The certificate printer had begun to smoke by the time Mara Bell found the woman who did not exist.
The smoke was pale and smelled of burnt apricots. It curled around the words COMPLETE ALLOCATION: 100%, which the printer continued to produce at intervals of four seconds. By noon the certificates reached Mara's ankles.
‘Turn it off,’ said her supervisor.
‘I've pressed Stop three times.’
He examined the button, now loose in its socket. ‘Then it feels strongly about the result.’
In Fairhaven, an allocation was made every five years. The city paired each resident with a dwelling, a paid role and a person who had agreed to be a care contact. Nobody could occupy two homes or be the sole contact for more than two people. The rules were written on a board outside the municipal office, beside a much smaller board explaining what to do if your allocated home had mould.
Mara had written the selection procedure. The machine began with the residents whose options were fewest and worked outward. If a choice caused a dead end, it started again with another route. She had called it humane because nobody was asked to nominate who should go first.
At 12:17 a woman in a yellow raincoat stood at the service hatch and placed a brass key in the tray.
‘This opens my flat,’ she said. ‘The man assigned to it says it opens his flat.’
Mara found the address: 6 Sable Walk. The man was assigned there. The woman had no address. She had no role and no care contact. The screen offered a blank line where her name should have been.
‘What is your name?’
‘Inez Vale.’
The search returned NO RESIDENT FOUND.
Inez produced a voting card, a hospital card and a photograph of herself outside the building when the paint was still green. She also produced a crumpled shopping list. On the back, someone had written: Your mother likes the hard pears.
‘I don't know what the pears prove,’ Inez said, ‘but I brought everything.’
Mara looked at the intake log. Five years earlier, Inez had taken a temporary care placement outside the district. Her return form had been stamped on time, then entered under pending residence. The allocation had counted only active residents. Its hundred per cent was accurate about the people it had counted.
‘We can add you to the next cycle,’ said Mara's supervisor, who had arrived silently enough to earn a complaint from the carpet.
‘When is that?’ Inez asked.
‘Five years.’
‘My mother is eighty-three.’
He gave he…6569 tokens truncated…ed passengers filled the station's old concourse. Some had relatives in our city. Some had relatives here with the same names and different lives. At an information desk, officials handed out temporary origin cards. The cards had boxes for name, age, point of entry and expected return route. There was no box for the place I came from may now be underwater. Mrs Selby wrote it across the bottom of several cards anyway.
Mica refused a card until the conductor had one. Then she asked for mine to compare the addresses. In her history, we had lived on the same street. I had died when she was twenty-eight. She told me this in the concourse between a vending machine and an overturned luggage trolley, as if there were a suitable place to learn it and she had simply failed to find it.
“I'm sorry,” I said.
“You don't have to be. You haven't done it yet.”
I tried to ask how. She closed her hand over her card, and I let it stay closed.
I took her home after the engineers had left the wall to cool. My younger Mica was at the kitchen table trying to make her volcano erupt with baking soda. When she saw the woman beside me, she looked first at the gap in her teeth. Then she looked at the wet coat.
“Are you me?” she asked.
“One of us,” the older Mica said.
The younger one thought about that. “Did the volcano work?”
“No,” said the older Mica. “We put in too much glue.”
Mica looked at me, offended that I had allowed the mistake to happen twice.
I found a towel for the older woman and cleared the sofa. She set her wet shoes beside the smaller pair by the door, their toes pointing the same way.
That evening, the city maps updated. East was marked with a grey line and the words CONNECTION UNCONFIRMED. Beneath the notice, in smaller type, was the operator's usual instruction: Do not enter an unconfirmed route.
In the kitchen, the younger Mica counted the three cups she had set on the table.
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