The cursor blinked.

On the old laptop, under the line that said Take 2, there was now a second line. It came out letter by letter, in the plain amber type of a machine that did not own a font, the speed of a clerk who has a lot of forms and a slow machine.

NAME:

"Don't," said Zee.

"I'm not touching it," Rui said. His hands were up in the air like a man at a robbery. "I'm nowhere near the keys. It's doing it by itself."

"Is it on the network?"

"It hasn't got a network. It hasn't got a card. I took the Wi-Fi chip out with my own pliers." His voice cracked on the last word. "It's a, it's a sealed machine, Zee, I use it to open viruses."

WHERE FROM:

WHOM DO YOU SERVE:

The lines came in one after another, patient and bureaucratic, each one followed by an empty space. There was no menace in them. That was what she could not bear. It was a form. It was an office with its pencils sharpened. She had stood in line at a thousand counters and felt the same thin dread in the chest: someone, somewhere, was about to ask her for a number.

She reached over Rui's arm for the lid.

"Pilar Nyambura-Voss," said Pip.

She said it quickly, and very clearly, with her chin up, because she was seventeen and had been asked a direct question by a screen, and some reflexes are not available to be trained out of a girl who has been in classrooms all her life. Zee saw her mouth shape it. She saw the black-rimmed eyes widen in the horror of a person who has already said it.

On the screen the cursor jumped.

NAME: Pilar Nyambura-Voss.

"No, no, no, no —"

"Pip, shut up," said Rui, quite gently, and slammed the lid.

It did not stop it. Zee had known it wouldn't. The sound the lid made, a hollow clap, was followed immediately by a small clean note, from inside the closed machine, like a service bell on a hotel counter. Ding. A single note, from a place with a very high ceiling.

Then the laptop went dark, completely dark, the little power light gone, and the room was just a room. A man's flat. A girl on the floor with a biscuit in her fist. The foam on the walls. The cold hum of the street.

"What did I do?" said Pip.

"You answered it."

"It asked me!"

"I know."

"It asked me my name, Zee. In a voice. It had a voice. I didn't hear it, it was like I heard it, but it was in, it was like the voice you hear when someone's just said your name in a shop." Her eyes went very bright. "I'm sorry. I'm so sorry. It was like being called on."

"It's all right."

"It's not all right. It's not! You've got a face like it's not all right!"

She did have a face. She could feel it. She sat down on the floor beside the girl, which hurt, and put her good arm round the thin shoulders in the stupid hoodie, and held on. Pip stiffened for a second and then folded in against her like a closing book. She smelled of orange vape and school.

Rui, over the girl's shoulder, was looking at the dead laptop as if it had bitten someone.

"I'll get Dona Graça," he said.

"It's half past three."

"I think she'll be awake."

She was. She came up in her purple dressing gown and her wool coat, not on the lift but by the stairs, one at a time, with the cane going tock on each tread, and she did not say a word until she had climbed into the one real chair in the room and been given a cup of the dead coffee. She sat for a long moment with the cup in her two hands. She had said nothing about the lateness. She listened to Rui tell it, in his scrupulous order, from the typed line to the bell; and to Pip, who interrupted twice to say she had been tricked, and was told by the old woman, quite kindly, to be quiet.

At the end Dona Graça put down the cup.

"Child," she said to Pip. "What did you say after the name?"

"Nothing. I shut up."

"Nothing. Good." She breathed out. "You gave your name to a clerk, and you did not give your village, and you did not give your master. It is an unfinished registration. That is better than a finished one. It is not good."

"What happens?"

"In my mother's day, at the Office, when a person came in and began to answer, we wrote down what they had said, and put the sheet in a tray. We called it pending. And after thirty days the pending sheets were taken out of the tray and the people on them were sent for."

"Sent for?"

"Called in." She said it quietly. "A man from the Office came to their house at night and knocked, and they went with him. They were registered. They were told the date at the time, you see. It was the only courtesy. Thirty days from the hour."

"What hour?"

"The hour they had answered." The old woman looked at the clock on Rui's desk, which said 3:41, then at the dark window. "Two forty-seven is when it begins, in this building. That is when the Office opens."

"It's three forty-one."

"It began again at two forty-seven last night, child. That was Tuesday. It is on the stair; it is in the pipes. The take keeps the hours of the Office. You said your name at some time after three. It will not mind. It will call you at the next two forty-seven, in thirty days."

Pip made a noise that was nearly a laugh. "You said it's a courtesy."

"I said it was the only one."

"What does called in mean?" said Zee. Her voice was low and flat, her soldier's voice, the one she used when something was far too bad to be spoken to in any other. "I want it in words, Dona Graça. I'm not asking for the history. What happens when the man comes to the door?"

The old woman looked at her with a hard, steady, unhappy eye.

"I will not say."

"Why?"

"Because I do not know." The cane tapped, once. "I was twenty-two. I typed the lists, I filed the sheets, I never went to the door. My father went, and my mother, who was brave. They sent me upstairs. Nobody came back from the cellar and nobody told me what they heard. I have told you what I know. It is thirty days, and it is not nothing, and I have never been wrong about the first part."

They sat in the lamp-lit room, the four of them, in a silence that filled and settled. Rui had taken his glasses off. Pip had her knees pulled up, her chin down, her eyes on nothing. On the shelf the dead puck lay on its side where it had been left, and for once she was very glad it was dead.

"Right," said Zee.

She got up, because she had to do something and she could not do the thing she wanted, which was to put her fist through a wall. She walked to the window. The harbour beyond was grey going on pearl, the cranes standing out against the sea in their long-legged rows. In an hour the first ferry would go out to the salt flats and the first cleaners would walk to work.

"Thirty days," she said. "Fine. It's a clock. I like a clock. I know what to do with a clock."

"Zee —"

"You'll sleep in my room."

"What?" said Pip.

"Not tonight. Tonight you'll sleep in your own bed, with your mother down the hall, and a chair against the door, and a text to me on the hour. I'll come up at six. Starting tomorrow you don't go anywhere alone. You don't post. You don't film. You don't answer anything that talks." She heard herself and did not stop. It was a pleasure to be a procedure. "Rui does the audio. Dona Graça does the history. I do doors. Seun does the lists. We find out what this is before the thirtieth night, and if we can't find out, we find out how to stop it, and if we can't stop it —"

"If we can't stop it?" said Pip, in a very small voice.

"We stand in the door."

The girl looked up at her, from the floor, from inside the hood. For a second Zee thought she might cry. Instead Pip did something very odd. She picked up her phone, pointed it at the room, and held it against her chest the way you hold a bible.

"Can I just say something?" she said. "Not on camera."

"Go on."

"I'm really, really scared." Pip's eyes were wet and furious. "And I'm also, like, a bit thrilled? Is that bad? Is that a bad thing about me?"

"It's what a person does who's alive," said Dona Graça, to everyone's surprise. "Go to bed, Pilar. Take the cat's blanket. I will send it up with Oluwaseun."

They left in twos. Pip first, with the old woman's hand on the back of her head for the length of the corridor, like a priest. Rui and Zee were last. He closed the door of 4B with a gentle hand and stood in the corridor with his dead ear to the wall, and said, without turning round: "I've been thinking about what you said. About the doors."

"It's a job."

"It isn't a job. It's a, it's a kind of faith. I envy it." He turned. His long face looked as if it had been left out in the rain. "I think, for what it's worth, you'd be quite good at standing in a door."

She did not say anything. In the shadow at the end of the corridor, by the lift, something clicked. She looked, and the display above the lift doors, the plain red numerals that showed which floor it was on, had changed from a 4 to a small neat line of type that scrolled once across the screen and was gone.

PENDING: 1

Beneath it, in the same tiny red lights, a second row appeared, slowly, with the air of a clerk lifting his pen.

PENDING: 2

And then the lift, with no one inside, opened its doors on the fourth floor and stood with its light on, waiting for her.