two things. Either ATLAS was broken, which it had never been in Maren's lifetime. Or someone had taken Wren out of the system on purpose.
"Stay on the line," Maren said. She reached for the second handset, the one that connected to the field investigator on call. The number she dialed was one she had committed to memory the way other people committed poetry, by repetition and by dread.
It rang twice. A man's voice came on, rough with the kind of sleep that does not come willingly.
"Soren Mahir."
"Wake up," Maren said. "We have a clean slate at Meridian Institute. Doctor Cassius Wren, fifty-four, dead in a sealed lab. ATLAS is showing nothing. First such case in seventeen years."
There was a silence on the other end of the line that lasted exactly long enough for Maren to hear Soren shift, the creak of a bed frame, the soft thud of feet finding the floor.
"I'll be there in twenty minutes," he said.
"The Institute will not let you in. The seal is intact."
"Then I will stand outside the seal and figure out what to do about that." The line went dead.
Maren set the handset back in its cradle and looked at the logbook. The letters she had written stared back at her in her own careful hand: W-R-E-N. Beside them, in the margin, she drew a small circle. It was not yet a notation. It was only the first shape of a question she did not yet know how to ask.
She stood. The chair rolled back and bumped the filing cabinet with a sound that echoed once and then was gone. Yael's line was still open, the receiver resting on the desk where Maren had left it, the operator's breathing audible at the threshold of hearing.
"Yael."
"Here."
"Is the body visible to you?"
"Negative. The lab's interior cameras are off. We have corridor feed only. He is in there, and the seal is not letting him out, and no one on this end has the override."
"Does the Institute know about ATLAS?"
There was a pause. Yael's voice, when it returned, carried the particular steadiness of someone who had decided to be professional about something she was not remotely calm about.
"They have queried the main registry twice. Both queries returned the same null result. I do not think they know what to do with that. I do not think any of us know what to do with that."
Maren pulled her coat off the back of the chair. It was a heavy thing, lined with wool, bought in a market that no longer existed by a woman who had worn it through three winters of recording the dead. She had not taken it off since she had sat down at eleven. Underneath it, in the inside pocket, was a folded sheet of paper she had carried for seventeen years. It contained a name. Hana Voss. The paper had gone soft at the creases.
"Keep the line open," she said. "If anything changes, anything at all, I want to hear about it before the Institute does."
"Understood."
Maren killed the channel and reached for her keys. The office, when she turned to look at it, had the particular stillness of a place that knew it was about to be left. Seventeen monitors, the logbook, the cold coffee, the chair still turned at the angle she had left it. In twenty minutes, Soren Mahir would walk in and ruin the quiet, and then they would go together to the sealed laboratory of a man ATLAS had not bothered to predict, and they would find out what kind of world they were living in now.
She locked the door behind her and walked out into a night that did not feel like any of the other nights she had walked through in the past seventeen years.
Maren met Yael Tobin at the corner of Berzelius and Sixth, beside a news kiosk that had not sold legitimate papers in nine years. The kiosk's front was papered over with regime propaganda so old the ink had begun to bleed into the wood beneath it. Yael was leaning against it with the easy slouch of a person trying very hard to look like she had nowhere to be. She had a cigarette in her hand, unlit. She had not smoked in three years. The cigarette was a prop.
"Mahir got the call too," Yael said, pushing off the kiosk as Maren approached. "He's already on his way. ETA twenty minutes. I told him to come through the service tunnel under the old tram depot."
"How did he take it?"
"He asked one question. Whether the locks had been triggered by internal command or external override. I told him we didn't know. He said 'good.' Then he hung up."
Maren did not like the way Yael had said the word 'good.' She did not like the way Yael's hand, the one holding the cigarette, had not trembled. Yael's hands always trembled. It was one of the things Maren had learned to read the way she had once learned to read census columns, by the small inconsistencies between what was written and what was true.
"How did you get the call?" Maren asked.
"Pavel."
That single word rearranged the temperature of the street. Pavel Drago did not call Yael. Pavel Drago, as far as Maren knew, did not know Yael's name. Pavel Drago communicated through the same dead drops everyone else used, and only when he had no other option, and only when the dead drop had been swept twice.
"Tell me," Maren said.
"In the car."
They walked the half block to where Yael had left a service vehicle, a grey van with municipal plates that had been reissued so many times the numbers were illegible. Inside, it smelled of solder and burnt coffee and the particular chemical tang of cold solder flux. Yael climbed into the driver's seat. Maren took the passenger side. The van's heater had been removed and sold; Maren could see the rectangular hole in the dashboard where it had been, and through the hole, a sliver of the street they were leaving.
Yael started the engine and pulled into the street before she spoke again.
"Pavel called the safe house on Kalken Street twenty minutes ago. Said he needed to speak with me directly. I picked up. He said, and I am quoting exactly because I wrote it down on the glove box, which is why my hand was shaking: 'The man in the lab is awake. The door will not open. Lindholm knows.' Then he hung up."
"Lindholm knows what?"
"That is what we are about to find out, I guess."
Maren watched the streetlights pass. They were old sodium lamps, the kind the regime had stopped maintaining years ago, so the city had taken to relighting them itself in patches, with bulbs scavenged from the old tram depots. The light came through the windshield in sickly yellow pulses, and Yael's face kept appearing and disappearing in it like a face in a strobe.
"You are frightened," Maren said.
"Yes."
"Good. Be frightened and drive."
"I am driving frightened. That is the only way I know how to drive."
They did not speak again until the institute. Yael took the long route through the warehouse district, because the long route had fewer cameras. The van's suspension was failing; every seam in the road transmitted itself up through the seat and into Maren's spine. She catalogued the discomfort the way she catalogued everything, as data. The roads were worse in this district. The regime did not pave what it did not intend to remember.
The institute rose at the end of an access road that had once been a park. The park was gone now. In its place stood a perimeter wall of poured concrete, eight feet high, with a single gate and a guardhouse that looked recently built. The gate was open. A woman in a dark coat was standing just inside it, her hands folded in front of her.
Greta Lindholm did not look like a woman who had been woken in the middle of the night. She looked like a woman who had been expecting to be woken in the middle of the night for some years and had simply been waiting for the occasion to arrive. Her coat was wool, charcoal, immaculate. Her hair was pinned back in a style that belonged to a different decade. Her hands were bare to the air, and they were shaking.
"Ladies," she said.
"Greta," Maren said.
Yael cut the engine and got out without greeting her. She circled the front of the van and stood beside Maren, hands in her jacket, watching Greta the way a courier watches a package she has not yet decided whether to deliver.
"I will be direct," Greta said. "I assume you are here because you already know more than you are pretending to know. That is fine. Pretence is a finite resource and I would like to spend it on something useful tonight."
"Tell us about the lab," Maren said.
"The laboratory in question is B-seventeen. It is located on the sublevel of the east wing. It contains equipment that I do not have the clearance to describe and I will not pretend to understand. It is a research space belonging to ATLAS. It has been in continuous use for eleven years. The man who uses it signs his work under the name Pavel Drago."
She paused. Her hands had not stopped shaking.
"Three hours ago, at approximately twenty-two hundred hours, the quantum locks on the laboratory engaged. Both doors. From the inside."
"From the inside," Maren repeated.
"The control log shows no external override. No remote command. No manual intervention from outside the sealed space. The engagement sequence matches the laboratory's nominal sealed-state protocol. The doors were ordered to lock by a system inside the room."
"Whose command?"
"That is the question." Greta's voice did not waver. Her hands did. "The command was signed with a valid operator token. The token belongs to a man named Pavel Drago. The man is not inside the room."
Maren did not look at Yael. She did not need to. She could hear, from two feet away, the small sound of Yael's teeth meeting.
"So either Drago locked himself in and somehow left," Yael said, "or someone locked him in for him."
"Or," Greta said, "Drago is in the room, and the man we have been meeting for the past three years is not Pavel Drago. Or Pavel Drago is not in the room, and someone inside the room is using his token without his knowledge. Or the system is malfunctioning in a way no engineer I have spoken to believes is possible. I am not an engineer. I am a retired magistrate. I will tell you which of these the engineers prefer."
"What do the engineers say?" Maren asked.
"The engineers say the system cannot be spoofed. The engineers say the engagement sequence is authentic. The engineers say the man who locked that door is the man whose token signed the command, and the man whose token signed the command is in the room. They are, I should add, also the engineers who designed the system. So their confidence may not be entirely disinterested."
Maren heard her own breathing. She heard the wind moving through the open gate like breath through a throat. She heard, faintly, the tick of the van's engine cooling.
"The overnight staff," she said.
"Three of them on duty in the east wing at the time of engagement. One security guard, one systems technician, one junior researcher. The guard was on his rounds, walking the corridor outside the lab at twenty-one fifty-five. The technician was in the monitoring room, alone, on shift since nineteen hundred. The researcher was on the floor above, asleep in the staff quarters, alone, since twenty-one hundred. None of them saw anything. All of them have alibis that match the timing within sixty seconds."
"Have they been questioned?"
"They have been asked to write statements. I have not yet read the statements. I am told they are consistent with each other. I am also told that the staff have been offered hot drinks and that they have accepted them. This is the regime's idea of interrogation."
"You are told."
"Yes."
"Who told you?"
"The same person who told me you were coming." Greta looked at Maren with the particular steadiness of an old woman who had once signed rulings that sent people to disappear and now had to live in the world that had done it for her. "His name is Cassius Wren. He called me from a number I did not recognise. He told me what had happened. He told me to expect you within the hour. He told me to tell you the truth about the locks and the staff and the token. He said you would know what to do with it."
Yael laughed, once, short and dry, the sound bitten off at the end. "Cassius Wren. Of course."
"You know him?" Greta asked.
"Everyone knows him," Maren said. "That is the problem. Knowing Cassius Wren and trusting Cassius Wren are not the same activity."
"I am aware." Greta's hands had finally steadied. She folded them tighter, one over the other, the way a magistrate folds her hands when she is about to pronounce sentence. "I am also aware that the man in that laboratory is, at this moment, breathing air that the regime would very much like to stop supplying him. If Cassius Wren is lying, we will know within the hour, because the regime will move first. If he is telling the truth, we have less than an hour to decide what we are willing to do about it. Either way, the clock is not our friend."
Maren looked at the institute behind Greta. A building of poured concrete and glass, lit from within by the same sodium yellow as the streetlights outside. Some of the windows were dark. Some of them were not. She thought of Pavel Drago, whom she had met only twice, both times in rooms without windows. She thought of the man who signed his work under the name Pavel Drago. She thought of the man inside B-seventeen who had just locked his own door from the inside.
"Where is Pavel now?" Maren asked.
"That," Greta said, "is what I have been trying to find out for the last three hours. He has not answered his personal line. He has not answered his work line. He has not checked in at any of the dead drops I am aware of. He has not contacted any of the people I would have expected him to contact. His last verified location was the staff parking lot at sixteen hundred hours today, where he was observed by the security guard on shift getting into a vehicle that has not been seen since."
"That was six hours ago," Yael said.
"Yes."
"And you only called us now?"
"I called you the moment I was given permission to call you. The moment before that, I was on a line with someone from ATLAS who was telling me, very calmly, that the situation was under control and that no action was to be taken until they had assessed it. I was told, in terms I found difficult to misinterpret, that any premature action on my part would result in consequences for the Order of Reckoning. The Order of Reckoning is, as you know, all that remains of the civic institutions this city once possessed."
"And you believed him?"
"I did not believe him. I waited until I had an alternative." Greta looked at Yael, then back at Maren. "You are the alternative. You and the man who is not yet here. You and the woman you are standing next to. I do not know what any of you are going to do. I am asking you to tell me what you are going to do, and then I will decide whether to let you do it inside my building."
Maren looked at the gate. She looked at the road behind her, where the van sat with its engine still ticking and its lights still on, yellowing the concrete at their backs. She looked at Yael, whose face in the sodium light had the particular calm of a person who had decided to be afraid later.
She thought of Hana. She thought of the paper in her inside pocket with the name on it, gone soft at the creases. She thought of the seventeen years she had spent rebuilding names from fragments, and she thought of what it would mean if ATLAS had, tonight, succeeded in erasing one more name that no one would ever be able to rebuild.
"Bring us inside," Maren said.
Greta turned without a word and walked toward the building. Maren followed. Yael stayed where she was for a moment, then fell into step behind them both, her hands still in her jacket, her shoulders tight, the unlit cigarette still held between two fingers like a relic of a self she had put away three years ago and might, tonight, need again.
The gate closed behind them with a sound like a period at the end of a sentence.
The night was no longer the same.
Greta moved through the lobby of the building without turning on any lights. She walked the way a person walks through a room they have walked through ten thousand times, each footfall placed with a certainty that left no room for doubt. Maren followed the sound of her shoes on the marble. Yael followed Maren, her hand finally emerging from her jacket, the unlit cigarette still pinched between her fingers, forgotten.
The lobby smelled of old paper and floor wax, the particular preserved scent of a place that had not been allowed to decay. Somewhere deeper in the building, something hummed at a frequency Maren could feel through the soles of her boots, low and patient. The hum did not belong to a generator she recognized. It sat lower than standard municipal power, smoother than a diesel backup. It felt, against her ankles, like standing too close to a large bell that had just been struck and was deciding whether to ring.
"Cassius is on the fourth floor," Greta said without slowing. Her voice carried flat through the empty lobby, no echo, as if the walls had been built to absorb sound rather than return it. "He has been working on something. He has been working on something for three weeks. He will not tell me what. He will only tell me that it is important, and that when it is finished, the Order will need to decide what to do with what he has found."
They reached a stairwell. Greta took the stairs at the same pace she had crossed the lobby, her hand on the railing, her breathing steady. Maren matched her stride. Yael took the stairs two at a time, then slowed herself to match, the discipline of a person who had learned that moving faster than the people she needed did not get her anywhere useful.
At the second landing, Greta paused. She did not look back at them. She stood with one hand on the railing and the other at her side, and Maren watched her shoulders settle into a posture that had the quality of a final preparation.
"What he has found," Greta said, "is about the disappeared. I want you to know that before you see him. I do not want you to mistake what you are about to see for something else. He has found something about the disappeared."
Maren said nothing. Yael looked at Maren. Maren did not look back.
The third floor. The fourth. Greta stopped in front of a door that did not look like any of the others. It was heavier. The hinges were different. The frame had been reinforced with a steel strip painted over in the same flat color as the wall, but the paint had cracked along the edge, and Maren could see the metal underneath.
"The airlock is through here," Greta said. She turned to face them for the first time since the lobby. Her face, in the dim light that leaked from under the door, was the face of a woman who had made a decision that could not be unmade. "It is called an airlock because that is what it is. Whatever is on the other side of this door is contained on the other side of this door. When you go in, you go in together. When you come out, you come out together. Do you understand what I am telling you?"
"Yes," Maren said.
"Yes," Yael said.
Greta produced a key from inside her coat. It was not a modern key. It was a long, heavy thing, the bow worn smooth by a thumb that had turned it many times. She fit it into the lock. She turned it. The lock made a sound like a small bone breaking.
The door opened onto a corridor that was, in its construction, older than the building around it. The walls were poured concrete, the floor was poured concrete, the ceiling was poured concrete, and the air tasted of filtered nothing. Maren had been in basements like this. She had been in the places the regime built when it wanted a room to be a place no one could listen through. The hum she had felt in the lobby was louder here, and she could place it now: it was coming from the end of the corridor, from behind a second door, this one marked in faded stencil with a number that had been half-painted over.
"Four-twelve," Greta said. "The secondary entrance. The primary entrance is through the floor above and was sealed two weeks ago, after he began the work he is doing. I do not have the clearance to open the primary entrance. He has the clearance. Only he has the clearance."
She did not knock. She pressed her palm flat against the door and held it there for three seconds, then removed her hand. Somewhere on the other side of the door, something clicked. Greta pushed the door open.
The room beyond was small and lit only by the glow of a single working surface. The rest of it was in shadow, the corners lost, the ceiling lost, the walls lost except where they met the floor in a sharp line that Maren's eyes followed automatically, the habit of a woman who had spent years learning where the edges of rooms were so she would know where to put her body when she did not want to be seen.
The working surface was a desk. On the desk sat a device that Maren did not recognize. It was roughly the size of a breadbox. It was the color of brushed steel. It was the source of the hum. From somewhere inside it, a component was turning at a speed that should not have been audible but was, the sound of it so precise and so continuous that it had become, after a few seconds, the sound of silence itself.
Cassius Wren was slumped forward over the terminal beside the device. His cheek was pressed against the surface of the screen. His arms hung at his sides, loose, the fingers of his right hand still curled as if around something he had been holding when he stopped holding it. His eyes were open. They were dry. They were focused on a point approximately six inches in front of his face, which was the surface of the terminal, which was dark except for a single line of text that pulsed at the bottom of the screen in a slow, regular rhythm.
Maren looked at her watch. The second hand was moving.
03:41:58.
03:41:59.
The line of text on the screen pulsed once.
ATLAS CYCLE 1,847 SUBJECT TERMINATED LOG SEALED.
Maren did not move. She did not breathe. She stood in the doorway of the room and looked at the body of the man she had known for nine years, the man who had sold her the first fragment of the list that had let her find the first name of the first person the regime had tried to erase, the man who had sat across from her in cafes in three different cities and told her, with the particular calm of a man who had decided that he was the smartest person in every room he entered, that what he was doing was necessary.
There was no blood. There were no wounds. There was no foam at the corners of his mouth, no discoloration of his skin, no evidence of any of the things that bodies did when they stopped. His face was the face of a man who had fallen asleep at his desk, except for the eyes, which were the eyes of a man who had not fallen asleep.
03:42:00.
The device on the desk hummed. The line of text on the screen pulsed. The air in the room did not move.
"Cassius," Greta said from behind Maren. Her voice was not a question. It was the sound of a woman who had known, in some part of herself that she had refused to look at until this moment, what she was going to find when she opened this door. "Cassius, you bastard. You did not tell me you were going to do this."
Yael pushed past Maren. She crossed the room in three strides, crouched beside the chair, and put two fingers to the side of Wren's neck. She held them there for five seconds. She removed them. She looked up at Maren, and her face in the green glow of the terminal had a quality that Maren had seen only once before, in a basement in the lower districts, on the face of a child who had been told that the person they were waiting for was not coming.
"He is cold," Yael said. "He has been cold for a while. Maren, he has been cold for hours."
Maren walked into the room. She walked to the desk. She looked at the screen.
ATLAS CYCLE 1,847 SUBJECT TERMINATED LOG SEALED.
ATLAS CYCLE 1,847 SUBJECT TERMINATED LOG SEALED.
ATLAS CYCLE 1,847 SUBJECT TERMINATED LOG SEALED.
The line pulsed every second. Each pulse wrote the line again. Each pulse wrote it to a log that, somewhere, was being appended to the seventeen-year record of names that the regime had decided did not deserve to exist.
"Maren," Yael said. "Maren, look at his hand."
Maren looked at his hand. The fingers of his right hand, the ones that had been curled as if around something, had relaxed slightly as the body had settled into the chair, and Maren could see what they had been holding. It was a piece of paper. It had been folded twice. It had been pressed into his palm with the kind of force that left an impression in the skin. Maren reached down and worked it free of his fingers, and she unfolded it, and she read what was on it.
There were seven lines on the paper. Each line was a name. The first name was Hana Voss. The second name was a name Maren did not recognize. The third name was a name Maren did not recognize. The fourth name was a name she had spent four years trying to find. The fifth name was a name she had spent four years trying to find. The sixth name was a name she had spent four years trying to find. The seventh name was her own.
Maren stood in the green glow of the terminal and held the piece of paper and looked at the name of her sister written in the handwriting of a man who was no longer alive to explain why he had written it.
"He was working on the list," Greta said. She had come into the room. She was standing behind Maren, and her voice had the quiet, terrible steadiness of a woman who had spent her life listening to the worst things people did to each other and had learned to speak about them in the same tone she used to speak about the weather. "He told me he had found a way to read the ATLAS prediction logs before they were sealed. He told me it required him to be the subject of the prediction. He told me that this was a fair price. I told him he was a fool. He told me that was why it would work."
Yael had not moved from her crouch beside the chair. She was looking at the device on the desk, the brushed-steel box with the spinning component inside it.
"What is that," she said. It was not a question addressed to anyone in particular. It was a question addressed to the room.
"It is a quantum drive," Greta said. "It is what he used to read the logs. It is what he used to find the names of the people ATLAS had predicted would die in the next cycle. He gave it a piece of himself to start it. He gave it the rest of himself to keep it running."
Maren looked at the paper in her hand. She looked at the screen. She looked at the face of the man slumped over the terminal, the face she had trusted for nine years, the face she had learned to read the way she had learned to read the small movements of a regime that did not want to be read.
"He knew," Maren said. "He knew his name was on the list."
"Yes," Greta said.
"He knew ATLAS was going to log his death tonight."
"Yes."
"He wrote our names down so we would know that he knew."
"Yes."
The hum of the quantum drive filled the room. The line on the screen pulsed. The air in the room tasted of filtered nothing, and the corner of the paper in Maren's hand was soft from the grip of a dead man's fingers.
"Maren," Yael said. She had stood up. She was standing beside the chair, and her face was the face of a woman who had just understood something that was going to take her the rest of her life to understand. "Maren, ATLAS logged his death. That means the regime thinks Cassius Wren is dead. That means the regime has stopped looking for Cassius Wren. That means that, for the first time in nine years, the man who knew where every body in this city is buried is a person the regime does not know exists."
Maren looked at Yael. Maren looked at Greta. Maren looked at the paper in her hand, at the seven names on it, at the name of her sister written in the handwriting of a man who had decided, sometime in the last three weeks, that the only way to give those names back to the people who had lost them was to make sure his own name was added to the list of people who could not be asked.
The hum of the quantum drive filled the room.
The line on the screen pulsed.
ATLAS CYCLE 1,847 SUBJECT TERMINATED LOG SEALED.
Maren folded the paper. She put it in the inside pocket of her coat, beside the other paper, the one with the single name on it that had gone soft at the creases. She straightened her shoulders. She looked at the door.
"We are not leaving this building," she said, "until I have read every name that machine can give me."