Chapter Ten: Floor

She sat on the floor anyway.

There was no reason to. There was nothing to lean against, nothing to talk to, nothing warm. But it was where she sat, at the end of a day. It was the shape her evenings had taken for three years, and she found her body folding into it before she had decided anything, knees up, back against the wall, in the corner by the window where the chair was not.

The floorboards were cold. The pale square where the chair had stood was colder still, or seemed to be. Above her the window was shut, the way it always was. It had been painted shut before she moved in, and in three years she had never once tried the latch.

Mira did not cry. She had not cried when she died, as far as she could remember. It had not been the sort of death that left time for it. A wet road, a delivery van, a Tuesday. She had not cried at her own intake either, when the officer read out what she was going to be, and she said, very politely, that she would rather have a desk. She had not cried in three years of sitting on this floor. She was not going to start now, for a piece of furniture.

She lasted about ten minutes.

When it was over she felt scraped out and oddly light, the way you feel after being sick. The street outside had gone quiet. Somewhere a long way off, a bell was ringing, slow and faint, the way bells rang in the sideways city, as if they were remembering a tune.

She said the letter out loud.

She had not meant to. It came out of her the way a song does when you're alone, because she had read it so many times that the words lived in her now, like her mother's file number. My Mira. I don't know if I'll send this. She said all of it, into the dark, to the empty corner. The back door. The key in her hand. The woman who couldn't breathe.

"I would not be one more person locking a door on her," Mira said.

She stopped.

She said it again, more slowly, and listened to it this time, the way she should have listened in the hearing room, instead of just being glad of it.

Her mother had had the key in her hand. Half the rules in that building had said no. And she had opened the door anyway, not because she was sure it was safe, but because it was not her door to keep shut. It was the woman's life. It was the woman's choice. Elin's whole job had been to keep people safe, and at the moment that mattered, she had decided that safe was not the same as locked in.

I would rather be wrong about that door than be the kind of person who keeps it shut.

And what had Mira done, since the letter came?

She had hidden it under a blotter. She had suspected a clerk because it was easier than looking up a flight of stairs. She had stood in a corridor and told a three-hundred-year-old man that she was making his decision for him, whether he liked it or not, and when he had asked her to let him carry his own weight, she had said no. She had written a lie in a dead man's handwriting so that nobody would have to choose anything at all, except her.

There was a knock.

She knew who it was before she got up. Nobody else ever came here. When she opened the door he was standing on the landing with his coat over his arm, dry, and his hands at his sides, and he looked past her into the room and saw the empty corner, and his face changed.

"They took her," he said.

"This evening."

"I'm sorry, Mira."

"Come in," she said. "There's nowhere to sit. I'm afraid that's rather the point."

He came in. He looked at the floor, and at her. Then, slowly, with the care of a man whose knees had been around for a very long time, he lowered himself down onto the floorboards beside her, back against the wall, coat folded on his lap. They sat there side by side, two dead people on the floor of a cold flat, looking at a square of slightly paler wood.

"I used to do this," he said, after a while. "With Agnes. Before I moved her to the office. I'd sit on the floor of my room and talk to her, and she'd just sit there on the shelf, being a music box. She never played. The key was broken. I used to tell myself that she was listening anyway."

"She probably was," said Mira.

"Perhaps." He turned his coat over in his hands. "I've come to tell you something, and I would like you to let me finish before you say no."

She nodded.

"I want to go to the hearing when it reconvenes," he said. "I want to stand up in that bone-coloured room, and tell the panel I crossed the boundary, and I took the letter out of the drawer, and I put it on your desk, and you knew nothing about it. And I want to do it under my own name." He paused. "I haven't said it out loud in three hundred years. I'm not entirely sure I still can."

Mira waited.

"Edmund," he said. Carefully, as if testing a floorboard. "My name is Edmund."

"Edmund," she said.

"Yes." Something in his shoulders let go. "That's the one."

"If you stand up and say that," said Mira, "Crane will have his name. Article Nine will be satisfied. And you'll be finished. They'll take your post. They'll probably send you for judgement. The real kind. The kind you've been avoiding since before this building was finished."

"I know."

"You'd be giving up everything."

"I'd be choosing it," said Edmund. "There's a difference. You of all people should know there's a difference." He glanced at her. "Your mother knew."

She thought about the key in Elin's hand. About a woman who asked for air.

It was his life. It was his choice. And it was not her door to keep shut.

"All right," Mira said. Her voice came out very small. "All right, Edmund."

He nodded once, as though something had been signed.

"But I'm going too," she said. "I'm withdrawing the correction. All of it. I'm going to tell them what I wrote in that book, and why, before Crane gets the chance to." She felt the shape of it as she said it, terrifying and simple. "No more gaps in the form. No more getting through before anyone notices. I'm going to stand in the middle of that room and tell the whole truth and see what it does."

"It may cost you the appeal," said Edmund.

"Then it costs me the appeal."

He looked at her. Then, unexpectedly, he smiled. It changed his whole face. It made him look, for a second, like somebody's brother.

"Loud," he said. "Not quiet."

"Loud," said Mira.

They sat on the floor until the window began to go grey. Neither of them said much. At some point, without quite meaning to, Mira leaned her head against his shoulder, and it was not warm, exactly. But it was not cold either.