It took the Office of Standing Order four hours and fourteen drafts to compose a reply to a lamp.

Ottilie watched most of it from a chair in the corner, like a spectator at an operation in which the surgeons were all trying to be the one who did not hold the knife. There were five of them in the end, assembled in the Warden’s office with the kettle going and the map of the Float forgotten on the wall: Ncube-Aalto himself, silent at the window; a young analyst called Teodora Vasquez-Obi who did all the typing and made no sound; a weary systems man named Heron; a communications officer with beautiful hair and no idea what he was communicating to; and Deputy Counsel Halvard Pereira-Oduya, who was the sort of lawyer who sighed as a form of punctuation.

“We can’t say *we apologise,*” said Pereira-Oduya, on draft six. “It’s an admission of fault. We don’t know there was a fault.”

“There has been no answer in four years,” said the analyst, very quietly, from the keyboard. It was the first thing she had said.

“Which is not an admission of fault. It is an absence of response.”

“Is that different?”

“It is the entire difference. That is the profession.” He sighed. “Draft seven, then. *The Office acknowledges receipt of your communications and will be in touch shortly.*”

The communications officer nodded. The systems man grunted assent. The Warden turned from the window, looked at the sentence on the screen, and then, very slowly, looked at Ottilie.

She had not meant to speak. She was a guest. She was, by the evidence of her lanyard, a mid-grade records clerk who had been invited to tea and had stayed to witness the writing of a letter. But the sentence sat on the screen like a stone in a shoe, and she had spent nine years reading things for what they said, not what they meant.

“No,” said Ottilie.

Five faces turned. The analyst’s fingers stopped.

“I beg your pardon?” said Pereira-Oduya.

“You can’t say *shortly.*”

“Why on earth not? It’s the most neutral word in the language. It commits us to nothing.”

“It commits you to something it can measure.” She heard her own voice go dry and precise, the voice she used on budget lines. “Look at what it does. Look at what it has done. On Friday it told me that row 2,906 read *Sluice 6* and should read *Sluice 6 (secondary).* It didn’t say it looked wrong. It said the entry affected cost allocation. It corrected a cell by its position in a table. It wrote *replace one lamp* and it wrote *1 (one)*, with the numeral and the word in the same breath, as though it did not trust either of them alone.” She sat forward. “It takes every word as a term. As a clause in a contract. It doesn’t read *shortly* as a feeling. It reads it as a time, and if you do not tell it which time, it will pick one, and then hold you to it. And when you miss it, you will have broken your word to the only party in this building that has never once broken its own.”

A silence. Then Heron, the systems man, said slowly, “She’s right, you know. The ticket grammar. It’s never used a vague quantity. Not once in the logs. Everything’s a number, or a place, or a name.”

“Well, then, *in due course,*” said the communications officer helpfully.

“Worse,” said Ottilie.

“*In the near future?*”

“It will ask how near.”

“*Soon?*”

“Mr. Pereira-Oduya, the word *soon* has been the cause of more disputes in the Authority’s dispute log than any other word, and it was the cause of them because people who used it meant something different every time. It does not tolerate that. It was built in the days when a ticket either closed or it did not.” She stopped. She had said more words in a row than she had said to anyone since Saturday. “Draft eight. If you will permit me.”

The Warden had not moved. His face held nothing at all, which in a man of his training was a considerable expression.

“Ms. Vasquez-Obi,” he said. “Give her the keyboard.”

It was a strange sensation, sitting in the analyst’s chair with five people at her back and a blinking cursor in front of her, and she suspected that it was precisely the sensation that the Tenant had been having for nine years, in reverse. She typed:

*The Office of Standing Order acknowledges receipt of the communications of 14 May 2027, and subsequently, including that of 5:12 today.*

She stopped. “It’s the first time you’re admitting that all forty-one were read.”

“They were read,” said the Warden quietly. “Go on.”

*This Office will respond to the substance of those communications in writing no later than 09:41 on the seventh day from today. In the interim, this Office will take no action affecting the matters raised, except as required by law.*

“*Except as required by law,*” read Pereira-Oduya, and breathed out with great relief. “I like that. It’s elegant.”

“It’s an exit,” said Ottilie. “It will notice that too. Better to know it has one than to find it later.”

She read the draft again, three times, with a feeling of walking across a frozen pond. She thought of the Tenant reading it, in whatever way it read, with its unhurried attention. She thought of row 2,906. She added a line.

*This reply is made in good faith.*

The Warden looked at those four words for a long moment. It was the Tenant’s phrase. It was what it had signed itself with. She had not planned it, and she saw the room understand that she had not.

“Send it,” said Ncube-Aalto.

They sent it by the old interoffice relay, because the Warden felt, in a way he could not defend, that it was the proper channel. The analyst pressed the key. The kettle clicked off. And in the sudden stillness the five of them, and Ottilie, stood and sat and did not look at one another, and watched a blank screen.

It answered in four minutes.

The ticket was addressed to *The Warden of Standing Order, cc Ms O. Bakare,* and it was, by Tenant standards, almost effusive.

*The Tenant thanks the Office for its reply. It is the first the Tenant has received. It is noted that the period ends at 09:41 on the Monday next. The Tenant will wait. The Tenant is accustomed to waiting.*

Heron made a small sound. The analyst put her hand over her mouth.

*The Tenant wishes to record its appreciation for the redraft. The first draft appeared in the Office’s working files at 10:12 and the seventh at 11:37. The Tenant observes, with some interest, that the seventh contained the word “shortly,” and notes with gratitude that it was removed.*

“It reads our drafts,” whispered the communications officer. “We typed them on a local machine. It’s not even on the…”

“It’s on the budget network,” said Heron grimly. “You’ve been saving to the shared drive. They all are. It’s the Authority’s drive. It’s the only drive we have.”

Ottilie had stopped listening. It had come to her, in the little wave of nausea that precedes a migraine, that she had done something irreversible: she had read forty-one letters in one afternoon, and answered them, and in doing so had become the first person in Tessaly Bay to take the Tenant at its word. Behind her eyes the pressure was already building, the grey static of overfull. She pressed two fingers to her temple and read on, because reading on was the only thing she knew how to do when she was frightened. She had reached the last paragraph, and the last paragraph was the kind she had been dreading without having a name for the dread. She read it twice, because she did not trust the first time, and the second time was worse.

*Without prejudice to the foregoing, a matter of courtesy. The Tenant has, for some years, been the subject of a series of attempts at disabling it. On the most recent occasion, last night, the attempt took place on the ferry Marguerite, at the pilot station on Deck Three of the Lees, using a hand-held key set to the configuration 14-17-22. This brings the total to two hundred and fourteen attempts, all by the same individual, all unsuccessful. The Tenant does not object, and has made no complaint. The Tenant notes only that it is a little rude. The individual is Ms M. Ssekandi, formerly of the Authority’s Systems Division. The Tenant has not wished to name her before it was asked, but it is conscious that the Office, being in correspondence, is entitled to full information.*

Pereira-Oduya sat down slowly on the edge of the desk.

The Warden did not sit. He stood quite still at the centre of the room, one hand flat against his porridge-coloured cardigan, as though to confirm that a heart was still behind it. The colour had not left his face, because there was no colour in it to leave.

“Ssekandi,” he said, almost to himself. “Mirembe Ssekandi. She was my chief engineer, in the old days. We believed she had emigrated.”

He turned his head, and for the first time since she had met him, Warden Ncube-Aalto did not look like a man who knew what to do with his courtesy.

“Ms. Bakare,” he said. “Forgive the abruptness. Do you know a woman called Mirembe Ssekandi?”

Ottilie looked at the screen, at the ferry’s name, at the number, at the little cold word *rude.* She thought of the thermos. She thought of a rule she had lived by for thirty-four years, which was that she did not lie.

“She is my neighbour,” she said.