Chapter 160: Someone From the List

"You can't order it," Min said, before I'd even finished asking. "I want to be super clear. You don't go to someone your Empire erased and ask them to be nice to the guy who signed the paper."

"I wasn't going to order it."

"You were going to ask, which for you is basically the same thing — because you're you, and nobody says no to you." She set her tea down. "I'll put it out there. That's what the network is for. Someone will offer, or they won't, and if nobody does, that's your answer. Take it."

Eleven days later, somebody offered.

— • —

His name was Sai. He used to be a cooper in a river town, but he was taken in Ping's second year — that's nine hundred and eleven years ago now — all because of a grain levy his town had tried to fight.

He was a big guy who'd gone thin, and he sat outside the reading tent for a while before he finally went in.

"I'm not doing this to be a good person," he told me. "I want everyone to know that. I'm doing this because I've got a question, and he's the only one alive who can answer it, and I've been waiting nine hundred years."

"What's the question?"

"That's my business," Sai said, and he walked in.

— • —

I stayed outside. Min stayed with me, and she wouldn't let me listen at the flap — she told me so twice.

What I know is what Sai told me after, and he told it flat, without any dressing up.

He sat down across from Ping and said his own name.

And Ping put his pen down and said, "Sai. Cooper. River town on the north fork, the one with two bridges. Nine hundred and eleven years, near enough. There was a levy, and your council petitioned it, and the petition was the real reason, not the grain." He said it without looking at anything. "It was raining. Your wife was named Ru. You had a dog that came into the office with the men who took you, and someone had to put it out."

Sai didn't speak for a long time.

"You remember the dog," he said.

"I remember all of it," Ping said. "That was the arrangement I made with myself. If I was going to do a terrible, necessary thing, I was going to know exactly what I did. I didn't permit myself to forget one." He folded his hands. "I've been told since that this wasn't a virtue. I've thought about that a lot, and I've decided they're right. It just let me keep doing it."

"Nine hundred years," Sai said. "I've wanted to ask somebody why, and I figured out about four hundred years in that there wouldn't be a 'why.' Just a form, and a reason on it, and the reason would be stupid." He leaned forward. "Here's my question. Did you think about me? After. Any single time. Not the eight million. Just me."

"Yes," Ping said.

"Don't."

"You asked."

"Don't lie to me —"

"Second year, fourth month," Ping said. "You're the reason I started keeping the list in my head instead of just in the ledger, because the ledger had your trade and your levy but not your dog, and I realized I couldn't put down a man and then not know what happened to his dog. I've thought about you specifically several thousand times, and it didn't stop me from signing eight million more." He sat very straight in his chair. "That's the true answer, and it's worse than the one you came for. I'm sorry. You said not to lie."

Sai put his head in his hands and stayed like that for a long time.

"I don't forgive you," he said, eventually.

"No. I should think not."

"I'm going to come back tomorrow."

Ping's voice did something for the first time in four years.

"...Why," he said.

"Because I've got about nine hundred years of questions," Sai said, "and you're the only one who has the answers, and when you die, they go with you." He stood up. "And because somebody told me every returned soul gets met, and you're one of us, whatever else you are. I'm not being kind. I'm being thorough. You'd approve."

— • —

He came back. He's been coming back for eleven months now.

— • —

Tao Tao went four days after Sai did.

She walked into the tent, stood at the end of the table, and Ping just kept reading names because he didn't know how to do anything else while someone was standing there.

"Stop," she said.

He read two more.

"Stop," Tao Tao said, and put her hand flat on the sheet.

He stopped.

"I'm not forgiving you," she said. "I want that clear first. I'm never going to. You killed old Ru — or you didn't, your machine did, your student did, it's the same building — and Sedgewater burned, and there's a hole in my life the exact shape of a net-mender, and none of that moves. Not today, not ever. Do you understand me?"

"Yes," Ping said.

"Good." She picked the sheet up from under his hands. "You're relieved."

"...I have four hundred a day —"

"You've got about two hundred left in you a day, and you've been doing four hundred for a month, and Mu Chen says your heart's tearing itself up doing it." Tao Tao's chin was trembling, but her voice was steady. "There are forty thousand readers. There are six million names. It's going to take nine years, and it's getting done whether you sit at this table or not. You're not the thing that makes it work. You never were. You've just been the thing that wouldn't stop."

"It was mine to do."

"It was yours to start," Tao Tao said. "You started it. You gave the whole list back, every name, then sat in the dirt and read for four years without anyone even asking. That's started. That's more started than anybody's ever started anything." She folded the paper, shoved it into her coat, and finished, "Now let someone else carry it. That's the rule. It's the only rule we have, and you don't get to be the exception just because you think you deserve to die at a desk."

Ping sat there, his hands empty and resting on the table.

"I don't know what to do," he said.

"No," Tao Tao replied. "That's why I'm taking it now and not in a year. So you've actually got time to find out."

Then she slid a bowl in front of him — she'd been carrying it the whole time — and walked out without looking back, heading behind the tent to cry for an hour where she thought nobody could see.

— • —

He lived another fourteen months.

He stopped reading names. Instead, he started answering questions — Sai's at first, then others, because Sai told people, and it turned out that among eight million returned souls, there were a lot who had spent centuries wanting to ask someone *why me* but never expected a real answer.

He answered everyone. He never once blamed the rain, policy, or some invisible order. Mu Chen says he actually got a little softer in those final months, and Mu Chen is not a sentimental man.

I sat in on one session, near the end, with his permission and the other man's.

The man was called Deng-fu, a former carter who only wanted to know one thing: whether his brother had been taken too, or if his brother had informed on him. He'd spent nine hundred years with both questions.

Ping thought about it, eyes shut, for a long moment.

"Your brother was on the list," he said. "Four months after you. Same clerk, different order. He is alive; he came up two years ago in the coast reading, and he is in a town called Elmford. If you go to the placement office in this camp, they will have him within a week." He opened his eyes. "He did not inform. Nobody informed. That town was taken on a map."

Deng-fu didn't say a word. He just got up and walked out, and I watched him go the wrong way twice before he finally found the placement tent.

"You could have just told him the first part," I said.

"He asked two questions," Ping replied. "People always ask the second one quietly, then spend a year pretending they didn't." He looked exhausted. "It's not kindness to just answer the easy half. Everyone in my old department was brilliant at answering the easy half."

He asked for two things at the end.

The first was that his name stay off everything. No stone, no entry, nothing in the record but the single line he already had in the manifest, sitting right there among the others where Tao Tao refused to let it be moved.

The second was that someone read him the day's names. So that's what we did, for about three weeks. Min mostly. Sai twice.

He died in the morning, which I've been told is common.

Tao Tao said his name.

She said it in that flat, clear voice you use for any name, standing at the end of a table in a reading tent; then she just sat down and read the next four hundred, wouldn't let anyone take the shift from her, and hasn't mentioned it since.

DING. Filed: Ping. Clerk. Of no town he ever named. Two million, five hundred and nine thousand, four hundred and eighteen names read aloud by his own mouth. Five million eight hundred thousand left for other people, which was always going to happen, and which he knew on the first morning and never once said. Talent — I have logged the deaths of gods. I want it noted that I have filed this one the same way I filed theirs: name, work, what was left over. He did not want an entry. He has one. He is on the list with everybody else, where the girl put him.

— • —

The air was warm — getting late.

I made the soup. Nobody said much for a while.

"Nine years," Tao Tao said eventually, staring at her bowl. "For the six million."

"About that," said Xue Ningzhi.

"I want a table."

"You've already got eleven towns."

"I want a table as well."

Xue Ningzhi looked at her for a moment, then took out her pen and wrote it down — it's the only kind of comfort Xue Ningzhi knows how to give, and honestly, it's better than most.

Later, Yun Shu leaned on me and said, "You've gone quiet."

"He never let himself forget one. Nine hundred years. He thought that was the honest thing to do."

"It was the honest thing to do," said Yun Shu. "It was also the thing that let him keep going. Both. He said so himself." She took my bowl. "Two things in the same person. We've all got them. Eat something."