The deed had spent eleven days under a leaking air conditioner, and Ryu Seon-ho was coaxing it back into existence one fibre at a time.

He worked at the back table of Jeongjik Copy & Notary, under a lamp whose shade had been mended with packing tape, with a brush the width of an eyelash and a bowl of wheat-starch paste he had cooked himself that morning at six. The paper was hanji, a hundred years old if the seal was honest, and the water had lifted the ink in the middle and left a pale brown tide-line across the owner's name. Seon-ho breathed out through his nose, lowered the brush, and laid a single hair of mulberry fibre across the gap. It took. The tide-line looked slightly less like a tide-line.

"You're doing the thing," said Mr. Jeong from the front counter, without looking up from his phone.

"What thing?"

"The thing where you stop breathing. You'll faint on my deed."

"It's the client's deed."

"Then faint on the client."

Mr. Jeong was sixty-one, wore a cardigan in every season, and had run the shop for thirty years on the principle that anything could be notarised if you stamped it firmly enough. Beside him the big copier shuddered and spat out a lottery syndicate's membership list. Through the window, the afternoon on Dolsan Island looked the way it always did in October: grey sea, grey sky, a ferry the colour of a dirty teaspoon crossing between them. A delivery rider with a Bballi bag was parked on the pavement arguing with his phone.

Seon-ho was twenty-four. He had slept four hours the night before and would have slept six, except that at ten past three his landlady had come up the stairs singing, to ask if he had a charger. He did not mind. He had a rule about people who asked him for things at ten past three: if they were singing, it was fine.

The bell over the door rang, and the room got heavier.

It was a small physical event, like an elevator starting to drop. The copier's hum seemed to bend. Mr. Jeong's thumb stopped on his screen. The delivery rider outside, a hundred metres of traffic and glass away, glanced up and then very carefully looked at something else.

Three men came in. The one in front was perhaps forty, broad through the shoulders, in a quilted jacket with a harbour cooperative badge pinned to the chest like a minor medal. His name was Pyo Gwang-hun, and everyone on the island knew it the way you know the name of a pothole. The two behind him were young and wore the same jacket. They stood on either side of the door as though the door might try something.

"Mr. Jeong," said Pyo, pleasantly. "Thirty years. Congratulations."

"Thank you," said Mr. Jeong, who had gone the colour of the paper in the copier tray.

Seon-ho kept the brush over the deed and did not move. He knew what this was. Pressure, the cultivators called it, weight, or, if they were being polite about it, presence: the surplus of qi that a trained person leaks the way a heater leaks warmth. Pyo was at the third layer of Breath, perhaps the fourth. It was enough to make ordinary people feel that the floor had opinions. Mr. Jeong's knees were visibly deciding whether to stay in the conversation.

Seon-ho felt nothing at all.

He had felt nothing at all for most of his life. At sixteen he had sat in a drab room at the Tide Hall youth clinic with a copper stylus pressed against his sternum, and a bored examiner had waited for the stylus to warm. It had not warmed. The examiner had tried a second stylus, then a third, then written a single word on the form and underlined it. The word was DRY. It was the kindest thing anyone had written about him since.

Which was why he now leaned his elbow on the table, let his brush hand tremble just a little, and breathed shallowly, the way a person does when a large man has made the air thick. It was not hard. He had practised in a mirror.

"There's a small matter of the harbour levy," Pyo went on. He laid a sheet on the counter, and the sheet made the counter creak. "Retroactive. Since 1998. Fourteen thousand days of shop frontage on cooperative-protected waters, at a very modest daily rate. I've rounded it down, as a courtesy."

"This is a shop," Mr. Jeong said faintly. "We are on a street."

"Everything is on water, if you go down far enough," said Pyo, and one of the juniors nodded as if this were scripture. "Sign here, here, and here. Your thumb, too. The cooperative takes thumbs now."

Seon-ho had been watching the paper, not the man. It was a good piece of work, he was sorry to see. Cream stock, a faint watermark of a wave, a stamp in vermilion at the foot. And running through the printed text, so fine that a normal eye would take it for a texture in the paper, was a second layer: a thread of qi laid in with a binding pen. Whoever signed would be held to it, not just in court, where nobody would ever see this sheet, but at a deeper level, where the world decided what was true about a person. He had restored enough contracts to recognise a trap built to be signed.

Mr. Jeong picked up the pen. His hand shook so badly the cap rattled.

"Mr. Jeong," Seon-ho said. "The deed needs your seal before it dries. It's two minutes."

Pyo's eyes moved over to him for the first time. They were mild eyes, which was worse. "Who's this?"

"The help," said Mr. Jeong.

"Dry," said one of the juniors, reading the badge on Seon-ho's lanyard with the satisfaction of a man who has found his own street on a map. "He's the Dry kid. Tested zero at the clinic. My cousin saw the form."

"Ah." Pyo's attention softened and slid off Seon-ho like rain off a coat. "Then he doesn't feel it. Lucky boy."

"I feel something," said Seon-ho. "I think it's lunch."

The juniors laughed. Pyo smiled. Mr. Jeong closed his eyes, and the pen touched the paper.

Seon-ho did not hurry. Hurry was for people who hadn't planned. He took the small wedge of tea-brown ink from the corner of his workbench, ink he mixed himself from oak gall and an unnamed ingredient he had never explained to anyone, and he dipped the brush that he had been using on the deed. Then, as Pyo leaned over the counter to watch Mr. Jeong sign, Seon-ho stepped to the side as if to stretch his back, set the wet brush on the corner of the arrears notice, and wrote.

One line. Fourteen strokes. It was not Korean, not hanja, not any script anyone had ever catalogued, a hand his father had left him like a limp, and the brush moved without effort because he had learned it before he had learned to read. In the whole world there was nobody else who could read it, and that was the first reason it worked.

The rule was simple, which was why it was dangerous. The binding thread in the paper did not care what the words said. It cared what was true, and it assumed the text above it was true because a qi-user had written it. A line in a language it could not recognise it treated as a footnote from a higher authority. Seon-ho had always thought of it as the cosmic equivalent of a rubber stamp: if the stamp looked official enough, the clerk never read the form.

The line he wrote said: *the party named above as collector is liable for the full sum, in the same measure, to the party named below.*

The cost arrived at once and quietly, as it always did. It felt like a hand smoothing the inside of his head. Somewhere behind his eyes, a night of sleep he had not yet had went out like a light in a house he would never enter. Tonight he would lie awake until five. Next week he would not get it back. He set the brush down and blinked at the tiredness that came after, enormous and polite.

Mr. Jeong signed. Pyo took the sheet. The thread in the paper closed around the clauses like a hand closing, and Seon-ho watched it find the new line, treat it as a footnote from a higher authority, and bind.

Pyo's face did not change. But he stopped with the sheet halfway to his jacket, and for the first time in the conversation he looked uncertain about which of them had been talking.

"That's odd," he said. "My mouth is dry."

"Mine too," said the junior with the cousin.

"Is it?" said Seon-ho. "There's water in the cooler."

Pyo's gaze dropped to the sheet in his own hand. He could not read the line, because no one could, but he could feel the weight of it, and a man who has leaned on thirty shopkeepers knows exactly what it is to be leaned on. He folded the notice in half, and then in half again. "We'll be back for the thumbprint," he said, and his voice had a new, narrow care in it.

They left. The weight left with them, the way a tide leaves a flat. The copier ground on. Mr. Jeong slid down the counter until he was sitting on the floor, in the cardigan, with the pen still in his hand.

"I signed it," he said. "Why did I sign it?"

"You signed the receipt," said Seon-ho. "I'll tell you about the receipt later."

He went back to the deed. His hands, he noticed, were completely steady, which was a lie, and the sort he found easiest. He lifted the brush. Then a voice from the doorway said, in careful English, "I'm sorry, is it a bad time? I was told you do certified copies."

A woman stood just inside the glass, one hand still on the door. Mid-twenties, hard hat clipped to a rucksack, a surveyor's tablet under her arm, dark hair tied back with what looked like a bootlace. She wore steel-toed boots and stood with her weight on the balls of her feet, as if the floor might tilt. She wasn't looking at Mr. Jeong on the floor. She wasn't looking at the copier or the deed or the lamp.

She was looking at the corner of the counter, where the arrears notice had lain, and at the single faint line of brown that was drying there and had no business existing.

"I'm Priya Venkataraman," she said. "I'm told you're the person nobody can sense." She raised her eyes to his. "I don't think that's the interesting part. Mr. Ryu, I watched the ink move."