THE ALPHA WHO ERASED ME

Chapter Two — The Wrong Ink

My father kept his inks in a wooden case with eight compartments, and he was superstitious about them in the way that careful men are superstitious about their tools.

Oak gall for permanent entries. Births, deaths, matings, rank. It goes down black and oxidises brown over about a decade, and after forty years it has a reddish cast like old blood. You cannot fake the ageing. It happens in the paper.

Carbon ink for notes, amendments, anything that might need correcting. It goes down black and it stays black for two hundred years.

He taught me this when I was nine, standing on a stool at the archive table, and he made me repeat it back twice. Oak gall for truth, carbon for talk. I thought it was a rhyme. I think now it was a confession, and he made me memorise it in the hope I would understand it one day without him having to say it out loud.

Page two hundred and forty records the births of the year I was born. Nineteen names. I know them all; most of them I grew up with.

Eighteen of those entries are brown.

Mine is black.

I sat with that for a long time. Long enough that the lamp needed trimming and I didn't trim it.

Because there is an innocent explanation, and I made myself consider it first, the way he taught me. Find the boring reason before you go looking for the interesting one. Maybe he ran out of oak gall. Maybe he wrote it in carbon meaning to copy it over properly and never did. Maybe he was tired; I was born in February and my mother died in April and a man can be forgiven for not keeping his inks in order between those two months.

So I checked.

That is the thing about this job that nobody understands. People think the record-keeper writes. Mostly the record-keeper checks.

I pulled the supply ledger — my father logged every purchase, because the council made him — and found that he bought oak gall in the January before I was born, enough for two years, and did not buy carbon ink at all that year. He had carbon in stock. He had plenty of both.

Then I did the thing I had been avoiding, which was to look at the handwriting properly instead of reading it.

My father's hand changed over his life, the way everyone's does. In his twenties he wrote with a forward slant and a long descender on the g. By his forties the slant was gone and the g had shortened. I have forty years of samples. I grew up inside this handwriting.

The entry recording my birth is written in his hand at about fifty.

He was thirty-one when I was born.

I put the pen down and I sat back and my heart was going so hard I could hear it in my ears.

Somebody wrote my entry ten years after I was born. In the wrong ink. In my father's hand — because it was my father's hand, I would know it anywhere, I would know it in the dark.

My father wrote my name into the ledger a decade late, in ink that would not age, and recorded me as nothing.

I want to be clear about what I felt, because it was not what I expected and it is the reason for everything that comes after.

It was not grief. It was not even anger, yet.

It was the feeling I get when a column doesn't add up. That cold clean itch at the back of the skull. Because a discrepancy is not a tragedy. A discrepancy is a question, and a question has an answer, and I have never in my life failed to find an answer when I was allowed to keep looking.

Somebody changed my record.

Somebody wanted me unranked, and no line, and small, and counted as nothing — and they wanted it badly enough to make my father do it.

I thought about Rhys Blackwood standing three paces away with his hands open, asking Marek about my rank instead of asking me. I thought about four hundred people watching me kneel in the grass because a line of carbon ink said I was worth nothing.

And I thought: that line is a lie. And I can prove it.

I turned the page.

There was a second black entry on page two hundred and forty-one.