第7章 The Unscored

The laundry on Solvang Row smelled of lye and heat and wet wool, and the back room smelled of neither, which told Mireille more than anything else about what the place was for. Zorah met her at the service door and walked her past four machines that were actually running and a fifth that was not, and led her through a curtain into a room the size of a nurse's break area, with a table, six chairs, and a wall of paper. The paper was the point. The wall was covered in sheets, hundreds of them, pinned and overlapping, each one a copy of a Bureau internal page, each one with names and numbers and columns, and Mireille stood in front of it and read the nearest column and understood that she was looking at the roll. Not the public roll. The real one. The one the Bureau used. "Two years of filings," Zorah said. "Everything the Bureau has decided, from the day I started copying to the day I left, plus what the others bring in. This is how we know who is scheduled. A name appears in a rebalance column and we have about three weeks before the fold lands." Two other people were in the room. A young man, the one with the unruled notebook from Cohort Forty-One, who nodded at her without smiling. And an older woman with a mechanical chair, who introduced herself only as the one who kept the books, and who did not look up from the ledger she was ruling. "You told him to watch me," Mireille said. "I told him to count the cohort," Zorah said. "He counted. You missed two assemblies and paid the fee on a response form, and you coded nine encounters above standard in a month, which is what a person does when they are frightened. We do not recruit frightened people. We recruit people who are frightened and then get quiet. You got quiet about a week ago." Mireille looked at the wall again. Her own sheet was there. Corland, T. Cohort 41. Target Band Three-low. And below it, in a hand she did not recognize, a line of notes: *nurse, night intake, codes generously, brother renal, watch.* "He was watching me the whole time." "He was deciding whether you were worth a conversation." Zorah pulled a chair out from the table and sat, and gestured for Mireille to do the same. "Sit. I'll tell you what we do and what it costs, and then you'll tell me yes or no, and whichever it is we will move on, because the fold schedule does not wait for anyone's conscience." She told her. It took twenty minutes. The Unscored did three things. They lifted. They were, on paper, nowhere: no leaders, no office, no name in any file the Bureau could reach. Members held no more than three names each so that no arrest could unravel the rest. They worked through clinics and pharmacies and transit offices, through people like Mireille, scattered across five wards, and they measured their success in the number of citizens who woke up on a morning the Bureau had planned to erase them. The older woman in the chair looked up from her ledger once while Zorah spoke, and when she did, she said a single sentence and went back to work. "Two years, four hundred and six lifts, ninety-two failures." She said it the way a clerk reads a total. "The failures are on the next page. We keep them whether or not the Bureau does." Mireille asked to see the next page. It was a list of names with dates and two columns, folded on one side and lapsed on the other, and the lapsed column was shorter than the folded column and longer than either of them should have been. A woman in the fourth ward, forty-one, folded before the network could reach her file. A man in the north ward, sixty, lapsed while a lift sat in a queue that did not move fast enough. The network did not save everyone. It saved the people it reached in time, and it kept a count of the ones it did not, because a count was the only funeral the city allowed. "Where does the weight come from?" Mireille asked. "When you lift someone, the engine balances somewhere. Numbers don't appear out of nothing." "They don't." Zorah nodded, as though this were the correct question and she had been waiting for it. "Every lift we file is drawn from real encounters, real patients, real weight that already exists in the system. We are not creating points. We are moving them, a few at a time, from a clinic's ledger to a citizen's file, and the clinic absorbs the difference as slack. The Bureau tolerates slack. It has to, or nothing would work. That is the whole trick, and it is the reason it is slow." "What does it cost me?" Mireille asked. "Everything below the line," Zorah said. "The moment you file your first large lift, you become a name. Crandall's office watches the codes that move too much. They will not know it is you for months, maybe. They will know it is someone at Fifth Ward. When they find you, you will lose your license, your flat, your Standing, and your brother's place behind you, unless we can move him first. That is the arithmetic, and it is not a kind arithmetic, and I will not lie to you about the shape of it. Most people say no." "Did you say yes?" "I said yes after they retired me, when I had nothing left to lose. You still have something to lose. That is why I asked you and not the others." Zorah stood and went to a shelf and came back with a small gray chip in a plastic sleeve. "Take this. It is a copy of the wall, three districts, eighteen months. If you say no, it is still yours, because knowing is not a crime the Bureau can prove yet. If you say yes, you will need it, because you will want to know whose name you are moving before you move it." Mireille took the chip. It weighed nothing. She put it in the inside pocket of her coat and felt it there all evening and all night, a small square of nothing that had made her, in a single hour, into a person who could not un-know what she knew. She did not sleep. She lay on the flat's narrow bed and listened to the trams turn at the end of the street and ran the arithmetic the way Zorah had run it, honestly, with the costs on the correct side. Her number was six seventy-one. Emre's was six ninety-four. The line was seven hundred. She could reach the line for Emre with one careful lift, filed through a clinic she controlled, and the Bureau would not notice a single lift because the Bureau noticed patterns, not acts, and one act was not a pattern. At five she got up and made tea and looked at the chip on the kitchen table and thought about the old man with the cane, who had needed eleven points. At six she put the chip in her coat and went to work. ---