Chapter 159: The Clerk Won't Stop

"He's dying," Mu Chen said.

I put my bowl down, just staring. "Ping?"

"Ping." He took a seat. "He's not fast. His heart's struggling, his hands have started shaking, and he's nine hundred years old in a body that crawled out of the ocean. I'd give him a year, maybe two. It is not six."

"Six what?"

"Six million," said Mu Chen. "That's how many names are left on his ledger."

— • —

I did the math on the walk over, and it's the ugliest sum I've ever had to tally.

Ping reads about four hundred names a day, which is a massive amount for a guy his age; it's also exactly four hundred more than anyone asked him to do. He's been at it every day for years, and he's cleared maybe two and a half million total.

Four hundred names a day, for a single year, is a hundred and forty-six thousand.

And there are six million left.

He's going to die with nearly five million eight hundred thousand names still left unread, and he's known that since the very first morning — he just never mentioned it to anyone.

— • —

I found him in the long tent at the terrace camp where the readers work. He was at a table near the door, a sheet in front of him and a lamp lit at two in the afternoon because his eyes have finally failed him.

"You're blocking my light," he muttered.

I stepped aside. "Mu Chen came to see me."

"Mu Chen is a fusspot." Ping made a small check beside a name, then read the next one out loud, clearly, just like he always does. Then he read the next. He got through four more before he opened his mouth again. "He told you the number."

"He told me both of them."

"Then you can do the math, and we don't need to talk about it."

"Ping."

"There are eleven other tables in this tent," he said, "and nine hundred readers in this camp, plus forty thousand across the provinces. Every name on every sheet that isn't mine gets read by someone perfectly competent, and the people come home just the same." He flipped the sheet. "The system doesn't need me. I'm aware. Thanks."

"Then why keep doing four hundred a day?"

He stopped.

"Because I signed them," Ping said. "Every single one. Not some policy, not some department. There's a mark at the bottom of every order and it's mine, written by my own hand, eight million six hundred and forty thousand and nine times." He grabbed his pen again. "I did them one by one. I'll read them one by one. That's my entire reason, and I've had nine hundred years to double-check it."

"You won't finish."

"No."

"Doesn't that—"

"Of course it does," Ping cut in. "Now move. You're in my light again."

— • —

I hung around the tent for an hour that first day, even though I hadn't planned on it, because I'd never actually watched the reading and I found I couldn't walk away.

It's not what I expected. There's no ceremony. Just forty people at eleven tables with lamps, reading names out loud in plain, boring voices like they're checking a grocery list. Behind each table is a strip of open ground with two of Mu Chen's healers standing there, looking bored.

Ping read: "Hu Yan. Fuller. Of the north fork."

Nothing happened for nine seconds. Then a guy was just standing on the open ground with his hands out, staring at the canvas ceiling.

One of the healers said, "You're fine. You're in a tent. Come sit down, there's a chair."

"...Is it the same year?"

"No," the healer said. "Come sit down anyway."

That was it. That was the whole thing. The guy sat in the chair, someone handed him water, someone else started asking what he did, and Ping had already moved on to four more names.

"You don't look at them," I said.

"No."

"Not even once?"

"If I look at them, I stop." Ping turned the page. "I looked for the first two months. I got through maybe forty a day, and I spent the time weeping, and everyone was very moved, and it was the single most useless I've ever been." He marked a name. "Four hundred a day, and I don't look up. That's the arrangement. It's not a nice arrangement. It's the one that gets people out."

He read the next name. A woman walked up. Someone pulled out a chair for her.

— • —

Lu tried two days later. I tagged along, and I wish I hadn't, because it was a private moment and I was just standing in the middle of it.

"Let me take a table," Lu said. "Not your sheet. A different one. I'll read them and you'll never have to see me do it."

Ping didn't look up.

"No."

"Teacher—"

"Don't." His pen didn't stop moving. "You want to help me carry this. You want it really badly, and you've wanted it since that night you sat on a log with me and told me a wrong man can still be useful. That was true. I've thought about it every day since, and it's the reason I'm sitting in this tent." He marked a name. "And you cannot have this. Not this."

"Why not?"

"Because you wrote down two million four hundred thousand of your own names," Ping said, not looking up from his stack, "and if you sit at my table, reading my names, then in forty years someone is going to tell a story about two archivists who did their penance together; and we become one single story, and yours starts looking easier just because it's standing next to mine." He finally looked up at Lu, his eyes tired and clear. "I won't let my crime be the thing that makes yours look smaller. Read your own. There are two million four hundred thousand of them, and not one person has read a single one."

Lu just stood there.

"I've been reading yours for four years," he said.

"I know. Now stop. Start reading my list at your own table, with your own stack, and let them be two separate lists." Ping turned back to the paper. "It's the only useful thing I have left to give you, and you are going to hate it."

Lu walked outside and stood in the rain for about twenty minutes, then he went and got his own list.

— • —

Tao Tao was the problem — and the problem was that she couldn't figure out what she wanted, which was weird, because Tao Tao has never in her life not known exactly what she wants.

"I'm not going," she said.

"Nobody asked you to go."

"You're going to." She was chopping something, putting way too much force into it. "You're going to walk over here, with that look on your face, and say, 'Tao Tao, the old man is dying,' and then I'm going to have to decide how I feel about it."

"So what's your position?"

"I haven't got one! That's the entire point." The knife hit the board hard. "I've had one job with him for four years. I don't forgive him. That's it. That's the whole job, and it's clean, and I'm actually good at it. He gets a bowl, he gets the rule applied, and he doesn't get forgiven — it's been fine."

"And now?"

"And now he's going to die at a table, processing four hundred names a day, and I find that I—" She stopped, hands flat on the board. "I don't want him to die tired. That's what I've got. I don't forgive him, but I also don't want him to die tired — and those two things won't sit right in the same person, even though I've been carrying them both around for a month."

"They sit in the same person just fine," I told her. "They've been sitting in you for a month already."

"Shut up," Tao Tao said, and she went back to her chopping.

— • —

It was Su Yue who caught the thing none of us had seen, just tossing it out over a burnt dinner without even looking up from the pan.

"Who met him?"

"Who?"

"Ping. Back when he first showed up." They scraped the pan. "Every returned soul is supposed to be met. That's the whole point of what we built. Somebody with the same hole inside them sits down, says 'I know,' and then they don't leave." They looked at me. "Who did that for Ping?"

I thought about it for a minute.

"He came up on the day," I said slowly. "He asked how many were left. Then he picked up a sheet from a pile and sat down in the dirt."

"And nobody stopped him?"

"No."

"So that's eight million, six hundred and forty thousand and nine people who got met," Su Yue said, "and one guy who wasn't." They put the pan down. "He's been at that table since the hour he arrived, all because nobody ever gave him anything else to do. We've all been calling it penance, but I think a lot of it is just that he never had anywhere else to sit."