MARTIN TAN. CLARA TAN.
DON'T LET HIM FORGET A SECOND TIME.
Martin photographed both sides of the print before sliding it back into the brown envelope. His phone confirmed two captures. The gallery contained only one new image: the four fingers were still visible at the edge of the family portrait, but the reverse of the photograph was blank.
He tried again. Victor's two lines remained perfectly legible in the viewfinder. The moment Martin pressed the shutter, the thumbnail became an empty field of grey paper.
On the third attempt, he did not use the camera. He found one of Victor's old blue-black pens and copied the words beneath the note Julian was keeping for him. Halfway through Clara's name, the pen stopped. For a second Martin could not remember why he was writing it. The line above contained his own name and nothing in his mind connected the two.
Then he turned the photograph over and saw the pale-blue polish on the child's fingernail.
Clara. His sister.
He drew a box around her name. The ink stayed, although the box already looked newer than the handwriting inside it, as if the two had been placed on the page minutes apart.
His mother looked out from the kitchen. “Aren't you leaving?”
She had put the fourth cup away. Four rings of moisture remained on the table. The smallest was fading into the wood.
“Dad wrote the name Clara Tan,” Martin said.
His mother frowned as though he had mispronounced a distant relative. “Who?”
Martin watched her hands. A cloth was twisted in her right fist. Her left hand still hovered between the kettle and the album, protecting a child her face no longer remembered.
He did not ask again.
Martin left the apartment at 3:07 a.m. In the mirrored lift, he read both names on the paper three times. By the time he reached the car park, he remembered reading them but could not tell whether he had spoken aloud.
A message from Julian contained a photograph of the folded note beside the disconnected review station. It showed only Martin's first sentence: I may be forgetting things I have just said.
The two names Martin had added were not there.
He looked at the original in his hand. Both remained. The paper had separated into two versions, and he had no way to decide which one the world would keep.
His phone vibrated.
The countdown on the abnormal work order had reached zero, but the case had not closed. A name now occupied the empty subject field: Ian Cheong, age nine. Beneath it was the address of a primary school, followed by a status line: GUARDIANSHIP CONSISTENCY REVIEW—ON-SITE AUDITOR REQUIRED.
The order had been generated at 2:54 a.m. Its receipt time was 7:40 that morning.
Martin glanced at the dashboard clock. 3:09.
Both times carried valid system signatures.
He did not accept the assignment. He copied the child's name and the location onto paper. A green notice immediately appeared: AUDITOR ARRIVAL CONFIRMED.
The car park barrier rose before his vehicle approached. His route service offered a nineteen-minute drive to the school and an estimated arrival of 7:26. The roads were empty. Nothing in the arithmetic allowed four hours for the journey.
Martin turned navigation off.
He waited for dawn at a twenty-four-hour kopitiam nearby. Ceiling fans pushed the wet air in slow circles. A cleaner hosed the five-foot way while the sky behind the billboards went from black to colourless grey. Every ten minutes Martin checked the paper and made sure Clara Tan and Ian Cheong were still on it.
Julian called at 6:48.
“The station is still offline,” he said. “The work order is gone. According to the system, no guardianship review was opened last night.”
“Do you remember Ian Cheong?”
A one-second pause. “Nine years old. Red raincoat. You told me to write the name first.”
“What about Clara?”
The pause lengthened.
“Is that your mother?”
Martin did not correct him. He was afraid the relationship would fall out of the sentence before he reached the end.
“Leave your note beside the offline station. Don't scan it.”
“Where are you?”
“Going to meet a child whose case doesn't exist.”
The school stood between two rows of ageing flats. Yesterday's rain had bleached the playing field with light. No pupils had arrived, though the canteen was already producing the smell of fried bee hoon and diluted disinfectant. Eight cartoon figures in different uniforms had been painted along the three-storey administration block. A noticeboard covered the space where a ninth should have stood.
The guard asked Martin to sign in. The visitor system recognised his Municipal Data Consistency Center credential, then completed the purpose of visit as PARENT ENQUIRY. He changed it to ON-SITE AUDIT. The display flickered and restored PARENT ENQUIRY.
The school counsellor, Mrs Wong, spoke in the soft, deliberate manner of someone accustomed to frightened children and defensive adults. She led him to a room beside the infirmary. Ian, she explained, had not boarded his bus the previous afternoon. The driver said the boy's name was not on the passenger list. His teacher said he had been waiting for family. The security guard eventually found him alone beneath the rain shelter.
“He has told us before that someone else was coming,” Mrs Wong said. “Yesterday he was wearing a red raincoat none of us had seen.”
“Where is it now?”
“His guardian took it.”
“Which guardian?”
Mrs Wong opened the boy's file. His father appeared at the top, with an aunt below him. Both phone numbers were active. The mother's field contained no dash, error mark or deletion notice—only a rectangle of background colour.
“His father works nights. The aunt collected him and brought him back this morning.” Mrs Wong lowered her voice. “Mr Tan, we have checked. This child has never had a mother.”
There was no cruelty in the statement. That made it worse.
“Never?” Martin asked.
She scrolled through six years of enrolment forms, vaccination consent, emergency contacts and medical declarations. Every document had been signed by the father or the aunt. In the annual family photographs, other children stood between one or two adults. Ian appeared beside his father every year.
Martin requested the source history for each form. Six systems returned six numbering schemes, with creation dates spread across nine years. Yet every source pointer converged on the same minute: 10:05 a.m. There had been no migration or maintenance window then. The timestamp ran backwards through Ian's life like a needle, stitching every place that required a mother's signature into one continuous blank.
“Did his mother leave?”
“No. His father says there was never such a person.”
“How was Ian born?”
Mrs Wong gave him the embarrassed look reserved for questions no adult should need to ask. Then she opened the hospital link. Full term. Natural delivery. Healthy male infant. Doctor, nurse, ward and time of birth were recorded. The maternal patient field was empty. At the bottom of the page, a completeness score read 100 per cent.
The record did not describe missing information. It described a birth that had taken place without a woman.
“It may be how the old system migrated the file,” Mrs Wong offered.
The sensible answer had arrived before the question was finished.
The door opened. A tired woman entered with a small boy by the hand. She introduced herself as Ian's aunt. He was thinner than his school photograph, with closely cropped hair. His right shoelace had been double-knotted. The left was undone. A drawing book with curled corners was held against his chest.
Before she sat down, the aunt said, “My brother has never been married. Ian was sick often when he was young, so the whole family took turns. Lately he has invented this woman. We don't know where he learned it.”
“What does he call her?” Martin asked.
“Always the same thing, as if that makes her real.” She pressed two fingers to her brow. “Hannah Teoh. There is no woman by that name in our family.”
Ian looked up.
It was not the fear of a child caught lying. It was the caution of someone hearing another person say a forbidden name correctly.
Martin placed the photograph of the hair clip on the table. “Have you seen this?”
The boy did not touch the screen. “It isn't hers. Mum doesn't use stars. She says shiny things are hard to find when you drop them.”
“Tell me what she looks like.”
His aunt inhaled sharply. Mrs Wong rested a hand on Ian's shoulder, ready to end a conversation that might be considered harmful.
Ian answered slowly, with the precision of a witness.
“There is a white line inside her left eyebrow. You only see it close up. She writes with her right hand but cuts fruit with her left. She hates coriander. If it is in my bowl, she picks it out. Her work bag is grey and the zip is broken. She keeps two orange pens inside.”
“What kind of work?”
“She watches cars move.”
“A driver?”
“No. Lots of routes. She says sometimes the safest one only moves the danger to somebody else.”
The medical patch on Martin's chest pulsed once. His elevated heart rate was classified as mild sleep deprivation.
“When did you last see her?”
“Three days ago.”
“Impossible,” his aunt said. “You were at our flat.”
“She stood outside the kitchen. You closed the door. You said no one was there.”
The aunt's lips parted. She remembered closing that door. She remembered an empty corridor. The two memories caused her no difficulty because the system had already chosen what one of them meant.
Martin searched Hannah Teoh across the Center's internal index: current identities, expired identities, former names, transport employees, family associations and phonetic matches. Every category returned zero. An ordinary search should have suggested near results. This one placed a single grey digit in the centre of the page.
0.
Below it, in smaller type: NO FURTHER ACTION REQUIRED.
Martin opened an offline note and transcribed Ian's description. When he entered two orange pens, the system corrected it to one. He changed it back. As soon as the cursor moved, the number became one again.
He closed the device and used paper.
“Ian,” Martin said, “I'm going to ask something you may not like. How can you prove you didn't invent her?”
The boy tightened both arms around the drawing book. “How can you prove your mother is real?”
A trolley moved along the tiled corridor outside, trembling gently over each join.
Martin could have answered with a birth certificate, photographs, shared memories, an address and a phone number that still connected. Until last night, those things had been enough to establish any human life.
“I can't,” he said.
Ian looked directly at him for the first time.
The audit form offered two resolutions: FALSE CHILDHOOD MEMORY—REFER FOR ASSESSMENT, or GUARDIAN DATA—NO CORRECTION REQUIRED. There was no field for a missing person.
Martin opened a manual objection and wrote: I believe Hannah Teoh exists.
The confirmation button turned red. A warning said the declaration would count towards his anomalous-association score and suspend high-level access for twenty-four hours. Belief was not proof. It only decided who would pay first.
Martin confirmed it.
His credential sounded once and changed from blue to grey.
Mrs Wong's manner became more careful, as though a trusted institution had quietly advised her to keep her distance. Ian's aunt stood and said the interview was over.
But Ian placed his drawing book in front of Martin.
“I can draw where she lives.”
The first pages showed a school bus, a rain shelter and a red raincoat filled in so heavily the paper had begun to tear. Ian turned to the final drawing.
It was a living room. A rattan sofa stood against one wall. A folding dining table occupied the window. The right corner of the television cabinet was cracked. Four bowls sat on the table, the smallest painted with two long rabbit ears.
Beside the door, the cover had been removed from a bell box to expose two curved wires. Ian had written its sound below it: DING—DONG. The second word stretched farther across the page.
“This is her home?” Martin asked.
“She said she couldn't come back. One day I had to give this to someone who remembered the bell.”
“Have you seen me before?”
Ian shook his head and pointed to the top of the drawing. A black rectangle stood there like a doorway seen from an open lift. The number plate carried no digit, only a circle darkened with layer after layer of pencil.
Martin knew the cracked television cabinet. He knew the rabbit bowl and the section of sky divided by an old advertising board.
It was not Ian Cheong's home.
It was the living room Martin had seen on the ninth floor of Tianheng Tower.