Priya came in sideways, because the door stuck, and the first thing she did was look at Seon-ho's face.

"You've done something," she said.

"I've annotated a contract."

"You're the colour of a boiled egg." She turned to the two Mins, bowed to each in a quick, correct, slightly furious way, and took her tablet out of her bag as if she meant to survey them. "Mr. Min. I'm told you stamped the first note yourself. I'm Priya Venkataraman. I was dismissed from the inquiry yesterday on the strength of your seal. I would like that on the record before I ask what time it is."

Gu-chul, who had been the master of the harbour for twenty-six years, looked at the girl in the hard hat and said, "Eleven forty."

"Thank you. One." She held up a finger. "A grey sedan is parked at the end of the quay with its engine off. Two men inside. One is stout and wears rimless glasses. Two. Dil says the batteries shop next door has a camera on a bracket and it points at this door. Three." Her voice stayed level, but her thumb had begun to knock against her thigh. "Three is that I can feel someone walking up the quay. Slow. Heavy on the left heel. A man carrying a case, and he has done this walk a great many times."

Do-yoon looked up from the binders. "Friday," he said. "The Friday man."

"Oh Tae-sik," said Gu-chul. He had begun to put his jumper back on, which was what he did when he needed his hands to be busy. "Their notary. He comes at noon. He brings the die back from them on Friday and it is, as I said, a little warm, and he takes the note away and the die with it. This time the die has not left. This time there is a note in the safe, unstamped."

"So we have nineteen minutes," said Priya, "before he finds that out."

"Twenty," said Seon-ho. "Your watch is fast."

"It is not fast."

"It's four minutes fast. I've watched it since the police station."

She looked at her wrist. It was four minutes fast. She said something in Tamil that he assumed was not a compliment.

He looked at the safe. At the pad.

A witness stamp is not just a die. It is a die and an ink pad and a rule, in that order, and the die was only the part that Gu-chul had been forced to press. The pad lay in the second drawer in a lacquered case with a cracked lid, a flat sponge of red felt gone almost black at the edges. He took it out and weighed it in his hand. It was heavier than it should have been. Years of ink had gone into it, and years of Mondays.

"What does a witness stamp do?" he said. "Not the law. The thing itself."

"Attests," said Gu-chul. "That the notary saw it done."

"That he saw. So the ink, if it is honest, prints what the presser witnessed." He put the pad on the desk. "That is the true thing under the line. Everything else is custom."

"You want to write on the pad," said Priya.

"I want to write one small line. In the lid." He hesitated. It was not a long hesitation, but she saw it, because Priya saw the floor under people. "I wrote one this morning."

"I know. You said you annotated."

"Two in a day is not a thing I've done."

She did not tell him not to. She had that in her, he had noticed; she could look at a bad plan and tell you its tonnage and then give you the ropes anyway. "How much," she said.

"A night. Another one."

"You didn't sleep last night either."

"I never do before an exam."

"Seon-ho."

"Four. Whatever the next one is." He lifted the brush. "I'd rather count nights than count ships."

He wrote it in the lid, small, in the cramped quick hand he had learned from the page his father left: fourteen strokes, and then a fifteenth he had never made before, a pause at the fifth and a long curve left, like a man stopping at a doorway to see if he is being followed. *This pad prints what the presser has witnessed.* It went in. He felt it go in. The room did not change, but something behind his eyes dimmed, as though a tenant had gone out and taken a lamp.

The lid, when he closed it, was warm.

"Mr. Min," said Seon-ho. "When he comes, you will give him the note and the die and you will stand beside your son. You'll press, because he will want you to. Don't aim for anything. Don't try to stop. Just press it."

"And if the ink prints what I have actually witnessed?"

"Then it will print the truth," said Seon-ho. "Which for the Daesan Pride, I would think, is a great deal more than anybody's paid for."

"Do you know," said Do-yoon, quietly, "I think I would like to stand beside him."

Nobody had asked. He put his phones on the desk, face down, and for the first time since Seon-ho had known him he did not look at them.

The door stuck, and then opened.

Oh Tae-sik was a small tidy man in a dark grey coat with a case in one hand. He had a face like a well-kept ledger: nothing in the margins. He glanced at Priya in her hard hat, at Seon-ho on the visitor's chair, at the two Mins by the safe, and he smiled with the vague courtesy of a man in the wrong waiting room.

"I'm early," he said. "Forgive me. Is this a bad moment?"

"It's Friday," said Gu-chul. "There is a note."

"Of course there is." Oh opened the case on the desk and took out a clean white card with a printed corporate name at the head and a sentence at the foot that began *The Notary certifies.* He did not look at the die when Gu-chul set it down on the felt, or at the chip at the lower left of the ring. He had stopped looking at it years ago. "The Sunjin Dawn. Pilot Seo, boarded 21:50, disembarked at the outer buoy. You're not required to read it, Master Min. The Registry's seen to the wording."

"I know."

"Wonderful."

Gu-chul picked up the die. The braid in the old contract would have bitten him there, in the throat, and he stood waiting for it, and it did not. Seon-ho watched his knuckles. They did not whiten.

He pressed.

There was a sound like a breath drawn in through the teeth. The ring appeared on the white card, red, perfectly circular, with its small chip lower left. And then, inside the ring, in the space where the stamp's registration number should have been, writing came up through the paper like a stain, line by line, in the red of the pad.

*WITNESSED: NO.*

*Pilot Seo Jae-ho not seen to leave. Vessel not seen to sail. Note prepared by a person other than the pilot, in the presence of the notary, who did not see the pilot.*

It did not stop. It went on in tight little capitals, as though the ink had been waiting years to be asked. *The same applies to the notes of 14 September and 3 March, and to a note of 7 April of the year before last, which the notary signed from a draft without reading.* Oh's smile was still on his face, but the muscle around it had gone slack. *The notary's name is OH TAE-SIK. He is standing at Berth Six at this moment. He is afraid.*

"That," said Oh Tae-sik in a very thin voice, "is a defect."

"It's an annotation," said Seon-ho.

Oh looked at him. He looked at Priya, and at the pad. He was not a Reader, but he had handled enough bound paper to know when it had been written on by someone above his grade, and his hand with the case went carefully behind his back, as if he wished to remove it from the scene. "I think I should telephone the Director," he said.

"Please," said Priya. "Use the landline. It has a better signal."

He backed out. The door stuck, and he put his shoulder into it, and then he was running, with the case swinging, up the quay toward a grey sedan.

Do-yoon's phone buzzed against the desk. Then Gu-chul's. Then the second one in Do-yoon's pocket, the work one, which he never answered. They all sounded together, a small unhappy chord.

Do-yoon turned his over and read it. His mouth went through four expressions and ended in none of them.

"My coastal licence," he said. "Registry of Qi Practice, Gwangryeong District. *Suspended with immediate effect pending review of public conduct.*" He read the next line aloud, in a pleasant voice, the voice he used for sponsors. "*We regret the inconvenience.* They've even put a smiley face on it."

"They can do that," said Priya. "A suspended licence means any sect that gives you a seat is in breach."

"Tide Hall can't have me in the building." Do-yoon looked up. "I'm the heir. I'm *not allowed in the building.*" For a moment he looked about twelve. Then he looked at his father, who had gone to the window and was standing with his back to the room, shoulders shaking, and Do-yoon crossed the floor in four steps and did something Seon-ho had not seen a man of his age do in public. He put his arms around him from behind and rested his chin on his father's shoulder, awkwardly, because of the height, and neither of them said anything at all.

Seon-ho looked away. He picked up the white card. The red lines were already drying, and as he watched, they went from wet to brown to the dull rust of old blood, and the ring flattened into the paper as if it had been there for years.

The phone in his pocket began to ring.

It was a number he did not have saved. He knew it anyway, from the way the lamp-light moved behind his eyes when he looked at the screen.

"Don't," said Priya.

He answered it.

"Mr. Ryu," said Director Kang Tae-rim, gently, and Seon-ho could hear the cardigan in his voice. "I am so sorry to interrupt your morning. I understand you've been consulting at Berth Six. I wonder if you might do me the kindness of coming to see me. Today, if it isn't a bother. I think there has been a misunderstanding about a stamp."