Sela Morn

Sela's body number was stolen by a false record, making even death an instrument of administrative violence.

In The Godless Priest

Sela Morn was a Red Canal worker, dying of a stab wound in a parlour when Cassian came to Pella for Manus Farthing's records. She asked him to witness her kindness ledger, twelve entries including returning Pella's teeth and, last, not asking the boy holding her hand to forgive her. The boy agreed it was kindness, Cassian signed, and she died.

Her funeral, an ash-broth rite in the Red Canal square, was interrupted when an old woman recognised the gold tooth in the bowl as her own daughter Mara's, revealing that the corpse office had switched the dead between funerals. Mourners recalled both Sela's kindness and her coercion. Her remains were later found in the Canal Thing, where calling her name released one gold-painted arm, and Ravel read her name among the dead while the crowd chanted for Mother Vey.

After the books

Dead before the main events; her recovered name becomes evidence of systematic erasure. The recovery of her name restores no life, but it refuses the lie that she was interchangeable.