In twenty-two years Meghna Rao has never once broken Section 4, Subsection 4. On Sunday night her sister asks her a question on the phone, and an eleven-year-old’s drawing of a fish waits in a drawer.

At twenty past six, by the fourth-floor lifts, a junior panel member stops the Secretary with a question he does not have to answer. She wants to know whether anyone knew, and built it that way anyway.

For eight months Meera Krishnan knew the system could not audit its own confidence. She told one colleague. He said everyone knew, it was in the design notes, and went back to work. So did she.

One course of a paediatric antiviral. Two children in the corridor at 2:40 in the morning. For twelve years a screen has given Rukhsana Baig the answer. Tonight the field comes back blank.

The morning brief arrives at 7:15 and runs to four thousand one hundred and six lines. Dev Sharma wrote the rule that it must list every one. He is seventy-one, and he means to read them all.

On the back of a Bureau envelope, Samar Varma adds up eleven years of confirmations. The number is not four thousand. Then he opens one file at random, and choosing it takes nineteen minutes.