The lift on Nam Pier played a piece for harp and something that wanted to be rain. Seon-ho stood in it with his back against the rail and tried to remember the ladle.

There was a handle shaped like a goose neck. There was a dent, left of the bowl, where Hwang had dropped it once and sworn at the floor. He went round the dent twice and the picture swam, the way a word does if you say it forty times, and somewhere around the sixth floor he understood the arithmetic of his own head. Two nights gone since six that morning. A man can fake a great many things. He cannot fake having the attention to spare.

Priya had wanted to come. He had said no, because the Registry's invitation said Mr. Ryu, and because she was one conversation away from being a criminal again. Dil had driven him to the kerb and said, in Russian, something he took to be a blessing. Lourdes had put a rope bracelet on his wrist that she said was for luck and was, he suspected, for tracking.

The door opened on Floor Nine. The receptionist with the headset offered him a boiled sweet. He took it.

Kang Tae-rim was not in the exam room this time. He was in a small office at the end of the corridor, where the long window looked down on the harbour and a kettle on the filing cabinet had been left to murmur. He rose when Seon-ho came in, which made him seem shorter, and he held out the hand with the button missing at the cuff. Seon-ho shook it. The palm was dry today.

"You are very good to come," said Kang. "Please. Take the chair with the cushion. Someone sat on the other one in 2019 and it never recovered."

The lamp-light came with him, as it always did. It rested on Seon-ho the way sun rests on a table, patient and warm, going over everything, and he did the only thing he could, which was to be interested in something else. He found, on the desk, a paperweight made of green glass with a bubble in it. He began to wonder how the bubble got there.

"A misunderstanding," Kang said, "about a stamp. I've spent the last hour on the telephone with a notary who has taken to his bed. I am so sorry. He is not a robust man."

"Mr. Oh left in a hurry," said Seon-ho.

"He said the ink spoke to him." Kang looked rueful. "I told him that ink doesn't speak. I should say, I told him that *ordinary* ink doesn't speak. I have been in this business a long time, Mr. Ryu, and I have only ever seen one sort of mark that I could not read." He lifted the paperweight, turned it, and put it down. "I would very much like to know who taught you your hand."

"I'm a restorer," said Seon-ho. "I use a standard oak gall."

"Oak gall. Yes."

"I was engaged by the Hall as a contract consultant," he went on, since the best answer to a threat is a question about its paperwork. "Any notation I made at Berth Six was made for my client, on my client's property. If the Registry feels there's a misunderstanding, I'd like to see the instrument on which it relies."

Kang gave a small, delighted nod, like a teacher whose pupil has found the page. He slid a folder across. It was thin. It held one sheet: the custody receipt, dated three years ago, with the Registry's crest at the head and Min Gu-chul's name at the foot.

*Received from the Gwangryeong Maritime Notarial Service, one witness die, to be held for safeguarding pending review.*

Seon-ho read it twice. Then he read it the way his father would have, from the bottom up, one line at a time, and the bubble in the paperweight forgot to matter.

"There's no return clause," he said.

"I'm sorry?"

"Under Section Forty of the Harbour Authority's Controlled Instruments Regulation, an item held for review has to be returned, or reissued under a new receipt, within thirty days." This was true. He had learned it at eighteen, copying tide statutes for money. "If the receipt names no return date, the thirty days run from the date of receipt. Three years is, I believe, thirty-six months. Which means the Registry has had no lawful custody of that die for thirty-five months, and every notation made with it in that time was made without authority." He closed the folder. "I'd rather it didn't come out in front of the Authority, to be honest. It looks careless."

Kang looked at him over the half-moon glasses for a long moment.

"It does," he said at last. "It does look careless. I am afraid it is exactly the sort of thing a department like ours does while it is busy being kind." He wrote something on a pad, in a small tidy hand. "Mr. Min's son. The coastal licence. I'm afraid that was an error of the front desk. I will have it restored by two."

"And Ms. Venkataraman's port pass."

"She has a port pass?"

"She had."

"It is hers again by this afternoon." Kang tore off the sheet and set it aside. "You see how very much easier it is when someone reads the fine print."

The room had gone warm. Seon-ho realised he was winning, and in the same instant realised that this was exactly the thing he would never have been allowed to do if Kang had not wished it, and the thought was so tired and so clear that it broke the ladle in half.

It was only for the space of a breath. Half a second. The goose-neck handle went out like a candle, and the floor of his attention was bare, and in the bare floor there was a page.

Kang's hand stopped on the pad.

"Odd," he said softly. He didn't raise his voice. He did not need to. "For a moment you looked, Mr. Ryu, like a clean sheet of paper."

Seon-ho thought, with perfect calm, of the ugliest object he had ever loved. The ladle came back, with its dent, with its sad neck. He put a hand to his face and rubbed his eyes the way a man does at the end of a bad week.

"I haven't slept," he said. "I had to stay up and check a lease. You've no idea how people write leases."

"No," said Kang. His smile was kind. "I imagine it is dreadful." The lamp-light drew back, slowly, with the air of someone setting down a book to find their place later. "I will not keep you. I know how it is when one has worked a double shift. I only wanted to apologise in person, and to say one thing about the offer."

"The Records post."

"The post stands. It will stand a month, a year, until you tell us otherwise." He stood, and came round the desk, and for some reason Seon-ho stood too. "The other matter is not an offer. It is only that I feel one ought to be told. The arrangement between the Registry and Sunrise Care, the staff discount, which has been in place on your mother's bed for some months, is being reviewed. It is a matter of budgets and has nothing to do with this morning. They have given us fourteen days." He spread his hands. "I thought you would prefer to hear it from me."

Seon-ho did not feel the floor shift, because he never did. He felt only the line of the sentence, how long it was and how neatly it had been made, how it had been waiting in a drawer under the cardigan since before he came in.

"The subsidy," he said. "You said some months. In the exam you said the arrangement was on offer."

"Did I? I get my tenses mixed up." Kang opened the door. "Do give my best to Ms. Bautista. She has a very strong grip. I met her when I visited, last Tuesday, to see how your mother was. Such lovely braids."

The door closed on the green glass and the kettle. Seon-ho went along the corridor with the boiled sweet still in his fist, and the lift came, and he got in, and when the doors began to shut a hand slid between them.

Han Soo-ah got in. She had a lanyard and a plastic cup of coffee and the look of someone who had come from a very long meeting about nothing. She pressed Ground and stood facing the doors, not him. The harp started again.

On the fifth floor she said, to the mirrored wall, "There's a rule here. A Reader may not discuss a reading with the subject."

"I understand."

"Nobody said I couldn't discuss the weather." She sipped her coffee. "It's going to be a hot week. Fourteen days of it. And you should rest before you do anything else, because a man in your condition, who has written two nights into somebody else's pad, shouldn't walk about with his guard down." Her eyes didn't leave the doors. "The bare floor is lovely, by the way. I've never seen one with a goose in it."

The lift opened on the lobby. She went out first and did not look back.

Outside the sun was white on the water. Dil's cab sat on the double yellow with its hazards going, and Priya was in the front seat with a clipboard, and when she saw his face she opened the door before he reached it.

"Number one," she said, "you're alive."

"Fourteen days," said Seon-ho, and got in, and shut his eyes.