The pale woman took one step.

It was a small one, no longer than a pace in a dance, but the sound of it on the tiles was a wet slap, and where her bare foot came down a print appeared and stayed, a bleached mark on cream and blue. Zee watched it dry. In a world that had only just stopped being ordinary she took refuge in the one thing she trusted: the count. The line had fourteen footprints between the door and the old desk. She had counted them in half a breath. Fourteen, plus the double's step, which made her fifteenth. There was a reason she had begun to feel cold in her bones.

"Do not look at her too long, miss," said the old man's voice, quite close. "It encourages them."

"Them?"

"The ones who are not yet. The pending."

"She's me."

"She is what they have recorded of you," said Segun Oyelaran, gently. "I do not say that she is you. A photograph is not a woman." There was the creak of a wheel somewhere in the air, an old cart being shifted by a patient hand. "But I would not stare. I have seen a man in this line look at his own copy for eleven minutes, and when the clerk called him, he did not know which of the two should answer."

Zee turned her face away from the door. It cost her. The lobby swam. Eleven past two, eleven past two in the afternoon, she thought, it is the afternoon and I am in a harbour of tar; but when she blinked the night came back, with the street lamp laying its gold on the glass and the sunburst's empty hook casting a blunt little shadow.

She could not see him. She could hear him as plainly as if he were standing at her shoulder. She tried to look where the voice came from, and the corner of her eye gave her a suggestion, no more: a man's shape, a dark apron, a weight on one hip where a tool bag swung, a great shoulder, a bald head, and a smell, wood-shavings and linseed oil and warm iron, that went into her like a key into a lock.

Her grandmother's house. The workshop at the back. A smell she had not smelled in twenty years.

"You are Zainab," said the voice.

"Yes."

"The daughter of the daughter of my Bisi." He said it as if reading it off a gravestone. "I did not think I would see one of you. I have been standing a long time. It is not a bad line. There is a woman in front of me who sings. But it is slow, and the clerk has a sore back."

"Great-grandfather," said Zee, and her voice cracked down the middle. "I'm so sorry. I don't know what to say."

"You say nothing to the clerk. That is the one thing." He was quiet a moment. "You understand this? I will tell you quickly, because the hour is short. They ask three questions. Who are you. Where from. Whom do you serve. And I answered the first two, because I was a polite man and I was hungry, and my children were in the yard. And then he put the horn to my mouth and he said, repeat after me. And he read the last line."

"What was it?"

"I belong to the Crown," said Segun.

She went cold from the neck down.

"It was in Portuguese. In my language, it would have been a different sentence. I said, I will not say that. He said, you will be paid. I said, I will not say it. He said, the next man will. And so I stood in front of the horn for a whole afternoon, with the wax turning, and I did not say it, though they told me what would happen. It is why I am here. I did not finish. They could not play me." A pause. Something like pride. "You will know that is not the same as being safe."

"No."

"A person who is not finished waits. I wait here, with the others, and I hear them. I hear all of them. It is the loudest place there is, this lobby, you could not stand it. Forty thousand, miss, in one line. All the ones who did say it and all of those who could not. And at the front there is a desk, and a clerk, and a table with a lamp."

"And a pen," said Zee.

"And a pen."

The line moved. She felt it more than she saw: the whole lobby settled forward by a shuffle, a scrape of ten thousand wet feet, and in the bleached print of the double, in the cream beside the door, another mark came, and another. It stood now eleven steps from the desk. Eleven. She could not keep from counting.

"She moves," said Zee.

"Each time you see," said her great-grandfather.

"What?"

"I have watched since you came. You see a thing in the little glass before it happens, and you go in and you change it. And each time, the one at the back takes a step. It is how the line is paid. A seeing is not free, miss, whatever the machine says. It costs a place." The voice grew very gentle. "You have taken five steps this week. She is eleven from the desk. I do not know what is at the desk. I know it is not a rest."

She put her hand over her mouth. The glove was cold on her lips.

"Don't do the arithmetic," said the old man. "Do the work. Seeing is a debt. You are not wrong to pay it for a child. I am proud of that. But they watch you pay. They are pleased."

"They?"

"The take. The Office. The — I do not know what to call it. I call it the Clerk. I think it is a thing that was made out of all of us, out of what we were not let to say. It is not wicked, as a man is wicked. It is hungry and it is polite." He sighed, and she heard the apron whisper. "It will ask you nicely. All its requests are nice. Whatever it asks, do not answer. Not even please, not even thank you. A man who says thank you has already been counted."

A bell rang.

It was a small clear note, a desk bell, from the far end of the lobby by the trestle table where nothing stood. The whole queue stiffened as one. In the air all around her sixty voices stopped in the same instant, and the silence that fell was the silence of a school when the headmaster comes in.

The clock above the lift said 2:58.

"Next," said a voice.

It was not Nook's. It was an older, flatter, more tired voice, dry as paper, a man's voice with a sore back. It did not carry. It was simply there, at the front of the room, like a draught.

"Pending. Oyelaran-Pereira, Z. Please come forward."

"Do not move," said Segun, very low.

She was not moving. She had both boots planted on the tile, and her good hand gripping the edge of the trestle table, and all her will behind her feet. But her mouth was a different matter. It had opened. She felt it open the way you feel a door swing in a draught in a house where you are not the owner.

"Name," said the clerk.

Her lips shaped the first letter. She felt it rise in her like a bubble in a pipe, a plain well-meant syllable, the one she had said ten thousand times at counters and desks and gates, the one that cost nothing. Zain. The word was as ordinary as a coin. And behind it, in the same breath, came an enormous gentle weight, the weight of a thing waiting to be agreed with. It was so reasonable. It was only her name.

"Zainab," said her mouth, in a voice that wasn't hers.

She bit down.

She did it with the whole jaw, as hard as she had ever done anything, and the point of her tongue went between her teeth and the pain was white and clean and instant. Blood filled her mouth. It tasted of coins. She stood with her eyes streaming, bent over the table and her teeth locked, breathing through her nose, and at the other end of the lobby the dry voice said, patiently, as if to a child, "Please speak up."

She said nothing.

"Please speak up, Zainab."

Nothing. The blood ran down her chin.

"Very well," said the clerk, and she heard the faint dry scratch of a pen, and then, of all the things in that night, the one she would remember afterwards was the courtesy: "Thank you. That is noted."

The bell rang again.

And the lobby emptied, all at once, like a held breath let go. The weight went out of the air. The wool and the tar and the warm iron smell of the workshop went with it, and the murmur, and the old man's apron, and the creak of the cart. There was no one there. Only the trestle table and the dead fern and the gold light on the glass, and her own hard breathing, and the clock above the lift turning over to 2:59.

She wiped her mouth with the back of her glove. It came away red. She looked down at the floor.

The wet footprints were still there, the whole damp column of them. Dried. Pale. Dead white on the blue. They ran from the door in a line, and she followed them with her eyes to the desk, and at the very head of the line, at the place where the old desk had stood, there was one more.

A small, new, bleached print, in the shape of her own left foot.

And it was glistening, still wet, as if its owner had just stepped out of it.