A dog walks five kilometres of the most closely modelled ground on earth and nobody puts anything down for her. Past the checkpoint, a fruit seller drops half a spoiled guava beside her cart wheel without looking.

Dev Sharma wakes at 4:50, eleven minutes before his house expects him. For nine months the rear gate’s latch has been fully closed. This morning the dog does not go to her bowl.

Samar approved Harish Oberoi’s file before the chime finished sounding. Sixty-two, a moustache going white on one side first, confidence 97.1. Years later he asks the Archive what happened to the man.

For twenty-six years Dev Sharma knew a longer recording of his night at Gate Four existed. He never asked to see it. On a Tuesday, in plain clothes, he sits down in a low chair in the Archive and asks for all four minutes.

Aisha has signed more than nine hundred files. She fought about sixty. Four she still thinks were wrong. Then Samar, two years out, comes to her office to ask how she saved one tailor’s licence.

Sector 4-West has lost 2.1 points of confidence across 6,214 determinations, and no one can say why. The first person to feel it is Pushpa Devi, whose tailoring licence has renewed cleanly for eleven years.

At six, Ruhi was carried across a checkpoint at dawn and named in a Handler’s testimony. At twenty-two she reads it for the first time, with a ninety-one per cent match from the Union Bureau still unanswered.

Renu’s network has no list and has never met in one room. It is nine Handlers in four buildings who take longer over their files. In the fourteenth month, one of them remembers a citizen ID she saw four months before.