Dil's dispatch office was a room at the back of the ground floor, behind a door marked STAFF ONLY, which had never kept anyone out. It had a desk, a base-station radio, a wall of paper street maps held with drawing pins, and a whiteboard on which Dil had written, in three colours of marker, a list of every driver on her books and their current debts to her. The debts were in red. The red went most of the way down.

On Thursday evening she cleared the whiteboard with her sleeve, wrote WAR in blue and looked at it for a while.

"No," she said, and rubbed it out. She wrote MEETING. "There. Less dramatic. Sit."

There were four chairs and five people. Seon-ho took the one by the door. Hwang had the armchair, which Dil kept for important visitors and creditors, and he occupied it with the air of a man who has been given a throne and finds it slightly too small. Priya stood against the maps with her rucksack still on her shoulders, as if she might need to leave through a window. Lourdes, who had come straight off a double shift, perched on the arm of the sofa in her cartoon-cloud tunic with a lunchbox of rice on her knee and her notebook open on the lid.

"I want it recorded," said Lourdes, "that I haven't slept in twenty hours and I'm doing this because the boss's mother is the nicest patient I have, and she never once threw a bedpan."

"Noted," said Dil. "Okay. We go in order. Priya. You said you found something."

Priya took her tablet from the bag. She did it slowly, aware that every face had turned, and cleared her throat like a woman about to deliver bad news at a funeral. "I want to say first that I'm a marine surveyor. I look at hulls, and corrosion, and documents that accompany hulls. I have no training in this. I may be wrong about all of it."

"You're not going to be wrong," said Seon-ho. "You've got your list voice on."

Her mouth twitched. "Right. One. Every pilot's disembarkation note must be witnessed by a notary, to confirm the pilot left the vessel at the stated point. The departure files for the *Daesan Pride*, the *Marigold N.* and the *Haeun Star* all carry a witness stamp. I assumed it was three different notaries." She turned the screen. "Two. It isn't. I enlarged the stamps. Same die, same wear on the lower left corner of the ring. A tiny chip. It's one stamp."

Hwang leaned forward. "Whose?"

"Three. The registration number on the ring is GM-0417. I looked it up in the harbour authority's public list. It belongs to the 'Gwangryeong Maritime Notarial Service.' That is a company. Its registered address is Dolsan Quay, Berth Six. Its sole director is..." She stopped.

"Say it," said Seon-ho.

"Min Gu-chul."

The room was quiet. On the radio, a driver reported a fare at the ferry terminal who wanted to be taken to a shop that sold only one kind of ginseng. Dil reached over without looking and turned the volume down.

"So the Hall witnesses the notes," said Lourdes slowly. "The Hall writes the notes. The Hall says the pilot got off. And the ship vanishes."

"Or the Hall is being used," said Priya. "A stamp is a tool. If you wanted to forge a witness, you'd forge it with a stamp that already looks real. It could be stolen."

"You could say that," said Hwang, "if you were generous."

"I was trying to be fair."

"Fairness," said Hwang, "is a luxury of the dead. That was Confucius."

"No it wasn't," said Dil.

"It was a man who sold me fish." He waved a hand. "Never mind. Go on, girl. You have more."

Priya looked at her tablet. "Four. The reason this matters. When I was in the Registry's offices on Monday, a clerk showed me the file index, and I saw that all three of those departure files were cross-referenced to a single *internal Registry claim number.* A claim number on the Haedong side. It means someone at the Registry knew all three files belonged together before any of the ships were lost."

Nobody said anything. Seon-ho thought of Tak's gloves, of the form, of a mild man with a button missing at his cuff. He thought: *the Hall has the stamp. The Registry has the number.* He had spent two weeks of every month for ten years being the person in a room who was trying to work out which of two people was lying, and for the first time he could not choose, because both of them were.

"Which means," he said, "that the invitation tomorrow night isn't a coincidence."

"The Hall wants a man who can read a binding contract," said Lourdes. "They want to understand how you got a forty-two-million refund out of a collector with a bad throat."

"They want to know if I'm worth hiring," said Seon-ho, "or worth removing."

"Both," said Hwang. "It's one decision. The Hall is a practical institution."

Dil crossed her arms. "So we don't go."

"If we don't go, Min Gu-chul will assume I have something to hide," said Seon-ho. "And he's right. And I'd have no way into the Berth Six office, where they keep the stamp."

"You want to rob them?"

"I want to read their paperwork."

"That's the same thing for you, you lunatic." But she was smiling, a sharp, appalled smile, and she had picked up the blue marker again. "Right. I'll write it down. FRIDAY: HALL. Underneath: who goes."

"Me," said Seon-ho.

"Me," said Priya, and Lourdes, and Dil, in a clash, and then Hwang said nothing at all, very loudly.

It turned into one of those arguments that are really declarations of love conducted in the language of logistics. Dil wanted to drive. Lourdes wanted to carry a bat. Priya wanted a map of the Berth Six building and a list of every exit, with a photo. Hwang observed that a man who turns up to a dinner with an army is not a guest, and a man who turns up alone is not a threat, and that between the two lay a narrow, lovely path called *Tuesday's weather.* Nobody understood. At one point Hwang rose, pushed up his sleeves, and held a lecture on the care and feeding of a Hall contract. Never read one aloud, he said, because the thread listens for your voice. Never sign with a Hall pen, because the ink is brewed with the signer's pulse in mind. Never accept a cup of tea from the master, not because it is poisoned but because accepting it is a form of consent, and Min Gu-chul had won three disputes in his career on the strength of a cup of tea. "If he pours," said the old man, "say you are fasting. If he insists, say you are fasting for a dead relative. If he asks which one, give the name of someone who has the decency to be dead already."

"Who?" said Seon-ho.

"Choose anyone. Choose Confucius."

"Confucius isn't a relative."

"He is, if you read enough." Hwang sat down, satisfied.

Priya, meanwhile, had begun making a second list for Dil's whiteboard: exits, a fire stair on the east side of Berth Six, a loading door with a padlock Lourdes pronounced "insulting", a security camera over the quay that had not worked since a typhoon in 2023. Dil added a column headed SNACKS. Lourdes, reading it over her shoulder, wrote *Priya: 12 points for thoroughness, minus 2 for the font* in her grudge notebook, then crossed it out and wrote it again in the other section, the one labelled FRIENDS, which was smaller and a good deal neater.

Seon-ho sat in his chair by the door and found that something in his chest was loosening, slowly and uncomfortably, like a knot being worked free by many hands.

*I haven't had this,* he thought. *Not since I was thirteen.*

He stood. "I go alone," he said, and when four voices rose together, he held up a hand. "Listen. I go in as the Dry kid, with a brush and a lunch box, and a very bad poker face. I'm a junior copyist invited to read a contract. If I walk in with a surveyor and a nurse and a taxi dispatcher, I'm a threat. If I walk in alone, I'm an opportunity. They'll tell me more." He looked round the room. "But I want all of you within a kilometre, with your phones on. And a plan if I don't come out."

"Plan?" said Lourdes.

"Break something," said Seon-ho. "I'm told you're good at it."

Lourdes beamed, and wrote something in her notebook with a flourish. Dil began drawing a map on the whiteboard, with arrows. Priya sat on the arm of the sofa, finally, and started to say something about tide tables, and her phone buzzed against her leg.

She looked down. The room continued to argue behind her. Seon-ho, because he was watching her face, saw it go from habitual attentiveness to blankness, the way a screen goes blank when the battery is cut.

"Priya?"

She held the phone up so that he could read it. It was an email on the official letterhead of the salvage inquiry, three lines long, timestamped 18:52.

*Ms. P. Venkataraman. It has come to the attention of the Inquiry that you have submitted altered and certified copies of departure documents (ref: Haeun Star, p. 3). Pursuant to Rule 14, your secondment is terminated with immediate effect. Your access to all port records is withdrawn. The matter has been referred to the Maritime Police for investigation of document fraud.*

The radio hissed. A driver asked, in a bored voice, if anyone could confirm a pickup on Hanul-dong.

"The copies," said Priya, very quietly. "The ones you made." She looked at him, and there was no accusation in her face, only a careful, terrible comprehension. "Someone has a copy of page three with no line on it, and the original in the departure file with one. They've worked out that something was done."

"I made the copies," said Seon-ho.

"Yes," said Priya. "And I certified them."