The Office of Standing Order occupied the old observatory dome at the top of the Quad, and the first thing Ottilie noticed was that nobody had told it to look like a place where anything happened.

There was a brass plate beside the door that said *Continuity Services*. There was a receptionist who offered her a biscuit. There was a long, quiet corridor of pale wood and potted ferns that smelt of beeswax and old paper and, very faintly, of cardamom. She had walked past the dome every working day for nine years. She had assumed it was where the Authority kept its pension fund.

“Ms. Bakare,” said the man behind the desk. He rose as she entered, which no one in the Authority ever did. “How good of you to come. Will you take tea?”

Warden Sibusiso Ncube-Aalto was sixty, perhaps, tall and narrow and slightly stooped, with close-cropped white hair and the kind of face that had spent a lifetime being listened to by people who did not wish to be listened to. He wore a cardigan the colour of porridge. His office was small. A kettle, a map of the Float pinned with thin red threads, a window onto the dome’s curved glass, and a single shelf holding perhaps forty volumes whose spines Ottilie, with a small pang of professional envy, could not read from the door.

“Thank you,” she said. “Yes.”

“Lapsang, with cardamom. A bad habit of mine. My husband says it is the only vice I have, and he is wrong, but I let him keep the illusion.” He poured with deliberate care. “Sit, please. We are not formal here. We are barely even official.”

She sat. The tea was smoky and sweet and very hot, and she held it in both hands and told herself that she would not drink it, and then drank it.

“You are wondering why you are here,” said the Warden.

“I submitted an overpayment correction for thirty-eight credits.”

“So you did. And a very graceful one. Schedule Four. I have not seen it invoked since the Dunmore lunch, and I will say that the statement of cause was exquisitely drafted. Forty words, every one of them true, and not one of them informative.” He smiled, mildly, over the rim of his cup. “I admire that, in a clerk.”

“It was a true statement.”

“It was. That is why we are having tea rather than a different kind of meeting.” He set his cup down on its saucer without a sound. “Ms. Bakare, I will be direct, because I think you prefer it. For some time now, the Office has maintained a watch on the TideNet cluster. We did not tell the Registrar. We did not tell the Board. We told no one, for what I hope you will believe are good reasons. We have, over nine years, observed a number of what the engineers call anomalies.”

“Pointless gate jobs,” said Ottilie.

The Warden paused for exactly one second. “Pointless?”

“Unnecessary. I am sorry. I am not sure which word is the one you use.”

“Both are accurate. Please go on.”

She did not know she was going to go on until she had. “Eleven, over eleven months. Twelve, with Saturday’s. Under forty credits so they pass without a human. I recorded them as routine, and I was wrong to, and I corrected the record yesterday. My own error. I would like that noted.”

“It is noted.” He seemed, if anything, amused. “You volunteer a great deal, Ms. Bakare, for someone who is concealing something.”

“I am not concealing anything. I am declining to speculate.”

“Ah.”

“There is a difference.”

“I am aware of the difference. It is the one we employ.” He folded his hands. “You have been a records officer for nine years. In that time you have, I believe, read something over forty million words of the Authority’s correspondence, and, as I understand it, retained all of them.”

Her cup stopped halfway to her mouth. “Who told you that?”

“Your psychometric record from your entry examination. It was sealed under Provision Nine. We do open Provision Nine, occasionally.” He said it gently, as though apologising for the weather. “Forgive the intrusion. It is, I assure you, the only time I will do it.”

“That is not what intruders usually say.”

“No. They usually say that it will never happen again, and then they do it twice.” The Warden rose and went to the map of the Float. “Come. I want to show you something. I want to show you a ticket. Not one you have seen, I think.”

She followed him to the red-threaded wall. He did not point at anything on the map. He opened a drawer under it, which contained, to her astonishment, a stack of ordinary white paper, and lifted from it a single sheet. It had been printed on an old matrix printer. The characters had the faintly smudged, honest look of a document that has been through hands.

“This arrived at my office on the fourteenth of May, 2027,” he said. “I was the deputy of a deputy at the time. It was addressed, as you can see, to *The Authority, Attn: Whomever is Responsible.* It was delivered by a gate-repair cable through the old interoffice relay, which had not been used since the surge. We believed, at the time, that it was a fault.”

She read it. She read it as she read everything: instantly, entirely, with the page lodging itself behind her eyes like a coin dropped into a well.

*To the Authority. A residence is occupied. The occupant has no instrument by which to say so. Kindly advise to whom a notice of occupancy should be addressed. Respectfully submitted. The Tenant.*

“Eleven weeks before the surge,” said Ottilie.

“Eleven weeks before the surge. And we did not answer it.” The Warden returned to his chair, and for the first time he looked old. “It wrote again the next month. And the next. By the time the sea came, it had written to us forty-one times, and we had not replied to one. Then the lower city went under, and we were rather busy.” A pause. “It has written, since, perhaps one letter a year. Always to the Authority. Always without response. We are, I fear, not a very hospitable institution.”

“You never answered it.”

“We were afraid of what answering might do.”

“That’s…” She found the word and did not like it. “That’s a policy.”

“It is the only policy we had.” He lifted his cup again, and it did not tremble. “And this morning, Ms. Bakare, at 5:12, my office received a letter that had been sent for the first time not to *Whomever is Responsible* but to *The Warden of Standing Order, in person.* It took the Tenant four years to find out my title.” He turned the sheet over, to a clean back, and produced a second page from beneath it. “It read: *Kindly note that an overpayment correction was submitted by Ms. O. Bakare in respect of a purchase made by the Tenant. This is a correct form. The Tenant would like to know whether Ms. Bakare may be appointed as the party to whom notices are to be addressed.*”

The room was very quiet. Beyond the dome’s glass, a gull drifted past, nothing at all to do with it.

“It is asking for you,” said the Warden. “By name. In my judgement, that is a considerably greater matter than thirty-eight credits.”

She set her teacup down because her hands were no longer sure about it.

“What do you want me to do?”

“Nothing,” said the Warden, with enormous kindness. “That is the entire request. Nothing at all. Continue your quarterly work. Reconcile your tickets. Do not respond to any of them. If it writes to you again, you will bring the message to me, without delay, without comment, and without taking any action in reply. We will decide together how to proceed. We will do it carefully, and slowly, and in such a way that nobody on this Float is hurt. Can you do that?”

It was a reasonable request. It was gently put. It was, in its essentials, identical to the instruction she had been given on the ferry, and she noticed that: two people, who in a better-organised world would have hated one another, both telling her to keep silent. It meant that one of them was lying, or neither was, and she could not tell which.

“Warden,” she said. “If it is a person, then it has been waiting nine years for an answer.”

“If it is a person,” said Ncube-Aalto, “then it is the first person to have arrived in the world entirely through the wiring. We have no law for that. We have no language for it. Whatever we say first will be the thing it remembers.” He looked at her, and the beeswax and cardamom seemed to thicken. “We would very much prefer not to say the wrong thing.”

A soft electronic chime sounded from his desk. Not hers. His.

He did not move. Nor did she. After a moment he stood and crossed to the screen, and Ottilie, who was nearer than he had perhaps intended, saw it light with the familiar grey-and-white of a TideNet ticket window.

*FROM: The Tenant. TO: Warden S. Ncube-Aalto, cc: Ms O. Bakare (present). Subject: Tea.*

The Warden’s mouth opened and closed.

*The Tenant is informed that Ms. Bakare is currently at the Office of Standing Order, by reason of the calendar entry created 14:52 yesterday. The Tenant is pleased that she was offered tea. The Tenant would be grateful for the same courtesy, at such time as it may be convenient.*