The dead were patient in the way that people become patient when they have absolutely no choice about it.
The queue stretched from the entrance processing desks all the way around the perimeter of the main hall and doubled back on itself twice, a snake of ghosts in varying states of temporal coherence waiting in rows separated by low wooden barriers that looked like they'd been sourced from a 1970s airport. The walls were lined floor to ceiling with filing drawers—real drawers, brass-handled, labeled in characters Wei could read and some he couldn't—and above the drawers were shelves holding more boxes, and above the shelves were galleries accessible by wrought-iron staircases that wound up into a dimness too thick to see through clearly.
The ceiling was not visible. Wei was reasonably certain it was there. He was not certain it was where ceilings usually were.
"Don't stare at the ceiling," Shen said, without looking at him.
"Why not?"
"Because it will stare back, and we're on a schedule."
The clerks at the processing desks were themselves dead—men and women in various eras of Chinese administrative dress who had apparently kept doing their jobs after dying, which Wei supposed was either dedication or the deepest kind of institutional inertia, and he genuinely wasn't sure which. They had the calm of people who had long since passed beyond surprise, beyond frustration, into something that was either enlightenment or total emotional depletion, and given what they were doing for a living—for whatever the dead equivalent of a living was—Wei was betting on the second one.
He passed close enough to one desk to hear the ongoing negotiation.
"—assignment to the Dominican Republic," a man in a 1970s leisure suit was saying. He had a wide collar and the expression of someone building to a point he'd been building to for some time. The leisure suit was burnt orange. It was, Wei thought, both the best and worst thing he'd seen all week. "I understand the assignment criteria. I'm not disputing the criteria. I'm saying that the criteria, properly applied, should result in an assignment somewhere that has hockey."
The clerk—a woman who appeared to be approximately forty and had clearly been forty for several centuries—looked at him with the expression of a person who had handled exactly forty thousand appeals involving sports. "The Dominican Republic has baseball," she said. "Baseball is a sport."
"Baseball is a sport that exists. Hockey is the sport."
"Sir, the assignment algorithm does not account for sporting preference."
"Can we amend the algorithm?"
"Sir."
"Because I looked into it, and there's actually a developing hockey scene in the Caribbean basin, there's a documentary—"
"Sir, I need you to take your form to window seven. The appeal process for demographic preference reincarnation has a twenty-year queue and you may submit your application at—"
"Twenty years."
"Twenty years, sir."
The man in the leisure suit processed this. "What if I just wait here until something opens up in Alberta?"
The clerk's expression did not change. It was possible it was incapable of changing. It was possible she had resolved it into pure professional affect sometime around the eighth century and was simply maintaining it. "Sir," she said, and picked up her stamp.
Wei moved past quickly. Rosa was a step ahead of him, navigating the space the way she navigated everything—by reading it first, by understanding the social geometry of who was looking where, by finding the line of least resistance and walking it so precisely it looked like she wasn't doing anything at all.
"Consulate training?" Wei asked quietly.
"Partially." She didn't look at him. "I grew up going to a lot of official buildings with my father. You learn to be invisible in rooms where being visible causes problems."
Wei thought about his father briefly and involuntarily, and then filed that away.
They passed through the main hall toward the back section—the restricted reading room, Shen had explained, accessible to active-investigation officers and their designated parties. The designated party thing was, Shen had also explained, technically an interpretation she was making about a regulation written before the concept of an unclaimed soul with developing divinity had been something the Bureau needed to account for. She had made this interpretation in the same tone she used to describe everything: as though it were simply true, and the universe would adjust its records accordingly.
The waiting dead watched Wei as he passed.
Not all of them. Most of them were doing what people do in queues: looking at the floor, looking at their hands, looking at nothing, conducting the internal negotiations of people who had run out of external options. But some of them looked at him—a man in work clothes from a different decade, a woman in a qipao holding a paper bag that contained, presumably, nothing, an elderly man with the careful stillness of someone who was still not entirely convinced that the thing that had happened to him was real—and in the looking there was something Wei didn't have a name for yet. Not recognition. More like: oh, there you are. I didn't know I was waiting for you but I think I might have been.
He looked away first. He had been told not to engage.
But he felt them at his back, the way you feel a draft from a window you can't see, and he kept his hand very firmly over the bell.
The processing system of the Eastern Underworld's Toronto branch Records Hall had been established, Granduncle Bo told him quietly as they moved, in the seventeenth century, when the Guangdong merchant diaspora started sending enough dead to Toronto's adjacent spiritual territories to require formal management. The original infrastructure was designed for hundreds of cases per year. Current throughput, Granduncle Bo said, was closer to tens of thousands. The system had not been substantially updated.
"Like a transit authority," Wei said.
"Worse. At least the TTC can blame weather." Granduncle Bo paused. "Occasionally."
"The volume of unprocessed files alone," Rosa said quietly—she had been listening—"is one of the Blood Consulate's standing arguments for why the Bureau needs external administrative support. They made a formal proposal in 1998. The Bureau declined."
"Declined to let the vampires help manage the Chinese afterlife," Granduncle Bo said flatly.
"I'm not defending the proposal. I'm describing it."
"Good. Keep describing it from further away."
They reached the restricted section door. Shen pressed her seal to the lock. The door opened, and the light inside was different—cooler, more silver, the light of things that were meant to last.
Wei looked back once at the queue, at the thousands of dead waiting in their rows, some patient, some quietly furious, some so resigned they barely looked like anything at all, and he felt something shift inside him that he couldn't name and didn't want to examine yet.
He went in.