Chapter Three: The Supervisor

The supervisor's office was on the third floor, at the far end of a corridor that most people in the Office had no reason to walk down, behind a door with no nameplate.

Every other door in the building had one. Small brass rectangles, screwed in at eye level, polished by a man with a cloth who came round on what were probably Thursdays. This door had four little screw holes where a nameplate had once been, and a paler square of paint around them, and nothing else.

Mira had been up here twice in three years. Once on her first day, to be told where the forms were kept. Once when she had filed an appeal for a man who was being processed as a footstool and had won, which had apparently never happened before on that floor, and had required a conversation.

She knocked.

"Come in, Mira," said a voice, before she had said who it was.

The office was long and narrow and full of shelves, and the shelves were full of objects, not files. A row of pocket watches, a doll with one eye, a single riding boot, a small wooden music box with its lid shut. The archive downstairs kept what nobody came to claim, and the supervisor kept the archive. The most precious of the unclaimed things seemed to end up here, on his shelves.

He was sitting behind a desk with a lamp on it. He was not old, exactly. He had the kind of face that had stopped bothering to age, the way a house stops bothering to settle. Dark suit, pale eyes, a cardigan under the jacket that had been darned at the elbow by somebody who knew what they were doing. He was the oldest reaper anyone knew of. Some people said three hundred years. Some people said he had been here when the building was put up, and had told them where to put it.

His coat was on the stand by the door, and it was wet.

Mira noticed that the way she noticed most things, without deciding to. Dark at the shoulders. Damp along the hem. It did not rain in the sideways city, not properly. It drizzled now and then, out of politeness, but it did not rain.

"Sit," he said. "You've brought me something."

She had meant to explain first. Instead she took the letter out of her inside pocket and put it on his desk, and he picked it up, and as he took it his fingers brushed hers. They were cold. Not the ordinary cold of the building. Cold like someone who had been standing outside for a long time.

He read it once, slowly. Then he folded it along its old folds and laid it down between them and put one hand flat on top of it, as if it might blow away.

"Your mother," he said.

"Yes."

"She appealed at her own intake, I remember. Most people don't. They're too busy being surprised." He looked at the letter, not at her. "She told the intake officer that the classification was wrong, and when he asked her why, she said it wasn't her place to explain somebody else's business. Then she went quietly." He paused. "A year later, you came through intake yourself. And when they read you your sentence, you asked for a desk instead."

Mira said nothing. Most reapers had done the same, once. The Office offered the desk to the dead it thought would be useful, and a few of them said yes rather than become whatever they were going to become. It was not offered to everyone. It was never offered to the negligent.

"People who take the desk are usually running away from something," the supervisor said. "You were running towards it. You took her case on before you'd learned where the forms were kept."

"You remember that?"

"I remember most things. It's the one part of the job that gets easier." He tapped the letter. "Where did you find this?"

"On my desk. This morning. No envelope, no stamp. It smells of the drawer it was in." She heard her own voice go flat and careful, the voice she used on difficult intakes. "Who brings letters across?"

"The Office does not retrieve personal letters from the living world," he said. "It never has. It never will."

He said it the way people recite something they have said many times before.

"Then somebody outside the rules did," she said.

"Then somebody did something very reckless," he agreed. "Either it was a kindness, a foolish one, or someone wants something from you and is starting with a gift. In this building, Mira, I would not like to bet on which."

Behind him on the wallpaper there was a hook. A plain brass hook, screwed into the wall at shoulder height, with a faint outline around it where something had hung for a very long time and kept the sun off. Nothing hung there now.

"You know what this is," he went on. "If it is real, and I think it is, then it is the first primary account your mother's case has ever had. In her hand. From before. The panel would have to take it seriously."

"I know."

"And you also know what the Office will think about where it came from."

She did. She had known since the stamp. The Office had one great fear, and it was not the dead. It was the living, writing in. If one letter could cross, a thousand could. Every grieving family with a pen and a grudge. Every judgement turned into an argument. The whole careful machinery of memory and sentence, flooded.

"So what do I do?" she said. "Sit on it?"

"No." He said it more sharply than she had ever heard him say anything. Then, more gently, "No. I know how you work, Mira. You find the gap in the form, and you get through it before anyone notices it was there. It's served you very well. Don't do it this time."

She stared at him.

"File it," he said. "Formally. Openly. Cite the letter as primary testimony, and put it in writing that you don't know where it came from. Don't guess. Don't decorate. Let the panel see you hiding nothing, because they will be looking very hard for what you're hiding. Quiet gets you caught. Loud gets you a hearing."

"And if they ask how it got here?"

"Then you tell them the truth, which is that you don't know." He took his hand off the letter and slid it back across the desk to her. "One more thing."

She waited.

"If you find out where it came from," he said, "come to me first. Before you do anything with it. Before you tell anyone. Will you do that?"

There was something in the way he asked. Not an order. Mira had been given orders by this man, and they sounded like weather reports. This sounded like a favour.

"Why?"

"Because I have been here a very long time," he said, "and I would like to be useful to you before I am anything else."

She did not understand that. She put it away to understand later, next to the wet coat and the cold hands and the empty hook, without quite knowing why she was keeping any of them.

That night she filled out the appeal form at her kitchen table, in her best handwriting, with the chair a few feet away in the corner by the window. Case number. Appellant. Grounds. New evidence: one letter, handwritten, in the deceased's own hand.

At the line marked Origin, she held the pen over the paper for a long time.

Then she wrote, "Unknown," and signed her name underneath it, and for once in her life did not leave herself a way out.