Chapter 29

The next morning I was woken by the phone.

Not a sharp ring — just a short, dry click of an incoming notification. I hadn't yet fully surfaced from a heavy, dreamless sleep when I reached for the bedside table and saw the sender's name on the display.

Helen.

The message was a single sentence, with no punctuation at the end:

"I need a witness today"

I read it three times, trying, through the last of my drowsiness, to catch the exact syntactic weight of the words. Not "I need help." Not "come quickly." That precise wording — legally measured and detached. A witness.

I typed back:

"What happened?"

Her reply dropped instantly, as if she'd been holding her finger over the keyboard, waiting for my reaction:

"Just come."

Forty minutes later I was parking outside her building in Pimlico.

Helen opened the door almost at once, the moment I touched the bell. She looked as though she hadn't just gone without sleep that night but hadn't slept for the past week — pale, with sharp shadows at the corners of her mouth. But it wasn't the tiredness that frightened me. A new, alarmingly composed hardness had come into her movements. She held herself like someone who had hesitated a long time at the edge of a cliff — and finally reached a final decision.

"Come in," she said shortly, stepping back into the hall.

The flat looked almost the same as the day before. Almost. My systems eye instantly registered the changes in the geometry of the room. On the massive wooden table stood three neat stacks of documents. On the floor stood a black plastic rubbish bag. On a chair — a small office shredder with an empty bin, glinting dully in the morning light.

I stopped in the middle of the living room.

"Will you explain what's going on?"

"Yes. Right now."

She went over to the first stack and picked up the top sheet in its stiff cardboard cover.

"My university documents. My degree from the London School of Economics. Archive extracts. Professors' references. A certificate of my placement at the ministry."

She opened the folder — inside lay immaculately preserved sheets, slightly yellowed with age, watermarked.

"Last night, after you left, I did an audit. I decided to check how many physical, tangible documents of my existence were still left in this reality."

A short pause.

"It turned out to be considerably fewer than I'd assumed."

She held out the degree certificate to me. I took it — examined it. Her name. State seals. The panel's signatures. The typeface, the embossing — it all looked weighty and genuine.

"I don't see anything wrong."

"Turn the sheet over."

I turned it. An utterly blank white surface looked back at me.

"In my graduation year the university registry put a purple ink stamp on the back of the form — a through-registration into the national education registry," she rapped out. "Without it this document is just pretty print work. The stamp is gone. Not rubbed off. Not bleached out. It's simply... not there anymore."

"Maybe a different form of the certificate for your cohort?"

"No. At three in the morning I wrote to a coursemate in Edinburgh. She sent a copy of her own degree. The stamp is there."

Helen opened the second folder.

"The tenancy agreement for this flat. The current contract."

I ran my eyes over the standard clauses. Signatures. The deposit amount. The exact address. Everything looked flawless, until my fingers turned the page with the particulars.

In the field "Emergency contact person" there was a blank inked dash.

"There was no one at all at the time of signing?" I asked, looking at that forlorn emptiness.

Helen stared for a long time out the window, where drops of morning rain crept slowly down the glass.

"There was," she said quietly at last.

"Who?"

She closed her eyes. Her lashes trembled.

"I don't remember, Michael."

Those three words were spoken with such everyday calm that it frightened me more than if she had burst into tears. It was a dry statement of a system failure — not a complaint, not a cry. Just a fact.

She went to the bookcase and took out a heavy photo album in worn velvet. She set it on the table in front of me and opened it to the middle.

I started leafing through. A childhood in the south of England. School trips. Student journeys around Europe. Ministry interiors with colleagues. A perfectly ordinary, warm human life — until my eye snagged on one recurring oddity.

In every group or paired photo, too much free, compositionally unjustified space was left beside Helen. The frame seemed to tilt to one side. As if the photographer had originally centred the composition for two — but the second person, for some reason, hadn't come into focus. Or had evaporated.

I raised my eyes to her.

"Is this what I think it is?"

"Yes." She snapped the album shut with a dull thud. "But there's a difference. I checked the original negatives. These photographs were never cropped. They came off the printer like this from the very first day."

I looked again at the closed cover.

In all those shots Helen stood a little left of centre. And in all of them she was looking not into the lens but slightly up and to the right — at someone standing next to her. At someone the system had already managed to cut completely out of the very structure of space.

"That's why I wrote to you this morning." Helen drew a deep breath, her shoulders dropping a little. "I need a witness, Michael."

"A witness for what?"

She moved away to the window. Leaned her forehead against the cool glass, staring for a long time into the grey, deserted street.

"If one day I start insisting that I've lived in this flat completely alone my whole life... that I never had any friends, anyone close, any memory of another person's footsteps in this room..."

She turned sharply, and her eyes flashed.

"Don't believe me. Do you hear? Don't believe today's me."

"Helen, stop it. We'll find a way out. The Protocol can be..."

"Promise me, Michael."

"Don't talk as if they're already erasing you."

"Promise."

She raised her voice — only a little, by a semitone. But that fleeting show of living, desperate human will was enough to catch the breath in my throat.

I slowly nodded.

"I promise. I'll remember."

She exhaled — raggedly, with relief, as if something heavy had been lifted off her chest. As if this pledge, this fixing of the fact by an outside observer, was exactly what she'd been waiting for all night.

We sat a long time in her quiet kitchen, looking silently into our cups. For about twenty minutes neither of us dared break the silence. Outside, the rain dripped. On the windowsill stood four living and two dead plants in identical clay pots. I tried not to look at the dead ones.

"Do you know what's the most frightening thing in all of this?" she finally asked quietly, without lifting her head.

"What?"

"I've caught myself thinking that I'm no longer afraid at all of disappearing physically. Or of losing my name."

I looked carefully at her pale profile.

"Then what are you afraid of?"

She smiled — very quietly, very sadly. The smile of someone who has already settled some important question and become, because of it, both calmer and further away.

"I'm afraid that one day my own disappearance will seem to me... something completely normal. The natural order of things."

At that moment the phone on the windowsill vibrated briefly. The screen flared, cutting through the half-dark of the kitchen.

Mo: "I dreamed about you tonight."

Helen's eyes slid over the glowing letters. And her face changed — instantly, the way the light changes when the sun comes out from behind clouds. She smiled so warmly and openly as I had never seen in all the days of our shared race. In that smile, for a second, the very twenty-five-year-old girl from the Kent photo showed through — with the bouquet of sunflowers, flooded with light.

Then she slowly reached out, turned the phone face down, and locked it.

Without answering a thing.

I tactfully kept quiet. But in that very second, looking at her lowered shoulders, I understood one simple thing with merciless clarity.

If the Protocol erases a person gradually, layer by layer — that distant, invisible architect from Dubai is right now exchanging messages with a woman who, perhaps in just a few weeks, will physically no longer remember why she ever decided to answer his first message.

And he'll go on writing. Because he won't know.

Late that evening, back in my own empty flat, I took a new black notebook out of the desk drawer.

I opened it to a blank page. I stared a long time at the white emptiness, cradling the pen in my fingers. Then I wrote a sentence — for the first time in all this time not about myself, not about my erased years, not about my own private fears:

"If I ever forget Helen, it will mean that I'm not the only one who has lost this war."

I put a full stop. Closed the notebook.

And only as I was putting the pen away did I notice the thing that sent a short spasm through my body.

I had written that sentence in exactly the same cold, even, almost calligraphic hand — the one that filled the directive pages after the thirtieth. That alien hand whose manner I was subconsciously adopting more with every day, and feared more and more.

I looked at my own letters for a long time.

Then — for the first time in the whole investigation — I didn't cross them out.