My fiancé was handed to my sister in front of two hundred people, and they gave him a standing ovation.

I should back up. Not far. Ninety seconds.

The Bonding Hall at the Calder Bay Registry is built to make you feel chosen. Glass walls, white marble, a chandelier of forty-eight crystals that I have counted at every ceremony since I was twenty-two. I sat in the third row in my mother's cream silk dress, still faintly smelling of her lavender soap, hands folded exactly the way procedure had taught me.

I was a clerk. I stamped other people's destinies for a living. Today, finally, one of them was mine.

Beside me, Dane Whitlock sat very straight. Beta heir, perfect jaw, a man who looked his best when he was frightened. That morning he had kissed my forehead and promised that nothing would ever come between us.

The reader stepped up to the podium, her voice bouncing off the marble. "The Registry is honored to certify today's match."

Then she lifted the certificate, and I noticed something wrong with it.

The ink shone. Wet. In four years I had never seen a certificate reach this room damp, because certificates are sealed overnight. Somebody had finished this one within the hour.

I told myself it was nothing. A rush job. A nervous clerk.

"Beta heir Dane Whitlock," the reader said. "Your fated mate is..."

She paused. They always pause. It is the best part.

I reached for his hand. My fingers closed on air.

"Liora Reyes."

For one second the silence was so complete I heard a ferry horn out in the harbor. I thought, quite calmly, that she had misread the paper. Clerks make mistakes. I had made a few.

Then someone clapped.

It started in the front row, where my father sat, and spread until the whole hall was on its feet. People whistled. A woman behind me wept with joy. A miracle, they said. Fate, arriving at the last possible minute.

My half-sister stood up in a white dress I had never seen before.

White. Tailored. Hemmed to her exact height. A dress ordered weeks ago.

She had known. They both had.

Forty-eight crystals hung above us, and every one of them seemed to lean in to watch.

Dane rose. He looked at the aisle, at Liora, at anything with a better future than me. "Tamsin, I was going to tell you."

Three weeks ago he had made me choose between two shades of ivory napkins.

"Before or after you asked me to iron your shirt?" My voice came out so ordinary it frightened me.

"It's fate," he said, as though fate were a diagnosis. "Once it's certified, you know nobody can..."

"I know the law," I said. "I stamp it."

He flinched. It was the only honest thing anyone had done all day.

"Then you know I had no choice."

"You had three weeks."

"I'll make sure you're looked after," he said.

Looked after. Like a retiring clerk's pension.

Behind me a councilwoman whispered to her husband, "At least the Director kept it in the family." Kept it. As though I were a spare key.

Liora came down the aisle crying, and the crowd loved her for it. But as she passed my row, her eyes found mine for exactly one heartbeat, and what I saw did not belong on a bride.

Terror. Not guilt, not triumph. The look of someone checking whether a door behind me was locked.

Then she was gone, and Dane took her hand, and the room roared again.

My mother used to say the Registry could hand you a name but never tell you what to do with it. She said it the winter before she died. I had thought it was a joke.

I did what I do best. I went to check the paperwork.

Nobody stopped me. A clerk walking toward a document is the most invisible creature alive. I read the certificate where it lay on the podium: the seal, the signature line, the scent verification code, the witness stamp. The scent code beside Liora's name was clean and crisp, the kind a lab needs two days to produce. Two days. Three weeks. Somebody had been very busy.

Perfect. Every line.

I wanted a mistake so badly my teeth hurt. A smudge, a misspelled name, one forgotten clause I could climb through. Instead I got wet ink and flawless margins, as if the Registry had finished my humiliation just in time for the audience.

All my life I had believed the Registry could not be wrong. Standing there, I prayed that it could.

My knees began to fold. Clerks do not faint in the Bonding Hall. I locked them and turned around.

My father was still clapping. Registry Director Augustin Reyes, silver at the temples, hands moving in slow, even beats, the way he applauded at every ceremony he had ever hosted. Across the whole length of the hall he found my face and smiled. Not the smile of a man watching his daughter break. The smile of a man whose afternoon was running on time.

Then he tipped his head toward the glass doors, gently, like someone suggesting I take a coat.

I have been afraid of the dark, of failing, of the day they lowered my mother into the ground while my father held my shoulder and never once looked at the hole.

I had never been afraid of him.

I was now.

I walked. I did not run. Down the aisle, through the applause, past the white dress and the man who had borrowed my future. The ushers who had congratulated me that morning found something fascinating on their shoes. Two hundred people, and not one hand reached out.

At the glass doors, my ears rang. The applause had thinned behind me into rain on a tin roof. My right hand ached, and I looked down. I had gripped my ceremony program so hard it had creased, and I had not let go of it since I sat down.

Something was tucked inside it that I had never put there.

Heavy Registry stock. Watermarked. Folded once.

Form 11-B. Declaration of Orphan Mark.

Declarant: Tamsin Reyes.

Typed, not written. And in the date field, in ink so fresh it smeared against my thumb, was tomorrow's date.

Someone had known, before I did, what I would become by morning.