It was the living room Martin had seen on the ninth floor of Tianheng Tower.
He studied the drawing again: rattan sofa, folding table, cracked television cabinet, even the section of sky divided by an old advertising board. Ian could not have taken those details from Martin's memory. Until the previous night, Martin himself had forgotten the rabbit bowl.
“Where is the address?”
Ian turned the page over. A unit number had been written in the lower corner: 8-05. The space for the building name was blank. Beneath it were a street and the numbers of the two properties on either side.
Martin entered the address into the map. The pin settled between two named apartment blocks. A building footprint appeared, along with its land reference, fire zone and forty-eight electrical accounts. Only the name people used for the place was missing.
Navigation labelled the destination ARRIVAL.
“Is this your home?”
Ian nodded. “Mum's too.”
His aunt closed the drawing book. “You see? He draws his own flat and says it belongs to this woman. Children mix dreams with real things.”
It would have ended an ordinary meeting. Martin's credential was grey now. He could not order a residential audit, and he had no authority over the boy.
“Let me see it once,” he said. “If there is nothing in the flat that belonged to Hannah Teoh, I'll amend my objection.”
“Amend it how?”
“I'll say I was wrong.”
The aunt glanced at his suspended credential. An auditor already marked down by his own system was less threatening when he offered to confess another mistake. She agreed.
They left the school at 8:12. Pupils were pouring through the gate, schoolbags and umbrellas striking one another along the narrow pavement. Ian walked between the adults and looked back twice, checking that the administration door had not closed over everything he had said inside.
The apartment was less than two kilometres away. Its entrance stood between a laundrette and a drainage lane. Rainwater travelled down faded tiles. Four screw holes remained above the doorway where metal lettering had once been fixed, but the dirt around them preserved no readable name.
No guard sat at the desk. The visitor ledger lay open. Across the last seven pages, residents had written THIS BUILDING under destination and left the building-name field empty. Even the management stamp carried only a company number.
There were eight floor buttons inside the lift. Ian's aunt pressed eight. The boy stood at the back and did not look into the mirror.
The display moved from one to two, then four. Three never appeared. His aunt continued reading her phone. By the time Martin looked up, the number was five.
“Does anyone live on the third floor?”
“Of course. Why wouldn't they?”
Her phone said 8:15. Martin's watch said 8:14. When the doors opened on level eight, the clocks agreed again.
The corridor was narrow, crowded by shoe cabinets and potted plants. Unit numbers ran from 8-01 to 8-08. Only the digits on 8-05 looked new, as though they had been removed and replaced.
Ian's aunt opened the door with her fingerprint.
Martin smelled yesterday's coffee. Then he saw the room from the drawing.
The furniture occupied almost identical positions. Rattan sofa against the same wall. Folding table beside the window. The split in the television cabinet rose from the right corner in two branches. Here, however, the view contained laundry poles, dripping compressors and a grid of windows across the lane—not the rain that had never reached the floor of Tianheng Tower's ninth level.
Ian removed his shoes and stepped neatly around the broken cabinet. This was not a dream location. His body knew the room.
“My brother works nights. Sometimes he sleeps at the depot during the day,” the aunt said, opening the curtains. “It's only him and Ian here. Look if you must, but don't touch anything personal.”
Three place settings waited on the dining table.
A dark-blue adult bowl. Ian's white rabbit bowl. A second adult bowl in pale grey. Three pairs of chopsticks lay parallel on the right. Only the grey bowl had a short-handled spoon beside it.
“Three people had breakfast?” Martin asked.
“I brought Ian home and ate before school.”
“Are you left-handed?”
The spoon lay to the left of the grey bowl. She moved it to the right as casually as if correcting a waiter. “I put it down without thinking.”
Martin opened his camera. The recognition overlay classified the table as TWO PLACE SETTINGS AND ONE CHILD'S ITEM. The grey bowl was visible in the image. The software simply did not count it.
Two adult coffee mugs dried beside the sink. One carried a light tea stain. Heatproof cloth had been wound around the other handle. The aunt said her brother liked buying things in pairs. Every knife in the rack faced right except one. She blamed the cleaner.
A pair of beige women's shoes, size thirty-seven, stood at the bottom of the shoe cabinet with dried red earth on the toes. They belonged to the previous tenant. Two adult toothbrushes occupied the bathroom cup, one worn towards the left and one towards the right. One was a spare.
Every object had an explanation. Not one explanation required another person.
In the main bedroom, men's clothing filled the left of the wardrobe. The right side held an empty row of evenly spaced hangers. Long use had left a shallow depression on both sides of the mattress. The pillow on the left wore a clean case, but a strand of black hair longer than the aunt's lay across its centre.
“The cleaner,” she said from the doorway.
“She sleeps here?”
“Then it may be mine.”
Her own hair ended below her ears.
Martin lifted the strand into an evidence sleeve. Before he could seal it, his phone warned: UNAUTHORISED COLLECTION OF FAMILY-MEMBER BIOLOGICAL MATERIAL. He opened the household list. Ian, his father and the aunt were the only people shown. None could have left the hair. The system continued to call it family material.
“Mum's bag,” Ian called from the living room.
He was kneeling beside the sofa, pulling a grey canvas bag from underneath. Half the zipper pull was missing. A paper clip had been fitted through the remaining metal.
His aunt crossed the room. “That was free from the supermarket.”
Martin remembered Ian's description: grey bag, broken zip, two orange pens.
Inside were a folding umbrella, a transit-card sleeve, an open packet of tissues and two orange fineliners. Both pens had been used to half length. Their clips faced opposite directions, as if one was habitually passed to somebody sitting across a table.
There was no identity card, no work credential and nothing bearing the name Hannah Teoh.
“Have you seen the bag before?” Martin asked the aunt.
“Of course.”
“Whose is it?”
For one moment she stared at the canvas. She was not searching her memory. She was waiting for an answer to be supplied.
“My brother's. He takes food to work.”
Ian shook his head. His aunt took hold of his shoulder—not hard, but firmly enough to keep him away from the bag.
“That's enough. You've looked. There is no woman here.”
Martin returned the pens. Folded between them was a school-bus route diagram, its crease running through two stops near Ian's school. He did not open it. In the corridor, the lift announced its arrival. Its doors remained open for several seconds. No one stepped out.
The refrigerator compressor stopped, and the kitchen became unnaturally quiet.
A yellow note was attached to the refrigerator door. It had been half covered by a shopping list when they entered. Cold air from a ceiling vent lifted the corner of the list and revealed blue handwriting.
FRIDAY, 4:10—COLLECT IAN.
BUS ROUTE CHANGED. DON'T TAKE THE ROUTE THE SYSTEM GIVES YOU.
—HANNAH
Martin did not move.
Ian pulled free of his aunt. “I told you she could write.”
The aunt saw the note. Colour left her face, then returned as an almost angry calm. “Ian wrote that. He's learned how adults write.”
“And the signature?”
“Any name.”
Martin raised his phone. On camera, the yellow square carried three blue rules and no words. He lowered it. His eyes could still read every line.
“All of us watch it,” he said.
The aunt did not like the instruction, but she did not look away. Ian stood on his toes to keep Hannah's name in view. Three people faced the note.
Martin counted to ten. Nothing changed.
“Now look out the window.”
“What does this prove?” the aunt asked.
“If Ian wrote it, turning around won't turn it into something else.”
She gave a small, incredulous laugh but faced the glass. Ian refused. Martin blocked the boy's view with his body and closed his own eyes.
One second. Two. Three.
He looked again.
The final stroke of Hannah's name was missing. The ink had not been rubbed off. It had withdrawn from the paper fibres, leaving a patch of yellow cleaner than the space around it. While Martin watched, the retreat stopped.
“Her name was complete,” Ian said.
His aunt turned back. “It was always like that.”
She believed herself.
Martin had Ian watch the note alone while both adults faced away. After five seconds, no more ink had gone. Then the aunt watched while Martin covered the boy's eyes. A dot disappeared from the first letter of the signature.
Not every pair of eyes could keep it in the world.
Martin peeled the note from the refrigerator without allowing it to leave his sight. A grain of rust had adhered to the back, evidence that it had been there for some time. Beneath the shopping list, the refrigerator paint was newer in a rectangle exactly the same size.
“You can't take that,” the aunt said.
“I'm making a record.”
“Your access is suspended.”
She was right. Removing a note the family denied would not make Hannah Teoh a person again. It would only make Martin an auditor who had stolen from a private home.
He gave the paper to Ian. “Don't look away.”
The boy held it in both hands with the care of someone carrying a bowl filled to the rim.
Martin took out the page on which he had copied Victor's message. Beneath Clara's name, he transcribed the refrigerator note word for word. For the first time, both erased women existed on the same sheet of paper. When he finished, Ian returned the original to the refrigerator.
“Why don't you take it?” Ian asked.
“Because someone still lives here. Evidence shouldn't take her home away as well.”
It was not an answer from any Center procedure. Only after he spoke did Martin realise he remembered every word of the sentence.
Ian's aunt opened the front door. “We're finished.”
Martin put the paper away. As he passed the dining table, the aunt nested the pale-grey bowl inside the blue one. The two adult settings fitted so neatly that, seen from the door, only one remained.
Martin stepped into the corridor. Ian did not follow.
“Ian,” his aunt called.
The boy stood at his bedroom door, looking beneath the bed. He waited until his aunt went to put away the grey bag, then knelt and reached into the dark.
He pulled out an old mobile phone. It was thick, with a diagonal crack along the display. A water-warped slip of paper had been trapped inside the transparent case.
“Mum said I could take it out when someone believed her.”
Martin accepted the phone. Five per cent battery. No contacts, messages or photographs. The call history, however, contained the same failed number again and again.
It was Martin's number.
He entered the aunt's phone number and pressed the green key. The display blinked. Eleven digits collapsed into zeros from right to left, then rebuilt themselves as a different number.
His number again.
Martin tried the Municipal Data Consistency Center switchboard. The result was the same.
The battery dropped from five per cent to three. Ian's voice tightened. “Only one try left.”
“Have you ever reached anyone?”
“No. Mum said I wasn't the one looking for you.”
“Who was?”
The old phone vibrated in Martin's hand.
No caller appeared. Instead, a message stored somewhere inside the device filled the screen: WHEN HE BELIEVES ME, ANSWER.
Before Martin could touch the green key, the phone in his pocket began to ring.
The caller ID displayed his own number.