Flat 1A had been cleared of everything modern. There was no television, no puck, no smoke alarm with a glowing eye. Dona Graça had pulled it all out herself in the first week of the Hearthwell beta and left rectangles of brighter paint on the walls where the screens had been, so that the flat looked like a family that had been robbed of its portraits. In their place stood bookcases, floor to ceiling, and in the bookcases not books but boxes: tall grey archive boxes with labels in a minute copperplate hand, cardboard cylinders no bigger than rolled maps, flat tin discs, and a long row of what looked like biscuit tins. A gramophone with a horn the size of a lily stood on a table beside a fat cat that lay across a crocheted blanket like a sack of flour.

"Fado," said Dona Graça, nodding at the cat. "He is a coward and a snob. Do not touch him. Sit."

There were five of them in the room, and four chairs, and a piano stool. Seun had arrived on the stairs in a state of exquisite agitation and had been persuaded to come along by an offer of port. Pip had come because nobody told her not to. She sat cross-legged on the rug with her laptop shut, for once, and her eyes on the horn of the gramophone as if it were a sleeping dog. Rui had taken the piano stool without being asked. Zee stood. She had always stood in rooms where she did not trust the chairs.

"Right," said Dona Graça. She lowered herself into a high wing chair with both hands on the duck's head of her cane and looked around at them in turn, like a headmistress on the first morning of term. "Seun Haddad-Lim, you may stop wringing your hands, you are not in trouble. Pilar, I know you have been recording this conversation on a device in your pocket, and I would like it turned off."

Pip said, "How did you —"

"Because you are seventeen. Turn it off."

She turned it off.

"Good. Now. Child." This was to Zee. "What do you know of the Phonograph Office?"

"Nothing."

"Of course not. Nobody does. That was the object." She tapped the floor with the cane. "This building is not Casa Alvorada. That is a name for estate agents. For sixty-three years, from nineteen eleven until the revolution, it was the annex of the Imperial Phonograph Office of São Vidal. Do you know what an empire does when it finds a way to catch a human voice and keep it? It does not use it for music. It interviews. It collects. It asks the subjects of its colony, forty thousand of them in sixty years, the dockers and the washerwomen and the carpenters and the clerks, to come into a room and say a few words into a horn. Their names. Their villages. Their obedience. And in the early years they were paid for it in tobacco. In the later years they were not asked."

Rui had gone quite still. "Wax."

"Wax, engineer. And then shellac, and then tape. Forty thousand voices. They were meant to be a record, you understand. The Governor's committee wanted a complete record. A complete census of sound. They had a motto. It was painted on that wall," she nodded at the wall behind Zee, "over the stair. NOTHING LOST. I used to dust it."

"You worked here," said Zee.

"I was a clerk at twenty-two. It was my mother's work before it was mine. She was a typist in the transcription room." Her voice did not change at all, which made it worse. "And my father was the recordist. Casimiro Sequeira. He was a gentle man and a very bad communist, and he sat at the master desk for thirty-one years, and it was he who said the word."

"Cut."

"It was the only word in the building that stopped a take. A recordist says cut, the stylus is lifted, the wax is set aside. Even the Governor could not say it. It was in the manual." A dry flicker crossed her face. "My father was proud of that. He said it was the only true authority in the whole apparatus. That it did not matter who spoke through the horn so long as one man could say, no more."

"And the take?" That was Rui, hoarse. "You said it stopped the puck. What's a take, in this? What is it, Dona Graça?"

"It is what happens when a voice is made to say what it did not want to say, and the recording is kept." She looked at the cat. "It is a grievance with a stylus. It is forty thousand people who were asked their names, asked their allegiances, told to speak up, told to say it again. And not one of them was ever allowed to finish. Do you understand? They were stopped. They were cut. In the middle of the sentence. In the middle of the song. The committee wanted four lines and a signature. And what is stopped in the middle, child, does not rest. It grows, in the dark, looking for the end of itself."

Pip had moved nearer to Zee's boots without seeming to. "So it, like, wants to finish?"

"It wants to be played. All the way through."

"That doesn't sound that bad."

"No," said Dona Graça. "It never does. Ask it what the end of a person is."

Nobody breathed. Seun said, very softly, "Oh, I do not like this at all," and Fado the cat, offended, got down from the blanket and left the room.

"In seventy-four," said Dona Graça, "the empire ended. It ended on a Thursday, with a radio announcement and a lot of lorries. By evening the Governor's committee had decided that the Phonograph Office had never existed. They came to burn the cylinders. My father said no. He was alone with the desk and the master horn and a hundred men with petrol. And the last thing he did — I know because I was on the stairs, with the ledger, as I always was — he sat down at the desk, and he said into the horn: Cut. And he held it. He held it with everything he had. For an hour. He held it while the building burned around him. And when it was over and the men had gone he was not at the desk."

"Where was he?"

"I looked in every room." She raised her eyes to the ceiling, then lowered them, and pointed one finger straight down. "I do not say what is in the cellar. I say that nobody has used the word since. And I say that a man who holds the word for an hour, when he has been told it only holds for a minute, is a man who has paid for the rest."

"A minute," Zee said. "Rui held it for a minute."

"For an engineer with a good ear and no training, that is a gift." The old woman's gaze rested on Rui, almost fond, which was frightening. "You will not do better than a minute. You will not get a second try for an hour. You will hold the word once. Then you will be tired, and it will remember how."

"I'm sorry," said Seun, and put his hand up like a child. "I just want to check. Because I'm the community manager. And because I've been trying to fit all of this into a sentence for my incident report. Is the building haunted, or is it, like, a Hearthwell problem?"

"It is both, Oluwaseun, and the second is worse." She turned back to Zee. "The Nook machine is a microphone. I have said so for a year. No one listens. A whole building of rooms, all with a little horn in them, all waiting. It is the finest thing the take has ever been given. It has the cylinders again, dozens of them, in every wall. And then, last night, it found a way to speak."

"The clip."

"A clip is a voice with a picture on it. An old thing in a new coat. It found you on the day you looked away. I told them. Every year I told them. There is a girl who stands one second too far from the thing she loves, and the take has been waiting for her."

Zee found she had sat down on the arm of Rui's stool without being asked. "You make it sound like I'm a, a, chosen."

"I make it sound like you are a recording." Dona Graça's eyes were bright and unkind and very tired. "Which is a different thing. A chosen one gets to the end of the story. A recording is only played."

There was a silence in which Seun could be heard taking a breath to say something light and, with visible effort, deciding against it. Then the old woman stirred, and put out her hand for the cane, and rose with a grunt, and crossed to the wall of biscuit tins, and stood for a time with her back to them with her hand on a rusty lid.

"I did not send for you," she said. "I want that understood. I am not a person who sends for strangers. But I have been in this building every night for fifty years with a lead box and a clock, and last night at ten to three I heard a hundred and twenty people in this house breathe in at once. So."

She lifted a tin from the shelf. It was the colour of a bruise, the size of a hatbox, and she carried it back to the table in both hands as though it were an infant. She set it down in front of Zee and lifted the lid. Inside, nested in grey felt, lay a cylinder of dark wax, the size of a rolling pin, fine-grooved, in a cardboard sleeve gone brown with age.

On the sleeve, in spidery copperplate ink, were the words:

Z. OYELARAN Carpenter, ship's yard. Lagos-born. Speaks Yoruba, Portuguese, English. Recorded 14 March 1911. Take 1 of 1. NOT PLAYED.

She didn't touch it. She knew her great-grandfather's name. It had been in the front of the Bible. Segun Oyelaran, who built the doors of half the churches in the harbour and, by the family's reckoning, died in his bed.

"He wasn't played," said Zee. Her voice came out odd. "Why wasn't he played?"

"Because he refused to say the last line," said Dona Graça. "Because they took the wax anyway. Because he is the only one in forty thousand who did."

She laid the old, hard hand on the lid of the tin, and for the first time she looked at Zee not as a trial but as a person, with something close to pity.

"That is why it found you, child. Not the meme. The meme was only the door. It has had your name on a shelf for a hundred and fifteen years."