Lena Cae proposed lunch on a Thursday, which was the day she had historically been most likely to propose things, and she proposed it in the particular way that meant she had been considering it for longer than a single morning.

"There is a place near the south gate," she said, appearing in Naia's doorway between the morning's correspondence and the afternoon's analysis. "They have the rice bowls you like."

"I have the acknowledgment mechanism section to finish before the senior council meets."

"You have been working on it for six days straight and the meeting is next week. You may take one hour."

Naia looked at her. Lena looked back with the expression she wore when she had already decided the outcome of a conversation and was only waiting for the other party to catch up with it.

On the way there, they had passed the Registry's southern branch office, where a line had formed, as it did now every morning, and Naia had noticed that the people in it were not looking at one another. They stood with their eyes on their own feet, or on the pavement, or on the middle distance, in the manner of people waiting to be told something they already knew. A small girl in the line was holding her mother's left hand and examining her fingers one by one, with great care, as though counting them.

Lena had slowed. Naia had slowed with her. Neither of them said anything. They stood at the edge of the pavement for the length of a long breath and watched the line move forward, a few inches at a time, and then Lena had said, in a voice that was almost conversational, "It was not like this a month ago," and Naia had said, "No," and they had gone on.

They went to the place near the south gate, which did have the rice bowls Naia liked. At midday it was quiet enough that the tables nearest the window stood well apart, far enough from their neighbors for a private conversation at ordinary volume. It was a narrow, high-ceilinged room with a counter of scrubbed pine, a bead curtain at the kitchen door, and a small shrine to the Registry in the corner where, she noticed, the lamp had been recently trimmed. Someone here still tended it. She was moved by this, unreasonably, and said nothing.

Lena ordered, and ate, with the comfortable directness of a person who found eating a sufficient activity in itself and did not require it to be performed with commentary. She did this until she had finished most of her bowl, which Naia recognized as her method of deciding when the social baseline of a meal was sufficiently established to move to the thing she had actually come to say.

"The gossip in the Wing," Lena said.

"I have been aware that there is some."

"It has become more specific in the last two days." Lena set down her chopsticks. "People are asking me directly whether your Bond is intact."

"What are you telling them?"

"That Bond status is personal information and I am not the appropriate source." She paused. "Which is also not an answer, and people who are good at listening know it, and some of the people who ask are very good at listening."

Naia looked at her bowl. A little steam still rose from the rice. "What do you want to know, Lena?"

"I want to know if you are all right." It was said simply, without the diplomatic framing that social convention usually wrapped around direct questions about another person's inner state.

The restaurant was quiet. The midday light came through the window at an angle that put their table in partial shadow and left the rest of the room bright, and Naia sat in the shadow and looked at her bowl and considered what an honest answer would look like.

"I need to tell you something," she said. "About the bandage."

"Yes."

"You have asked before. I have deflected before. I am going to try not to deflect this time, because I think," she paused, arranging the sentence properly before committing to it, "I think I need to say it aloud to someone."

Lena did not say anything. She had the stillness of someone whose instinct was to respond and who had decided that responding was not what this moment required.

Naia laid down her chopsticks.

"When I was fourteen," she said, "the Registry mark came. It came a little late, which was thought a mild curiosity at the time. An ordinary name, a stranger's name. Erev Solan. I had never heard of him. I felt the way people describe feeling when it comes: certain, in a way nothing I had experienced before had been certain. As if something already true had been written down."

"I know this part," Lena said, gently.

"You know some of it. I am telling you all of it." Naia looked at the window. "His family moved into my district the following spring. His father had a warehouse. He was fifteen, he was clever, he was not unkind. We found each other within a month. We were friends first, and then more than friends. We were together for three years."

"Three years."

She remembered the first time she had spoken to him. It had been in the library of the southern academy, in a low, brown, quiet room with a stove that ticked as it cooled, and he had been sitting at the wrong table, reading her book. She had been fifteen. She had told him, very coldly, that the volume was reserved. He had looked at her over the top of it with a look of such mild, interested surprise that she had forgotten what she was going to say next.

"It is a very good book," he had said. "I have only reached the second chapter. Are you going to tell me what happens?"

"It is a treatise on the Registry's founding statutes."

"Then I think I would prefer to find out for myself." He had slid the book across the table toward her, and she, who had never lent a book to anyone, had slid it back.

It was such a small thing. A book on a table. She had carried it for years without knowing she carried it.

"It was not a small thing. Not to me. At fourteen and fifteen and sixteen it was not small at all. We read the same books. We argued about the same poets. He knew when I was tired before I said so and I knew when he was lying about the weather." She stopped, and for a moment the old fond ache moved through her, the shape of a person she had loved. "I told him once that I thought the Registry was the one honest institution in the empire. He laughed at me. He said it was a lot to ask of an institution."

Lena's hand moved slightly on the table, not toward Naia. It only moved, the way hands do when they would like to do something and are being kept still.

"When I was seventeen, we were sitting on the roof of his father's warehouse. It was evening. He had been quiet for days. He said he had to show me something, and he rolled back his sleeve, and I looked at his wrist." She breathed. "The name on it was not mine."

The sentence landed in the quiet and stayed there.

"It was not a mistake he had made. It was not something he had hidden. He had never shown me, because I had never asked, because we had both, I think, been afraid of what we would find. It was a girl's name. A stranger. She lived in Varath, as it happened. He had known for three years, and had been trying to find a way to tell me." She said it in an even voice, a voice she had spent years training to be even. "He did not leave me to be cruel. He left because the Registry told him to, and we had both spent our lives being taught that the Registry was right."

"Naia."

"He was not a bad person." She meant it entirely and without reservation. "I need that to be clear each time. If it is not clear, the listener will understand the wrong thing. It is not a story about cruelty. It is a story about a system and a boy who believed it and a girl who did, and what the believing cost."

Lena did not reply.

"There is another piece," Naia said. She had not told this part to anyone. "Four nights after he left, I woke before dawn. My wrist was burning. I lit the lamp and looked." She was staring at the table now, at a grain in the pine. "The name on it had changed. Not faded. Rewritten. The ink had moved overnight as though a hand had crossed out the first and written another. A different name, in my own handwriting."

"Naia," said Lena, very quietly.

"Whose name is not a part of this." She said it without heat, as a fact. "I am telling you only that it happened. That the Registry, which had made one entry and then, I suppose, discovered the mistake, simply corrected it, in the dark, without asking me. As if I had been a ledger. I do not know if that is what the Misprint is. I know it is what it felt like." She drew a breath. "I have read every case in the archives since. There are three that resemble it. I have never found a mechanism."

"You do not have to say the name," said Lena.

"I will not."

"I do not need you to."

Naia lifted her eyes. Lena's face was open, grave, and a little wet at the edges, and she did not try to hide it.

"When I am in Varath," Naia said, "I saw his name. In the roll of the coastal district. He has been living there three years. His Bond is intact." She found, to her surprise, that she could say it with equanimity. "He is well, I think. He married her, perhaps. I did not look further."

"Do you hate her?" Lena asked. "The girl in Varath."

"No." Naia considered it honestly, because Lena deserved honesty and because the question deserved it. "I hope she is kind. I hope she has made him laugh. He was always better when he laughed."

"That is a very generous sentence."

"It is a very tired one." She almost smiled. "Seven years of practice make generosity cheap."

Lena let out a breath that was half a laugh and half something wetter, and wiped her eye with the back of her wrist, and was embarrassed, and said that the steam from the rice had got into it.

"Was it hard?"

"It was a name in a column. I read it and wrote it down." She paused. "That is the thing about the bandage. People think it is because of him. It is not."

"Then what is it for?"

"It is a reminder." The sentence arrived on its own. "Every morning I look at my wrist and I remember that I trusted the Registry once, entirely, the way you trust a compass or a measuring rod. The way you trust something that presents itself as a fact rather than an interpretation. And I was wrong to trust it that completely. The bandage is there to remind me not to do that again."

"Not to trust the Registry?"

"Not to trust anything that completely. Not to let certainty stand in for examination." She turned the chopsticks over in her fingers. "The bandage is not about Erev. It is about me. It is about the version of me that believed something without requiring sufficient proof."

Lena was quiet. She looked down at her own left wrist, where the Registry mark lay visible and unbound, vivid and fine, the name on it belonging to someone she had not yet found and for whom she had, as far as Naia could tell, entirely uncomplicated hope. Contrast did not need to be explained. Both of them saw it.

"If you stopped wearing it," Lena said, carefully, "what do you think would happen?"

"I do not know. That is partly the point. I am not currently willing to find out."

"Even now? After Varath?"

Naia looked at her. Lena looked back without her careful face, with the other one, the direct one, that she wore when she thought the careful face was doing more harm than good.

"I have a theory about how the Registry works," said Naia. "I have a mechanism hypothesis. I have data. All of it is consistent with the possibility that the name now on my wrist is not an error, that it was a correction rather than a mistake. But data and mechanism and hypothesis are not certainty. They are evidence. Evidence requires interpretation. Interpretation requires," she paused, "that I examine what I want the answer to be. That is the part I find hardest."

"What do you want the answer to be?" Lena asked.

It was a very simple question. It sat in the air between them with the weight of something that had been present for a long time and was only now being given the chance to exist in language.

Naia looked at the window.

"I do not know yet," she said. "I am still working on it."

They finished lunch without discussing it further. A girl came and cleared the bowls. Lena paid for both of them, which was its own sort of statement and required no words, and they walked back through the midday streets toward the palace, past the shuttered bakery and the long-armed crane that was putting up a new roof on the grain exchange, past a line of schoolchildren who were being walked two by two toward the river and who stared up at the Scholar's robe with open interest.

At the entrance of the Wing, Lena stopped.

"For what it is worth," she said. "Whatever you decide. I think you are probably wrong that you need sufficient proof for the most important things."

"I know you think that."

"I know that you know it." Lena pushed the door open. "It is worth saying anyway."

Naia stood in the doorway a moment longer than she needed to. Then she went in. She had work to do, and the acknowledgment mechanism section was not going to finish itself, and she had spent seven years constructing a very specific relationship with proof and its requirements. She was not going to revise that relationship on the basis of a lunch and the fact that the ink under her bandage was darker than it had been a fortnight ago.

On the stairs, she found she was thinking, without having chosen to, of the morning the name had changed.

It had been a Tuesday, she thought. She could never be sure of that. She remembered the room better than the day: the single window, the lamp she had lit with shaking hands, the pale square of dawn on the floor. She had sat on the edge of the bed with her wrist turned up in her lap, and she had read the new name three times. She had not known it. It was a stranger's name, a man's name, and the handwriting was her own.

That was what she had not been able to tell anyone. Not the name, which was only a name. The handwriting. Every mark in Auren was written in the hand of the person it bound, a fact so universal that no one remarked on it, and she had read it all her life as a kind of signature: here is your match, written by you, from the other side. And she had looked at the new name and thought, with a calm that had frightened her afterward: I did not write that. And then: I did. I will.

She had sat there until the lamp burned low. Then she had gone to the washstand and wrapped a strip of clean linen round her wrist, tight, three turns, and had gone down to breakfast as though nothing had changed.

Seven years. She had worn the bandage ever since, and the name beneath it had never faded, not for a single day, not even in the years when she had wished it would.

She sat down at her desk. She opened the document.

The afternoon mail had been sorted in her absence, and the top item in the tray was a report that wanted her signature before submission. It was the follow-up from the Varath coordination, and the header line listed the two coordinating parties.

His name was on the line below hers.

She looked at it for the length of one breath, as she had looked at a name in a roll in Varath, and she signed the report, and set it in the outgoing tray, and took up her pen, and began to write.

She thought of the question once more, the one Lena had asked, and found that the answer had a different shape than it had had a month ago. It was no longer a wall with a door in it. It was a field she had been walking across with her eyes down, and somewhere in the last twelve days she had lifted them, and the horizon was very far, and very wide, and she had not yet decided whether the sight of it was joy or terror. It was possible that they were the same thing, viewed from different distances.

She wrote for a long time. The lamps came on in the corridor. The Tower in the window held its thin gold. And at some point, without lifting her eyes, she became aware that she had put her right hand over her left, on the desk, with the bandage between them, and that it was warm there, and that she did not take it away.