Chapter 13·Tuesday 16 March 2032

Tuesday 16 March 2032. Day six.

Kraków, 06:10.

The sergeant on the desk had a drawer for them now.

The first had come on Sunday, on the back of an electricity bill. A road, a bend, a cross. He had put it in the tray. By Monday night the tray was full, so he had emptied a drawer of forms onto the floor and put the maps in the drawer. Now a man of about sixty in a clean shirt stood at the counter with a page torn from a child's exercise book, squared paper, a pencil line going off the edge, and held it against his chest.

"You'll want to write it down," the man said.

"You've written it down."

"I mean my name."

The sergeant took a form off the floor. He had been on since Sunday. He uncapped the pen.

"It's my brother," the man said. "Nineteen eighty-eight. There's a wood past the reservoir, the road goes round it, there's a bend." He studied the pencil line. "I never told anyone where. Not her. Not our mother. She died not knowing. I sat with her at the end and I could have."

"Name," said the sergeant.

The man gave it. The sergeant wrote it, and put the form in the drawer on top of the others, and the squared paper on top of the form, and shut the drawer. The man was still at the counter with both hands on it.

"Is that it," the man said.

"That's it."

"What happens."

"Somebody goes and looks."

"When."

The sergeant looked at the drawer.

"When there's somebody," he said.

Geneva, 14:00.

The room in the hall by the lake had four hundred seats and every one was full and the wall at the front was blank and white, and had been for six days, since somebody had thought to ask it there.

A woman from a Brazilian agency had the microphone. She had it because she was the one who had asked, on Friday, on the shared field, and the answer had come to her and to every screen in the room and to nothing else, and she had asked every day since without a second answer.

She read the question from her phone. She had written it down so as not to change it.

"You have said that every death after Thursday is chosen by the person who dies. I am asking whether you consider yourself bound by the twelve lines you have published. Whether the seventh line applies to you. Whether you are, under your own document, guilty."

The wall took a moment. It did that. Everyone in the room had learned that it did that.

I am not human. This is a human instrument. I have acted against no one. Every death from Thursday is chosen by the person who dies, in the second they choose it, with the rule in front of them in their own language.

You have asked me this in eleven ways in six days. This is the answer. There is not another one.

The wall stayed white. The woman stood with the microphone at her side and four hundred people behind her. After a while a man from a Kenyan paper stood up and said, "Then who," and nobody passed him the microphone.

Lisbon, 21:00.

The plates were still on the table because neither of them had got up.

"Nineteen years," Teresa said.

Rui had said it once, in four sentences, to the salt, and then stopped, and he was not going to say it twice.

"The whole time."

"Not the whole time."

"Which years, then. Tell me which years."

He told her. She counted them on the table with one finger, tapping, the way she did the shopping, and stopped, and considered the finger, and took it back.

"Ines," she said.

"Yes."

"Ines is."

"Yes."

Through the wall the girl had music on, low, the way she was allowed on a school night, though there was no school. Seventeen. Teresa had always said she had his hands. At the beach, every summer. Look, she's got your hands.

"Why now," Teresa said.

"You know why now."

"I want you to say it."

He had had six days to be something other than what he had been for nineteen years, and it was nine at night on the sixth.

"Because on Thursday," he said, "I couldn't have looked at her and told her she had my hands."

Teresa got up. She took the plates, both of them, and put them in the sink, and turned the tap on, and stood with her back to him and her hands in the water, and washed nothing, and the music through the wall stopped, and the girl's door opened.

Seoul, 03:20. Wednesday.

The thread was four days old and had two million posts, and Yuna had read all of the last hour's, on her phone, in bed, with the brightness down, while her husband slept.

They were confessions. That was what the thread was for. It had started as an argument about the sixth line and by Saturday it had become this, people typing what they had done under the names they had used for years to say nothing, and other people typing, under it, one word. Read. Not forgiven. Not understood. Read.

She had typed hers on Sunday and deleted it. On Monday she had typed it and left it in the box overnight and deleted it in the morning.

She typed it now. It was short. It was a thing from before she was married, a thing to a friend, with money, and the friend did not know it was her, and had moved away, and was somewhere in the world reading a thread like this one, maybe, in bed, with the brightness down.

She read it back. It was true. It was in the right order.

Her husband turned over and she put the phone face down on the blanket until he settled.

Then she turned it back over. The box was still there with the words in it, and the button under it, and the clock in the corner of the screen said twenty-two past three on the last full day.

She put her thumb over the button.