He waited until they were in the main hall.
He didn't do it because he had a plan. He didn't do it because he'd decided it was the right moment, or because some strategy had coalesced that required it. He did it because he walked back into the main hall and saw the queue—thousands of dead in their rows under the silver light, patient and exhausted and confused and tired in the way you are when you've been waiting long enough that you've stopped being sure you were ever waiting for anything in particular—and something in his chest went very quiet and then said: this is not okay.
Not a philosophical position. Not a doctrine. Just: the specific wrongness of a system that had been built to process people and had scaled past any point at which the people could still be seen individually.
He stopped walking.
"Wei," Rosa said, behind him.
"One second," he said.
He took the bell out of his pocket.
"Wei—" That was Shen, sharp, already moving.
He rang it once.
The sound was not loud. The bell was small, bronze, cracked, the tool of a lineage of guides who had spent generations helping the dead find their way. It did not produce a sound that shook the building. It produced a sound that the building heard—that every soul in the building heard—in the place where sounds go that are meant for you specifically, the place you didn't know you were listening until the right thing came through.
The queue went still.
Thousands of dead, in their rows, all of them turning.
Shen reached him in three steps. Her hand went to his arm. He didn't pull away and didn't move and she stopped pulling—because pulling a man who wasn't moving anywhere was just friction, and she was too pragmatic for pointless friction, and maybe because some part of her wanted to hear what he was going to say.
Wei looked at the dead in their lines.
"I don't have any power over what happens to you," he said. He said it at a normal volume. The hall carried it the way the hall carried everything—perfectly, inevitably, because the space had been designed to carry the words of administrators, and administrators' words were made to reach everyone in the room. "I can't process you. I can't send you anywhere better. I can't fix the queue." He paused. "I am, for the record, very new at being dead and I have almost no institutional authority and I'm probably going to get in substantial trouble for this in about four minutes."
A few of the dead were looking at him with the focused attention of people who had given up expecting anything interesting to happen and then something interesting happened.
"But if you want to stop waiting," Wei said, "you can. That's a choice you can make. This building can't make you stay in line. It can make you feel like staying in line is the only option that exists. It's not." He paused again, because the next part was the part he wasn't sure about, and he'd learned recently that being unsure about something out loud was better than performing a certainty he didn't have. "I don't know where you'll go if you stop waiting. I don't know what that looks like. I know that the line is not the only thing you are."
He stopped speaking.
The hall was very quiet.
For a long moment, nothing happened. Thousands of dead stood in their rows and looked at him, and the fluorescent-adjacent light hummed, and the bell in his hand was very still, and Shen was very still beside him, and Wei thought: okay, that was probably just—
The man in the 1970s leisure suit—the orange one, from the desk by the entrance—stepped out of his line.
He didn't go anywhere. He just stepped sideways, out of the snake of the queue, and stood there on the institutional floor looking at his own hands with the expression of someone who has just discovered something he already knew but had managed to stop knowing for a while.
Then a woman in a qipao stepped out.
Then an old man.
Then—not everyone. Not even most of them. But a quarter of the dead, give or take—the ones who had been there longest, maybe, or the ones who had been most confused about why they were still there—simply stopped waiting. Some of them stood in place looking lost. Some of them turned to each other. Some of them looked at Wei with an expression he was going to have to sit with for a while, because it wasn't gratitude exactly, and it wasn't relief exactly, and it was too complicated to name in a room that was currently experiencing what Magistrate Shen Ziyu was already, in the part of her mind that was always composing the paperwork, categorizing as a Category Three Unauthorized Convocation.
"Wei Chen," Shen said. Her voice was very level. "I am going to need you to come with me, and we are going to have a very significant conversation about the meaning of rule three."
"I know," Wei said.
"You rang the bell in the main hall."
"I did."
"I told you not to."
"You did."
"Is there anything you'd like to say?"
Wei looked at the dead stepping out of their lines—confused, blinking, some of them crying in the transparent way of people who were surprised by their own emotions—and he thought about the glass rod with its two threads, the life that was supposed to have been his and the scar imposed on it by someone who needed him to not exist.
"I'd like to file a complaint about my death alteration," he said. "Formally. With your office. I believe you have the form."
Shen looked at him for a long moment.
"Yes," she said. "I do."
The dark gold text arrived at the edge of Wei's vision, slow and careful, like a bureaucratic system that had not expected to process this case and was trying very hard to be adequate to it:
DOCTRINE ENACTED: CONSENT BEFORE CLAIM. FOLLOWERS: 108. DIVINE SEED: 28%.
The building, around them, was beginning to wake up in the institutional sense—alarms, summons, the sound of officers being called from other sections. The chaos was administrative. The chaos was loud. The chaos was exactly the kind that took years to sort out properly, and generated forms, and left records.
Wei put the bell back in his pocket.