The back seat of the hatchback smelled of tea and old rope. Min Gu-chul did not look up when Seon-ho got in. He was reading a tide table off the side of his thermos, as another man might read the paper, and he moved his thumb down it one line at a time.

Do-yoon climbed in on the other side, so that Seon-ho sat between father and son with his knees against the transmission hump. Two phones buzzed in his jacket. He did not take them out.

"You said Friday evening," said Seon-ho.

"I said the Hall wanted you Friday evening." Gu-chul turned a page of nothing. "This morning a lawyer filed a complaint against a young woman I have never met, over a stamp I have never signed, and a sergeant of the Maritime Police told him to go and find out who told him. I have been waiting eleven years for somebody to tell a lawyer that. I decided not to wait until evening."

"Dad's been quoting that all the way here," said Do-yoon. "Eleven years. He's not even sure it's eleven."

"It is eleven."

The car turned onto the quay road. On the left the fish market was hosing down its floor, and the water ran grey and silver toward the drains. Seon-ho slid one phone halfway out and looked at it below the level of the seat.

Priya, three messages. *1. Where are you. 2. Do not answer that, I can see the pennant, Dil is behind you in the cab. 3. Phone stays on. Say a word, any word, if you want us to come in.*

He typed one-handed. *Marmalade.* Then he put it away.

"Who is Marmalade?" said Gu-chul.

"A colleague," said Seon-ho.

The master of Tide Hall made a small noise that might, in a more relaxed man, have been a laugh.

Berth Six was not a hall at all. It was a ground-floor unit in a row of chandlers' shops at the end of Dolsan Quay, between a place that sold marine batteries and a shuttered cafe, with a frosted-glass door and brass letters that read GWANGRYEONG MARITIME NOTARIAL SERVICE. Below that, smaller, *By appointment of the Port Authority*. The glass had gone a little green at the corners from salt. A black cat sat on the step and declined to move.

Inside there were two desks, a safe the size of a washing machine, a kettle, and a wall of ring binders with years written on their spines in white marker. No clerk. The air was cold and carried the faint mineral smell of ink that had been sitting in its well for a long time.

Gu-chul hung up his jumper. He did it slowly, with great attention to the hook, like a man putting off the next thing. Then he unlocked the safe, took out a flat box covered in blue cloth, and set it on the desk between them.

"You will tell me," he said, "what is wrong with this contract."

Inside was a single sheet of heavy cream paper, folded in three. Seon-ho unfolded it with two fingers by the edges and the sense he used to read hidden margins woke up and pressed at his eyes like a thumb.

There was a thread in it. Not a thread such as the levy notice had carried, a bright single strand, but a braid, a dozen strands twisted together and drawn so tight that the paper had puckered along the grain. The title read HARBOUR LICENCE UNDERTAKING. Beneath it, in three columns of small legal type, sat the usual things: tonnage, berth fees, a surrender of mooring rights. Then clause nine.

*The Undertaking Party shall not, by speech, writing, gesture or any other means, convey or cause to be conveyed to any person not a party hereto the existence, use, custody or disposition of the Instrument.*

"Which instrument?" said Seon-ho.

"Read on."

He read on. The Instrument was defined in the schedule as *the witness die, ring-pattern, bearing the registration GM-0417.* The Undertaking Party was Min Gu-chul. The counterparty was a single line, a corporate name he had seen on a brass plate at the foot of a tower on Nam Pier.

"The stamp," he said.

Gu-chul's face did not move. His left hand, on the desk, closed slowly until the knuckles stood out like stones. His mouth opened. Seon-ho watched the muscles of his throat work, and the braid in the paper tightened and made a small dry sound, like a knot taking weight. Gu-chul shut his mouth and swallowed. A bead of sweat ran from his silver hairline down the side of his nose.

"Dad," said Do-yoon. "Dad, stop."

Gu-chul lifted one finger. Stop what? His eyes said, *See?* He drew a slow breath through his nose and nodded at the paper, and then at Seon-ho, and then at the paper again.

It was perfectly clear. For eleven years, or three, or however long it had been, the master of Tide Hall had been unable to say the name of his own seal. He had been permitted to hold the door of a shop and say nothing, and for those years a different pair of hands had used his seal, and he had stood in front of the proof of it in a locked safe and been physically unable to tell his son.

"The gag only covers him," said Seon-ho slowly. "*The Undertaking Party.* Not Do-yoon. Not me."

"I can't just ask him," said Do-yoon, who was white around the mouth. "I tried that. Years ago. I said, Dad, what's wrong, and he went grey and sat down on the stairs."

"Can you read it?" said Gu-chul. It came out hoarse, but it came out, because it was a question about the paper, not the Instrument. "My Reader says it is the best-made clause she has ever seen. She says to break it I would need to break the Registry's licence over the whole harbour. I do not want a clause that cannot be broken. I want one that can be amended." He looked at Seon-ho's hands. "You do not own a Writ that anyone can read, but you own some other thing. I saw it on the Hall's own floor, with the Pyo business. A line went in, and it held."

"A line goes in the margin," said Seon-ho. "It's an annotation, nothing more. The paper treats what it can't read as coming from higher up." He had said that to no one in his life. It surprised him how easy it was to say to the one man who could, if he chose, use it. "It will cost me."

"I will pay what you ask."

"It's not the money."

Gu-chul looked at him for a time, with those patient pale eyes. "Then I will owe you, which is worse," he said. "Do it."

Seon-ho took out the brush.

He had thought about what to write in the car, and then thrown it away, because he had been trying to write something clever. The line that goes into a clause has to be plausible, and it has to have something true underneath it, and the truest thing about this clause was that nobody in the Registry had ever expected the Undertaking Party's son to be in the room. He wrote it small, in the margin beside clause nine, in the script his father had taught him before he could read the other kind: fourteen strokes, and then three. *This clause lapses as to any person who stands beside the party at the signing.*

He felt the cost go out of him as the ink dried, and it was the usual cost, which was a night he would have had. The walls were the same colour. The cat, outside, got up off the step and stretched. The back of his skull ached with a sourceless, patient tiredness, the kind he used to feel on the fourth day of a cold.

The braid in the paper loosened. He felt it go, one strand then another, like fingers letting go of a rope.

"Try," he said.

Gu-chul opened his mouth. "The stamp," he said, and stopped, and waited, and nothing came for him, no knot, no tightness. He breathed out. His shoulders came down an inch and he suddenly looked his age. "Three years ago the Haedong Registry came to this office with a custody receipt," he said. "They called it a safeguarding. It was a Harbour Authority review, they said, the stamp being a controlled instrument, and Tide Hall's name was on it. They took the die and brought it back on Fridays. On Mondays it was a little warm."

"Warm?" said Seon-ho.

"From being used. Do-yoon, sit down."

Do-yoon did not sit down. He stood against the ring binders with both phones in one hand, screen dark. "Who used it?"

"Their notary. A man in a grey coat. He came with the pilots' notes already written and stamped them here, in this room, while I stood by the kettle. It was always a note for a pilot who had been dropped at the buoy and gone home. The first one was the Daesan Pride."

"You said you had never signed," said Seon-ho.

"I said I had never signed. I stamped it. Not him. I did." Gu-chul held up his right hand and looked at it as if it belonged to someone else. "He had the die in one hand and my son's coastal licence in the other. The Registry grants them at renewal, you understand. A cultivator without a licence in this city is a man without a bed. My boy was twenty-four and had just posted a video of himself falling off a jetty, and the Registry was reviewing it for *public display of qi.* He had nine days. They did not ask me to do anything wrong. They asked me to press down. It is a small thing to press on a seal."

Nobody said anything. In the quiet, Seon-ho could hear the slow dripping of the kettle cooling, and from the quay, very far away, a ferry horn.

"You said you'd done it for the Hall," said Do-yoon at last. His voice had gone quiet and curiously flat, as if someone had pulled the lights out of it. "Every time. When I asked why we couldn't take the big contracts. When the ships came in short. You told me it was for the Hall."

"It was for the Hall."

"It was for my licence."

"Do-yoon."

"I fell off a *jetty*."

"Yes."

Do-yoon laughed, one terrible bark, and put his hand over his own mouth. He looked at the phones, then at his father, then at the cat in the window. The ring-light face was gone and underneath it was a boy who had spent three years being gently handled. "Nineteen people on the Daesan Pride," he said. "I did a charity stream for them. I wore a black tie."

"I know," said Gu-chul. "I watched it."

Seon-ho's phone buzzed against his ribs. He took it out because he needed something to do with his hands. Priya: *4. Dil has parked across from the cafe. 5. Lourdes is on a bus, ETA nine minutes, she says tell you she is bringing a bag of rope. 6. Please say something.*

He typed, *Marmalade. Nobody hurt. Stay.* Then he looked up.

"The ships were never going down," he said. He had not known he thought it until he said it. "The notes aren't to cover an accident. You don't need a pilot to have left a ship that sinks. You need one for the insurer, so that they pay on a vessel that is gone, and they pay in ninety days. The paper was dressed to be *accepted.* Nobody ever inspected it, because nobody needed to. Whatever happens to those ships, it happens somewhere the stamp doesn't reach."

"I think so," said Gu-chul. "I have thought so for a long while, with no way to say it. Do you know how long it is since I said a whole sentence to my son?"

Do-yoon put his hand on the back of the chair. He did not sit.

"The next one is the Sunjin Dawn," said Gu-chul. "They brought me the note on Tuesday. It is in the safe. The pilot's name is already written. It says he left at the buoy."

He unlocked the lower drawer of the safe, took out a single sheet, and slid it across the desk without a word. Seon-ho looked at the name, and at the date, and then at the chipped ring waiting empty at the foot of the page, and understood for the first time what the Hall had really asked him here to do.

"You want me to forge you a refusal," he said.

"I want," said Min Gu-chul, "to press down, and have nothing happen."

Outside, the cat had gone. In its place, with her hands in her pockets and her bootlace hair tie slipping, stood Priya, looking in through the green glass at the three of them. She did not knock. She held up one finger, and then another, and then a third. It was a list. He had no idea what was on it.

Seon-ho capped the brush.