The knock on the front door was polite, and Evan's mother, who had not yet put down the rolling pin, opened the door two inches and said, "Is this one polite too?""I have brought my own tea, madam," said Cassian Voss.He had. Two paper cups, one in each hand, and he held them out through the gap with the grave courtesy of a man presenting credentials. Evan's mother looked at the cups, and at his hat, and at the grey in his face that had not been there at nine that morning."You have been running," she said."I have been walking very quickly. I do not run. It frightens the junior staff." He cleared his throat. "May I come in? I am afraid I have news, and it is better delivered sitting."She let him in. She did not, Evan noticed, put down the rolling pin.Voss sat at the kitchen table with his hat on his knee and told them in four sentences what had happened since noon.The Archive had been closed by order. Miss Park had not been seen at her desk. Dispatch had received, by hand, a sin

The second bell rang as Tobias Fenn reached the foot of the dais.It was the same flat iron note as before, one stroke, and it went through the Rank Hall like a hand drawn across a wet plate. Every window along the high walls shivered in its frame. Four hundred and twelve people took a single breath, in perfect unison, and held it.On the black board behind the dais a white line appeared.It was a thin line, a hair's breadth wide, running from top to bottom through the middle of the glass, and it glowed like the edge of a blade held up to a lamp. Evan had seen it once before, on a morning not long ago, and he had thought, with the idle fancy of a boy in a queue, that it looked like a seam."Thumb, please," said the Needle, very kindly.Tobias held out his hand.Evan wrote.He did it without deciding to, the pencil already moving, in his father's blunt capitals with the flat bar through the V. He did not look at what he was writing. He felt the third coin of the round go out of him as

Evan had never seen the whole of the board at once. It had always been a place where one name lit at a time. Now it was covered, floor to ceiling, in small white script: every name that had ever been ranked in Halcyon, in rows, thousands upon thousands of them, each with its single letter at the side. A. C. F. B. F. D. F. He saw his own, near the bottom, in the F column.They were coming off the glass like snow.Each letter fell as a spark falls, slow and bright, and as it fell it loosened, and each spark that dropped from the board drifted out over the heads of the people in the hall and went, like a moth to a lamp, to somebody.A woman in the gallery put both hands to her mouth. She had been standing at the rail with a clipboard, a clerk, a stout grey woman who had stood at the back of every Ceremony for thirty years. She said, in a voice that carried, quite distinctly, "Hush-a-bye, my little one," and stopped, and stared at her hands, and sat down on the floor and wept.A young man

They went down the way they had gone before, but there were more of them now, and it felt like a procession.The room under the stairs was waiting with its door open. The old brown coat hung on Serena's shoulders as they stepped into the plaster cell, and she looked back once at the lit kitchen, at the soup bowls and the biscuit tin, and then she followed Evan down the stone stair into the smell of salt and river and iron.Evan's mother came after her with a lamp, and Voss behind with his hat clutched to his chest, and last of all Tobias Fenn, who had insisted, who had said in a small cracked voice that he did not know why but he would feel a great deal worse if he did not.The vials had brightened.It was the first thing Evan saw as the stair turned. All along the shell-coloured wall, in row on row of little glass niches, the tiny lights had grown, as if a wind had gone down the gallery and fanned them. They were beating faster. He saw Tobias put out a hand to one without touching, a

It did not open all at once.That was what saved them, Evan thought afterwards. If the whole of the floor had gone, in a single heave, as the Needle had meant it to, there would have been nothing left to see. But the rim was cracked and frayed and four hundred years from sound, and what it did was only to ease, as a door eases that has been held shut against a weight and is no longer held. A hand's width of dark appeared in the middle of the stone. Then two.Then the paper began to come up.It rose out of the hole like moths. A few at first. Single cream-coloured leaves, a handspan square, turning slowly in the wind that came up from underneath, and then a dozen, and then hundreds, thousands, a slow soft blizzard of paper filling the whole domed chamber and rising to the black stone roof where it hung, rustling, like a flock of pale birds that has found a place to roost.Voss came out of the corridor at a run.He had not run in thirty-one years. He ran like a man who has never been ta