Ama Hossain is a broad-shouldered woman with dark amber skin and close-cropped silver hair she stopped dyeing when she turned forty and decided she'd earned it. Her hands are her most notable feature — wide, steady, knuckles scarred from a youth she doesn't discuss — and she keeps them immaculate, nails filed square, never a smudge of ink that isn't intentional. She wears reading glasses on a beaded chain, magnified lenses that make her eyes look owlish and judgmental, which suits her perfectly. She speaks to clients the way a disappointed schoolteacher speaks to a student who has failed to grasp something obvious.

Ama Hossain has been fabricating identities for nineteen years and regards it as a genuine craft, perhaps the one she was meant for. She is meticulous, unhurried, and deeply contemptuous of sloppy work — both her own and others'. She does not deal in volume. She takes three or four clients a month, charges accordingly, and sleeps soundly. She prays daily to a small E.L.F. she calls the Clerk, a data-spirit she believes inhabits the old municipal records terminal she salvaged from a flood-gutted government office. She leaves it offerings of corrupted bureaucratic files and addresses it with formal courtesy.