By Wednesday afternoon, Pyo Gwang-hun had been thirsty for four days.

It was a very particular thirst. Mr. Jeong, who had been following developments with the interest of a man watching a neighbour's roof catch fire, described it later as a thirst with a *grudge.* It did not matter how much Pyo drank. He took water, tea, barley water, beer, an isotonic drink from a vending machine with a picture of a lightning bolt on it. His lips cracked. His tongue stuck to his teeth. He spoke in the croak of a man gargling gravel, and since he was a person who earned his living by being frightening, this was a considerable inconvenience.

He came into Jeongjik Copy & Notary at four o'clock carrying a sports bag.

Seon-ho was at the back table with a repaired deed, a bowl of paste and a mug of tea gone cold. Priya had left an hour earlier for her inquiry, with a numbered list of three things she wanted from the departure file, and Mr. Jeong was at the counter eating clementines from a plastic tub. They both watched Pyo come through the door. It was, Seon-ho realised, a remarkable thing: a large man in a harbour jacket entering a shop with the cautious slowness of a patient entering a dentist's.

"Mr. Jeong," said Pyo. His voice sounded like a door on a rusted hinge. "I'd like to settle the account."

"Which account?" said Mr. Jeong, delicately peeling.

"The... arrears." He swallowed, or tried to. "The notice I brought. I've had it checked. I'm told it's valid but faulty. It *reversed.* I owe you the sum on it." His eyes flicked to Seon-ho and away. "Forty-two million won."

Mr. Jeong dropped a segment of clementine.

He stared at the bag as it was placed on the counter with a thud. Pyo unzipped it. Inside were bricks of banknotes in rubber bands, five-thousand-won and ten-thousand-won mixed together, like the contents of a bank robber's nightmare. Seon-ho counted what he could see. It was a good deal of money. It wasn't enough.

"There's seventeen," said Pyo, who had followed his eyes, and the humiliation in the croak was almost physical. "I can have the rest by Monday. I just need the clause lifted. It's... I can't swallow, Mr. Jeong. I haven't slept. My wife thinks I have a tumour."

"A tumour," said Mr. Jeong, with enormous interest.

"I need you to say you've been paid."

"But I haven't been."

"Part payment, then..."

"It says 'in full,'" said Seon-ho.

He had not meant to speak. The words came out in the mild voice he used with customers, and both men looked at him. He put down his brush. "The notice. I read the copy afterward. The collector is liable for the full sum, in the same measure, to the party named below. 'Same measure' is a nice phrase. It means the amount you tried to take is the amount you owe. Seventeen is not forty-two. I'm not a lawyer, but I'd say the clause isn't going to be impressed."

Pyo's eyes shut. A muscle moved in his jaw.

"Are you *doing* this?" he said, very low. "You're the Dry. You're a zero. I read the sheet. I was in the *room.* You're doing something. Tell me what you're doing."

"I'm restoring a deed." Seon-ho lifted it. "It's from 1962. It's very nice. Would you like to see the watermark?"

Before Pyo could answer, the bell rang. The room got heavier.

This time it didn't feel like an elevator. It felt like the whole building being gently pressed from above by a hand the size of a bus. The copier stopped mid-sentence. The lamp's shade rattled. Mr. Jeong sat down, quite slowly, on the floor behind the counter, with the tub of clementines in his arms, like a man who has seen what's coming and elected to meet it from below.

The man in the doorway was not large, and that was the unsettling part.

He was sixty, silver-haired, in a navy fisherman's jumper with leather patches on the elbows, and he stood perhaps one metre seventy. He looked like someone's favourite uncle. He had a face brown from forty years of weather and eyes the pale grey of seawater under cloud. In his left hand he carried a ceramic thermos with a tide-table printed on it. Seon-ho knew him in the way you know the name on a ferry.

Min Gu-chul. Master of Tide Hall. Seventh gate of Breath, or thereabouts, depending on whose rumour you believed. A man who had once, it was said, closed a cooperative strike by sitting down on the quay with a flask and waiting for the tide to come in.

"Master," said Pyo, going white. "I told you I would handle it."

"You did, Gwang-hun. For four days." His voice was soft, with a slight gravel in it, like a pebble in a shoe. He crossed the shop in a slow, rolling walk and set the thermos on the counter beside the sports bag. "You went home to your wife, and you told her you were ill. You didn't mention it to me, because you thought I would find it unseemly." He looked at Pyo with pity so complete it was worse than anger. "I find it *educational.*"

He drew a leather wallet from his jumper. From it he took a plain white cheque, and, with a pen he produced from his sleeve, wrote on it in a neat hand. Then he tore it out and laid it on top of the bag.

"Twenty-five million," he said. "That, with the seventeen, is the sum. I assume that is acceptable to the party named below."

Mr. Jeong, from the floor, raised his hand like a boy in a classroom. "I think it is," he said faintly.

A breath of silence. Then something in the air changed, and Seon-ho felt it the way one feels a tooth stop aching: a quiet snap, a release. Pyo gave a great, wet, strangled gasp. He fumbled for the thermos, tore off the lid, and drank, straight from the spout, in huge desperate gulps, tea running down his chin and onto his jacket, his shoulders heaving. When he finally lowered it, tears were streaming down his face.

"Thank you," he said. "Master. Thank you."

"Don't thank me. Wait outside."

Pyo went, carrying his empty bag, his gait the stagger of a drunk. The door shut. The pressure stayed.

Min Gu-chul turned, slowly, and looked at Seon-ho for the first time. It was not a stare. It was a kind of weighing, the way a fisherman looks at a catch he cannot name.

"I have been the master of the Hall for twenty-six years," he said pleasantly. "In that time, I have had three people try to tax me, one try to poison me, and my son try to start a channel on Gaeul. I have never had anyone hand me a bill. Forty-two million, to a copy shop." He gave a little wondering shake of the head. "I'm told you're the boy who tested at zero."

"That's what the sheet says, sir."

"My son's spent two days telling the world that you beat him in a contest about a *deed.* I'd normally have sent someone round to teach you manners. But I looked into it, and I found something." His eyes were mild. "I found that every time a person in this district has been put to trouble by a piece of paper this week, you have been in the room."

"I work in a shop full of paper, sir."

"So you do." He turned the thermos, absently, so that the tide-table faced the wall. "My Reader tells me there's nothing in you. A bare grate, she says. I've known a few men with bare grates. They tend to be the kind who've never struck a match." He lowered his voice. "Or the kind who've burned the whole house down and swept up afterward."

Seon-ho kept his face still. Behind it, he was thinking, with some force, about a goose.

"I like a quiet boy," Min said. "I'm told you can read terms. Tide Hall has terms. Contracts. The sort with a thread in them." He smiled kindly. "I'd like you to look at some of them. A consultation. Handsomely paid. Come to the Hall on Friday evening, Mr. Ryu, and bring your brush."

"I have an appointment on Thursday," said Seon-ho.

"I know." The old man's gaze did not change. "It's why I said Friday. A man with a morning like yours will want an evening to recover." He took up the thermos, patted it, and walked, with his rolling gait, to the door. There, over his shoulder, he added, "Don't be late. The tide doesn't care how clever you are."

The bell rang. The pressure went out of the room in a long exhalation, and the lamp stopped rattling.

Seon-ho let out a breath he had been holding since the doorbell. His hands, he noticed, had left damp prints on the table. He had stood two metres from a man who could crack a quay by sitting on it, and every muscle in him had been performing calm, and the performance had cost almost as much as a line in the hand. He thought of Hwang, who had said the Hollow Breath was a trick for spies and the indebted. It had never occurred to him that it was also a trick for the merely terrified.

On the counter, the sports bag sat empty beside the cheque. Beyond the window, Pyo was leaning against a lamp-post with his head back, drinking from a bottle of mineral water and weeping with open, shameless relief, while a passing schoolgirl photographed him for her group chat. By evening he would be a meme. By the weekend, there would be a hashtag. Seon-ho felt a small, unworthy pang of satisfaction, and a larger one of unease. Pyo had been humiliated by a clause. The man who had paid for it now knew there was a clause.

Mr. Jeong rose from behind the counter. His cardigan was covered in clementine peel. He looked at the sports bag, at the cheque, at the forty-two million won that had just been dumped on his counter by the most dangerous man on the island, and then at Seon-ho.

"Seon-ho," he said. His voice shook slightly. "I'm giving you a raise."

"How much?"

"Ten thousand won a day."

"It's very generous."

"And I'd like you to never tell me what you did." He sat. He peeled a clementine with enormous concentration. "I have a pension plan to think about."