This heat was just killing people.

Sarovitch looked out the window of his office — his cubicle, really — on the seventeenth floor of Government Hall. At least he had an office. Pity the poor souls outside, the citizens, toiling like oxen beneath the relentless August sun. There was one right now in fact, just across the way, towing a pot of tar on the roof of the building below. Just look at him! The stink and the grime and the endless unimaginable toil. The way his arms strained against the weight of the bucket, the way the steam billowed into his eyes. Black on his face, dirt in his hair, sweat cascading down his shoulders. He looked miserable, absolutely miserable.

Sarovitch thinly smiled.

Sarovitch worked in the Department of Statistics, Bureau of Public Welfare, for the Division of Life and Health. The government kept all the records here, the numbers and figures that told the story of the City outside. The Cards, the employees all called them, from when everything used to be on paper. Nothing was too mundane or too minor. Parking tickets and tax returns, the new forms for picnic permits that had only recently been required. Emails and app inquiries, and the occasional hand-written letter. If you couldn’t find it here, it might as well not have happened at all.

Two floors down in Personnel they kept the Card for Sarovitch, he’d filled it out almost ten years ago now. Sarovitch, Stefan A., emphasis on the first syllable, STE. Six foot one, one hundred seventy pounds, brown hair, gray eyes. Unmarried. Built a bit like a gibbon and wore a pair of fashionable eyeglasses.

On the seventeenth floor, the Cards were laced with sorrow. In the first row of the maze of cubicles Mrs. Chu counted diseases as well as failed cures. In the next Katya Walker followed marriages while her former husband summed divorces. Birth defects and abortions and children born with addictions. These were all Liliana Vitale’s territory, born a Mexican and married an Italian as she liked to say, who sat in the center at the lone table in the room. Mrs. Washington in reception was the only other employee not seated in a cubicle, guarding Director Robinson’s office from her post by the elevators. When the door opened Sarovitch could see in if he stood, sometimes catching a glimpse of the miniature water wheel fountain on his boss’s over-sized oak desk. And sometimes Sarovitch spotted the Director staring out, watching over the maze like a proctor in school.

Wiggins sat on one side of Sarovitch, ancient Wiggins, dutifully cataloguing crimes. On spare metal shelves rising high above the faux burlap walls of his cube, Wiggins had a record of every reported theft, every reported rape, every reported maiming and murder in the City for at least the past hundred years. Alone among the staff Wiggins still kept the old books, the ledgers, even though they’d made him computerize the records long ago. “To the gallows!” he would say when the crime was exceptionally heinous, as if anyone cared what an old Englishman had to say these days.

But Sarovitch was king, he held the Cards everyone wanted to see. Who lived and who died, when they were born and how they’d expired. How much time they’d had and how much time they’d owed. Sarovitch was the keeper of the death certificates, the over-size yellow forms with the official seal in the bottom right corner. In envelopes the color of a faded water lily he sent them to the bereaved on the occasion of a loved one’s demise, informing all concerned of the government’s interest. The Master of Death, his colleagues sometimes kidded, spoofing his middle name, Azrael. God’s angel had nothing on him.

He sat in his cluttered cubicle and stared at the man working on the rooftop outside. Sarovitch was bored, as he often was. He’d taken his first job at the Division on a lark, just to make some money, and now after several promotions, here he was. He looked out the streaked window and his pity of moments before dissipated into passing envy, even as the air-conditioning kicked in and reminded him how lucky he was to be somewhere cool. It was close to a hundred out there, it had been for days now, for weeks. In the month since the Fourth of July not a single drop of rain had fallen, not a solitary afternoon had passed when the temperature failed to crest ninety-five.

By Sarovitch’s count there’d been five hundred and forty-eight citizens who’d perished from the heat in the last week alone, when the temperatures had really begun to soar. Still, he peered through the glass and for a moment wished to join the man on the roof with his boiling cauldron of black tar. To be outside, to feel the heat of the sun on his neck, the fizz of the wind in his hair, away from the buzzing fluorescents hanging overhead like guillotines, swaying ever so slightly in the musty vented air. Maybe Wiggins would join him, they could go across the street for a coffee or an iced tea with sugar. A biscotti to go with it, or a lemon frosted scone. Sarovitch called out to the old man over their shared gray wall.

“Nigel?”

“Yes?” The old Brit’s voice was gravelly, filled with phlegm. Cigarettes. Wiggins was one of the few people in the office who still openly smoked.

“How ‘bout a coffee?”

“Ten-thirty on a Monday? You start early, Saro.”

“So? The only rule I’ve read says no breaks until nine-forty-five.”

The old man paused as if reflecting on this maxim — which didn’t really exist — and then mumbled, “Too hot, Saro. Too hot.”

“Since when is it too hot for coffee?”

“It’s a hundred degrees out there. Why would I want coffee?”

“Iced coffee, Nigel. The nectar of the Gods. Come on — we can celebrate.”

“Celebrate what?”

“Ten years for me on Thursday.”

Sarovitch heard the old man cough; probably he was also shaking his head. Wiggins was always shaking his head, if not at Sarovitch or one of the other junior Division employees, then at something one of the citizens had done, especially those who dared enter the maze seeking aid. Wiggins hated the citizens, for reasons that had never been clear to Sarovitch, well beyond the indifference that everyone else showed. The rabble, the mob. The sheep. Ten years? Ten years was nothing to someone like Wiggins.

“I don’t want to,” Wiggins said, his words enunciated precisely in that upper-class English way. I. Don’t. Want. To. “Go right now, that is.”

“Why not?”

“As I said, it’s a hundred degrees out there. Who knows. Could be a hundred and five.”

“This time of the morning? Not a chance.”

“You don’t think so? Let’s ask Shapiro.” Shapiro sat on the other side of Sarovitch, and among other things kept track of the weather and its effect on the birth rate. He’d recently authored a well-received report on the City’s declining fecundity, and its potential relationship to the earth’s increasing temperatures.

“Arnold!” Wiggins called out. “How hot is it out there?”

A youthful nasally voice called back, sounding a trifle annoyed. “Why don’t you just look on your phone?” Shapiro was ill-tempered in the mornings, particularly on Mondays. Late nights, he often said, as a way of excusing his frequent use of the dating apps. Shapiro was the youngest employee at the Division other than the clerks in the pool, half a dozen years younger than Sarovitch.

“Oh come now, Arnold. Tell us how the heat is helping you make babies.”

“Helping? You obviously didn’t read my last report.”

“I wasn’t referring to your report, lad. I was talking about Ms. Walker’s.”

“Katya’s?”

“Yes. She tracks seductions of young Jews.”

Sarovitch smiled, imagining the sour expression on Shapiro’s face. While Shapiro disliked his job no more than the rest of the Division’s employees, alone he’d made his unhappiness his life’s work. He reveled in it, carping about it daily, until ultimately it had become indistinguishable from Shapiro himself, and to everyone at the office he was always sad Shapiro, sullen Shapiro, surly Shapiro. Even if he was quick with a quip about it — Shapiro was nothing if not clever, like all the Division employees on seventeen.

Out of the office by contrast Shapiro played the Lothario, as in addition to the apps, he was a regular at the City’s singles bars. Sarovitch had even joined him a few times, as witness to the transformation. Shapiro darted among various potential mates like a hummingbird between flowers, the empty ones mere annoyances to be tolerated. “His projects,” he called his triumphs. It was this Shapiro that Katya Walker had slept with after her divorce last summer. She had been lonely, he’d told Sarovitch later on, he had been horny.

“Very funny, Nigel,” Shapiro shot back. “Last time I checked you were the one out there assisting the pickpockets and the monte players.”

“Just evening things out, Arnold, my boy. Just balancing the books.”

This made even Shapiro laugh, a gentle snort that was one of his more redeeming features. All was forgiven, even the sin of disturbing Shapiro on a Monday morning.

“If you must know, Nigel, it’s ninety-seven. Going up to a hundred and two by four.”

“A hundred and two?”

“Maybe even a hundred and three, a record for August. A hell of a day.”

Wiggins chuckled, assuredly was shaking his head. “You see, Saro, my boy? Too hot, too hot.”

Sarovitch sat back in his chair and drummed his fingers on the windowsill. Outside the man with the tar had stopped working; he stood by the roof’s edge wiping his hands with a red bandana. His face looked both florid and wan at the same time and it seemed as if he desperately needed a glass of water. Well, if Wiggins really didn’t want to take a break that was something else entirely. Still, it was best to be sure about these things.

“How about a cigarette?” Sarovitch lobbed over the wall.

“You don’t smoke.”

“No. But you do.”

“My answer is still no.”

“Oh come on, Nigel. I need a break.”

“Sorry, lad — catch me in an hour or so, we can go to lunch together.”

Sarovitch sighed loud enough for Wiggins to hear before returning to the window. The man with the red and pale face was sitting down now, while the other workers began spreading the tar with flat metal implements, not quite rakes, not quite brooms. He looked queasy, exhausted. His head bobbed forward and his feet dangled loosely over the roof’s edge. Still, Sarovitch was possessed by a vague longing to go out there and join him.

“Nigel?”

“Saro, for the last time, no!”

“All right, all right. No need to get snippy about it.” Sarovitch turned back to his computer, a modern intrusion amidst the stacks of yellow forms. Rows upon rows of cobalt blue numbers blinked indifferently on his screen. Before spying the man outside Sarovitch had been reading the latest suicide report, which while not directly his responsibility — for reasons he never quite understood — he was required to check for any gross errors. Everything ran like this at the Division. Two reviews of final reports, sometimes three or four, so that no one person was accountable for any embarrassing mistakes. Mistakes that might become public, mistakes that might become headlines. It had happened before. City Reports 2,200 Birth Defects Last Week, when really it should only have been 22; or Abortion Rate Soars to 10.4%, when the correct percentage was 1.4. Sarovitch had long since lost track of whose work he verified each Monday, the initials in the corner of the report read ELJ but he had no idea who this was. As for Sarovitch’s tabulations, his precisely calculated statistics of death, these were all checked by Wiggins.

“Keep up the good work, lad,” the old man would often say. “You make the Division proud.”

Sarovitch scanned the columns of the suicide count and casually noted last week’s totals. Fourteen by midnight Saturday: eight by gunshot, three by gas, two by hanging, and one by self-inflicted stab wound. Two more shootings, one less gassing, and one more hanging than the previous week. It sounded reasonable enough.

Keep up the good work, ELJ.

Sarovitch clicked his mouse and the suicide tally vanished, revealing the main report that occupied him this morning. The Department of Taxes in the Division of the Treasury had requested an analysis of the recent spike in the heat wave death toll by later this afternoon, to be followed by a presentation by Sarovitch tomorrow morning. Something to do with next year’s budget, next year’s cash flow. Age, gender, income and race — they’d asked for the usual particulars, along with a few other demographics and, strangely, cause of death. C.O.D., as abbreviated in column seven.

How any of these affected the City’s finances Sarovitch could only guess; he did what he was told and tried not to ask too many questions. He’d kept his nose clean in his ten years at the Division, he was on his way up up up, everyone said, his good looks almost assured it. Maybe not all the way to the Director’s chair — he didn’t think himself cunning enough for that — but perhaps to the assistant level or to vice deputy of something once or twice removed. This was Shapiro’s phraseology. The various levels in City government were like family; after a while, no one knew who was related to whom, or in the case of the Division, who was in charge of what.

Except for the Director. He was in charge of everything.

Sarovitch leaned back in his chair, his keyboard in his lap, and inspected the nearly finished report; he typed in several minor corrections, evening out margins, tightening up spacing. It looked good, damn good, this careful ordered tally of the summer’s carnage. Five hundred and forty-eight citizens dead of heat-related causes as of nine a.m. this morning in the last seven days. On track for a thousand by week’s end, a graph displayed.

The dead were all very similar, they shared common characteristics. Attributes, Wiggins might say, his voice rising up on the stressed double T. Sixty-eight percent had died of cardiac problems, seventy-four percent were over sixty-five. Thirty-four percent black, thirty-one percent white, and twenty-three percent Hispanic, not far from the proportions in the City’s population overall, with a smattering of Asians, Indians and those who claimed a mixed heritage thrown in. Females accounted for forty-five percent, while those on government assistance totaled seventy-nine. Nearly all were widowed or divorced; few had owned cars; most had died in the oppressive heat of early evening.

Adding it all up Sarovitch figured the press would portray the numbers as some kind of freak epidemic if they obtained the report, a mystery affliction preying on the elderly and impoverished, the abandoned, the lonely. Sarovitch knew better. There was nothing extraordinary about the deaths except their number, five hundred and forty-eight was nothing to sneeze at. But the aged, the poor, the infirm? It was always this way.

A few last edits and the report was ready to print. Then Sarovitch would email it to Wiggins. “Brilliant!” the old man might say upon reading the dismal totals. “You are truly the Master of Death, my boy. The Master of Death!”

Sarovitch wheeled over to his printer as it spat out the pages of the report. He was lucky to have his own printer; it stood by his window reminding everyone of his status he sometimes joked, though really it was because his Cards required printing. Almost everything else in the Division existed in the ether, on the Internet, but Sarovitch’s Cards, his yellow talismans of death, endured still on the special security paper, which the clerks’ high-speed printers consistently mangled. Not even Lily’s birth Cards were always physically memorialized, something not lost on Sarovitch. Death seemed to be all that was permanent in the City.

As he waited on the machine to finish he looked outside again, at the man with the tar on the building below. The man was standing now, still at the roof’s precipice, as behind him the rest of the crew smoothed the sticky tar. He still appeared ill: his face was beet red and he held to his forehead what appeared to be a can of soda. He cast a dwindling shadow. Some insects annoyed him, perhaps cicadas, Sarovitch guessed. The hatch had been huge this year, a rare confluence of the annual and periodical, though downtown they were absent because of the dearth of trees. Mosquitoes or flies, Sarovitch decided on second thought, as the man waved his soda to shoo the bugs away.

Seeing him anew, Sarovitch realized the man was younger, much younger — practically, he was a boy. His jaw was slack and his limbs hung loose; he couldn’t have been much beyond eighteen. This surprised Sarovitch, and made him even more curious. Work like that on the roof was not for children; the boy might still be in high school or college, what was he doing on the roof looking so wan? The summer he had been eighteen Sarovitch had spent sailing, cruising the great blue water that rimmed the City in a borrowed catamaran. He’d loved the water when he was a boy, even though he’d almost drowned once when he was seven. Up and down the shore from the City to the suburbs with a girl on his arm and a beer in his hand. It had been blissful, perfect. He had been young and tan and trim and happy.

Or at least that’s how he remembered it.

The printer hummed on. Sarovitch pressed his hand against the warm glass of the window, his index finger pointed lazily at the boy’s sternum. He strained to glean some clue of the boy’s fate from the expression on his face or the way he held his arms. There was nothing. The boy yawned and in his gaping mouth Sarovitch saw only fatigue; the boy dropped his soda and revealed merely clumsiness. It might as well have been chance that had brought him there, to his place on the roof in the broiling hot sun. Like Sarovitch’s numbers, a flip of a coin repeated over and over again. It was that simple.

The boy bent over to retrieve his soda, lost his balance, and pitched over the roof’s edge.

He fell slowly, it appeared to Sarovitch, like an autumn leaf, or a stray feather. Arms splayed and his feet kicking for a solid surface, the boy fluttered to the ground as if carried by the wind. No one saw him, it seemed; no one but Sarovitch. The workmen continued to spread their tar; the traffic continued to snarl; the pedestrians continued to stare at their phones. Sarovitch tried to shout, tried to cry out “No! Oh No!” but could not manage even to breathe as the boy tumbled through the air. Tumbled for what seemed like an eternity until eternity abruptly met concrete and the blood poured from the boy’s head like black water.

“Good God,” Sarovitch finally uttered. He withdrew his hand from the glass and saw it was trembling.

“What is it?” Wiggins barked.

“Outside. This boy . . .” Sarovitch’s voice was barely a whisper.

“What?”

Sarovitch breathed deeply, anxiously; his printer went silent. He’d never actually seen someone die before, nor even a dead person, all his numbers and figures and he’d never had a whiff. Not a cadaver laid out on a slab, not a dressed-up corpse displayed for viewing. And now this. Christ. The boy had been close enough to touch, it seemed: the tendons of his fingers as he clutched at the air, the muscles in his stomach as he tried to make himself a wing. And his face, the ghastly white mask of his face. Surprise and confusion and the knowledge of certain death. He hadn’t even appeared to scream. Only in the very last moments, as his head was about to smash into the ground, did his face show any panic, any fear, his eyes stretched wide with a piercing red terror.

Sarovitch shuddered at the memory. He had to get outside. On the roof he saw the crew still smoothing the tar, they appeared not to have noticed anything had happened. While on the ground a crowd had gathered, snapping photos and making videos, the boy’s corpse only visible between waves of a patrolman’s arms.

Sarovitch called out to Wiggins over the wall. “Nigel?”

“What now, Saro?”

“How about that cup of coffee? My treat.”

“Your treat? Sounds tempting. What time is it?”

Sarovitch looked at his watch. An hour had passed. It seemed like far longer. “Eleven-thirty.”

“Why don’t we just wait for lunch?”

“How ‘bout an early lunch? You said to check back in an hour.”

A hoarse laugh rose from Wiggins, a gruff, throaty sound that temporarily eased Sarovitch’s mind. Perhaps the old man had seen the whole thing, perhaps not. One never knew with Wiggins. Sarovitch heard the thud of a book closing, the brush of a chair on carpet, then Wiggins’s refined phlegmy rasp ringing stoutly over the barrier between them.

“What the hell, lad, why not. I could use the break. The incidence of mid-day employee absenteeism is down according to Division of Personnel figures, you know.”

Sarovitch glanced out the window one last time. An ambulance had arrived, paramedics were placing the boy on a stretcher beneath an opaque plastic sheet, the crowd of onlookers was already thinning. Shapiro was grumbling, the air conditioning was wheezing, the lights were swaying. Sarovitch noticed the report still resting in his printer’s output tray.

Five-hundred and forty-nine, he thought, unable to help himself. He stepped out of his cubicle and was greeted by Wiggins’s yellowed smile.

One