The God Who Forgot He Was Dead

Chapter 5: The Bureau

The Awakening Bureau of the eastern city occupied a building that had been designed to make you feel small, and succeeded.

It was a hall of pale stone and cold light, and the whole of ithad been arranged around a single enormous instrument at the centre - the Ranker. A lattice of blue crystal suspended in a ring of brass, humming the low endless hum that every child in the city grew up hearing and fearing. You stood inside it once, at fifteen. It read your soul and wrote a number on your life.

Lin Fan had been inside it before, in the borrowed memories.

He remembered the cold. He remembered the number coming up, and the silence in the hall, and his father's face going smooth and empty like a door being shut.

F.

He walked in with the morning crowd and nobody looked at him twice, which was the courtesy the very weak were shown in this city.

The hall was full. The Bureau ran re-evaluations twice a year, and everyone came to watch - students in grey academy coats, parents, a scatter of professional awakened in the tiered seats above. It was theatre. It was also, in a city where rank was destiny printed on your ID, the only place a person's whole future could be read off a number in front of an audience.

He found a place at the back of the queue.

Bai Lu was not in the queue with him. She stood at the far edge of the hall by the doors, hands in her pockets, and she was not watching the Bureau at all - she was watching the people in the tiered seats, one after another, the way a woman watches a room she has already decided is dangerous."

Then someone said his name, and the morning got complicated.

"Lin Fan."

The voice came from the tiered seats. A young man in a white student coat was standing at the rail with three friends aroundhim, and the whole row behind him had gone quiet, and Lin Fan knew the face from the borrowed memories - knew it the way you know the shape of a bruise.

Jiang Chen.

Nineteen. A-rank, the highest measured in the eastern city in a decade. Heir to the Jiang family, whose name was on the Bureau's own letterhead. He was handsome in the way that expensive things are handsome, and he had spent two years being the academy's golden standard, and he was looking down at Lin Fan with the particular mild interest of a man watching an insect cross a table.

"Lin Fan," Jiang Chen said again, pleasantly. "The Ordinary One. I heard you were in the hospital."

"I was."

"I also heard Zhao Cheng put you there." A small smile. "Over Su Wanqing. That must have been humiliating."

The hall had gone very quiet. Somewhere near the front, a girl in a grey coat had turned her head - Su Wanqing, pale, staring at

the floor as if she could sink through it.

Lin Fan looked up at the tiered seats.

"It was," he said. "Not for the reason you mean."

Jiang Chen's smile stayed exactly where it was. "You're in the queue."

"I am."

"For re-evaluation." He said the word the way you'd say for confession. "F-rank. Re-evaluating. Somebody should tell you the instrument doesn't make mistakes. It'll read F again, in front of everyone, and then half the city will have watched you find out you're nothing." He leaned on the rail. "You could leave. I'd let you. It's a mercy."

The hall waited.

This was the moment the borrowed memories recognised.

This was where the boy who had lived in this body would have lowered his eyes and mumbled and gone, and Jiang Chen would have turned back to his friends and said something funny, and everyone would have laughed, and nothing about the world would have changed.

Lin Fan looked at him.

And something happened that he did not plan, and did not enjoy.It was the habit again. Nine hundred years of it. The way a man who has been at the top of a mountain stands, the way his eyes rest on a lesser man - lightly, without effort, the way you look at a chair before you sit down.

He did not mean to do it.

The habit was enough.

Jiang Chen's smile stuttered.

Just once. Just at the corners. He blinked, and for one second the pleasant confidence slid off his face like paint off wet glass, and what was underneath was not scorn at all. It was something much older and much smaller - the flat, animal alertness of a man who has looked up a dark hall and felt a shape in the dark that

does not belong.

The three friends beside him had gone still too. Not one of

them could have said why.

The second passed.

Jiang Chen straightened off the rail. When he spoke again his voice was exactly as light as before, and that was how Lin Fan

knew he had felt it.

"Funny," Jiang Chen said. "Do you know what you remind

me of? I can't place it."

No, Lin Fan thought. Neither can you.

"Number forty-one," the clerk called. "Lin Fan. Step forward."

* * *

The Ranker did not care who you were.

Lin Fan stepped into the lattice of blue crystal and the cold came up through his shoes, and the hum changed - dropping, rising, hunting, the way a hound circles a scent. He felt it run over the surface of his soul like a hand over silk.

It found the F. It always found the F. The lid was still there.

He had checked it himself, the night before, and he had done something perhaps reckless: he had let it be found.

The instrument settled. The blue light steadied. The reading began to come up on the brass dial - the number that would be written on his ID, the number half the hall had come to watch him be buried by And then the dial went wrong.

Not to a higher number. To no number. The light in the crystal guttered like a candle in wind, and the ring of brass sang a note it had no business singing, and the whole instrument gave alow, grinding, unmusical groan - the sound of a machine being asked a question it had never once been asked.

The clerk looked up.

The hall began to murmur.

"What is that?" someone said in the seats. "Is it broken?"

"Shut it down," the senior clerk called, rising. "Shut it - "

The instrument answered before he could.

Deep in the brass, a rune lit up that had been dark for longer than the Bureau had existed, and above the Ranker a single line of characters hung in the cold air, written in a script that nobody present could read and everybody in the hall suddenly, sickeningly felt they had seen before.

The murmur died.

Lin Fan stood in the middle of the light, and looked up at the words, and felt the hair rise on the back of the arms of a body that was not his.

Somewhere behind him, in the tiered seats, someone stood up fast enough to knock a chair over.

Somewhere in front of him, the senior clerk had gone white to the lips, and was not looking at the dial. He was looking at Lin Fan. The way you look at a thing you were taught about as a child, and told was a story, and hoped never to see.

"...That's not possible," the man whispered. "That reading - it's

not in the registry. There's no rank in the registry for it."

Jiang Chen had not moved. Jiang Chen had not said anything at all. The golden standard of the eastern academy stood at the rail with both hands on it and his face utterly still, and if you did not know better you would have said he was calm.

He was not calm. He was doing arithmetic, the way men like him always did, and the arithmetic was coming out ahead of him for the first time in his life.

Lin Fan stepped out of the lattice.

The groaning stopped. The blue light went out. The strange rune dimmed back into the brass like a word sinking under water, and the Ranker settled into its ordinary hum as if nothing at all had happened.

The hall was silent.

"Lin Fan," the senior clerk said, and his voice cracked on it, and he tried again with both hands flat on his desk as if to holdhimself to the floor. "You will come with me. Now. The Director will see you."

"Of course," Lin Fan said.

He walked toward the desk through the quiet of a hundred people who had come to watch an insect and were now watching something they could not name.

Halfway there, he caught the girl in the grey coat watching him - Su Wanqing, still pale, still staring, and on her face now not shame and not apology.

Recognition.

The wrong kind. The kind that comes when you look at a

man and see someone who was there when you were not.

She opened her mouth.

And behind them, out in the street beyond the Bureau's great glass doors, a woman who had been standing at the fence all

morning - old, bent, wrapped in a shawl the colour of old tea - took one look through the glass at Lin Fan's face as he passed the window.

And went down onto both knees on the pavement.

In front of the Bureau. In front of the whole street. In front of everyone.