The car ferry to Ongdo had a vending machine that sold hot corn soup and a sign on the deck that said PLEASE DO NOT FEED THE GULLS WITH YOUR FINGERS, which implied a history.

Dil stood at the rail with a paper cup, in a jacket the colour of a traffic cone. She had parked the cab in the hold between a truck of bean sprouts and a hearse, and had said, with satisfaction, that this was the most honest line of traffic in the country. Priya sat on a bench with her boots planted and her eyes half shut, reading the deck.

"It's choppy," she said.

"It's flat," said Dil.

"The water is flat. The swell under it isn't. There's something coming up from the south-east, a long one. Nothing dangerous. I only like to know." She opened one eye. "You're asleep on your feet, Ryu."

"I'm resting my eyes."

"You're resting them standing up in a wind."

"It's a technique." He leaned on the rail beside Dil and watched Dolsan fold itself back into the haze: the cranes, the Registry tower on Nam Pier with its top eleven floors catching the light like a jar of honey. He had given the morning of the Sunday to the problem and been left with a great many documents and no key.

He had one thing in his bag. Mr. Jeong's notary seal, in its felt pouch. Mr. Jeong had pressed it into his hand at five that morning on the copy-shop step, in his good cardigan, without a word, and walked away.

The gran lived at the end of a lane of low houses behind the fish drying racks. Ha Bok-nam was seventy-eight and four feet nine and sold dried squid from a trestle outside her gate; she looked at the three of them, the tall woman in the hard hat, the loud woman in orange, the young man like a dropped umbrella, and said, "If it's the Registry, I've already paid."

"We're not the Registry," said Seon-ho. "We're a copy shop."

"That's worse."

"It's very much worse," said Dil warmly. "May we see his room?"

The boy's name was Ha Jun-seo, and his bedroom was a lean-to with a tin roof and a window onto the drying racks, and a futon made up with the corners squared as if for inspection. There was a shelf of cassettes, actual cassettes, and a stack of battered recording devices, the old kind with a red button, and on the desk, laid out in a row, eleven school exercise books with their spines taped.

Priya was already at the shelf. She had taken her boots off at the door without being asked, which Bok-nam noted with approval. She was standing in her socks on the lino with her head slightly bent.

"He lived here," she said. "The floor remembers."

"He's a good boy," said the gran. "He doesn't go out. He sits and listens. They said at the clinic he had nothing, but I said, he hears the pot boil in the next house. I said, that is not nothing." She pointed a short finger at the shelf. "Don't touch the cassettes. He knows which is which."

Seon-ho opened the first exercise book.

It was not a diary. It was page after page of small neat tables, ruled by hand: a date, a time, a place, and a number. A column of numbers down the right-hand side. At the head, in the careful print of a child who has been told to write clearly, *HUM, Hz, ESTIMATED.* Below, notes. *Tuesday. Harbour wall. Steady. 41.* *Thursday. Behind the Co-op. 38. Birds quiet.* *Moonless. Strait, east light. 29. Falling. Cannot stand.*

He turned the page. *Moonless. 27.* The next, *Moonless. 24. It is thinking. I put my hands over my ears and it comes through the bones.* And then, in the margin, in a child's anxious capitals, *I AM NOT MAKING IT UP.*

He handed it to Priya without a word.

She read two pages and stopped. He watched the colour leave her face and her thumb begin its slow knock on the cover. "My feet say it's thinking," she said, in the careful voice of a woman reading a sum back to herself. "That is what I said at the canteen. It's what my grandmother's lineage says. The sea is thinking on moonless tides. I told you that."

"You did."

"He's *measuring* it." She turned the pages faster. "Twenty-two months. Every moonless night. He's got dates here for the Daesan Pride. The night before, the hum is thirty-one. The night of, it's nineteen, and he marks it, he writes *loud in the teeth.* Seon-ho, this is data. Properly kept. It is better than the inquiry's."

"He's a zero," said Dil. "They gave him a copper stick and it said he was nothing."

"It said he had no qi," said Seon-ho. "The stylus tests how hard the world pushes back on a Writ. It doesn't test whether a man can hear something the Writ doesn't cover." He looked at the shelf of cassettes, all of them labelled with dates in biro. "I think he's not nothing. I think he's listening to what the Registry can't read, and it's the strait."

"Then that's why they wanted him," said Priya.

The gran said, from the doorway, in a dry voice, "Why *did* they want him?"

Nobody answered. Dil put a hand on her shoulder, and the old woman allowed it for exactly the length of time it took to look at her, then removed it.

"Mrs. Ha," said Seon-ho, "as his next of kin, you're entitled to see him. It's in the Placement Offer's welfare paragraph. A Participant's next of kin may request a visit or a supervised call at any reasonable hour. I'd like to write the request, and Mr. Jeong, who's a notary, will stamp it, and you'll read it out in front of the Registry's front desk by telephone, and they will have to give you a time."

"I can't read very well."

"I'll write it out in big print. Dil will read it to you twice."

"I will do it in Russian if I have to," said Dil.

He wrote it on the lino, kneeling, with Mr. Jeong's pouch open beside him. When it was done he pressed the seal into the corner with the flat of his palm and felt nothing in it at all, not a thread, not a thought, only the plain ink of an honest notary at a bad hour. It made him almost happy. He passed the page to the old woman, and she held it at arm's length like a fish, and dialled the number on it.

It rang six times. Seon-ho counted. On the seventh a voice came on that was neither the front desk nor the headset girl, but something warm and unhurried, with an undertone like a cup of coffee being set down.

"Registry, Floor Four. Han Soo-ah speaking. I am so sorry you've waited."

Bok-nam read the page. She read it slowly, ironing each word flat under her thumbnail. There was a short silence on the line, and in it Seon-ho heard something he could not place. A door closing, perhaps. A key.

"That's a perfectly valid request," said Han Soo-ah. "I think I can offer you four minutes. Today. Within the half hour. If you can access a video call?"

"He has a phone," said the gran. "It's the one he left. It's in the drawer."

"That will do."

They sat in a row on the futon, with the phone propped against the tin kettle. Priya had her hands pinned under her thighs. At eleven fourteen, to the second, the screen went blue, then grey, then resolved.

Ha Jun-seo was a thin boy in a blue Registry-issue shirt with the collar buttoned to the neck. He had no headphones. His ears, strangely, looked bare, like a house with its curtains taken down. He sat on a plain bed in a plain white room, and behind him there was a window with wire in the glass, and through the window, very small, Seon-ho could see a crane. A crane with a yellow stripe: the third berth on Nam Pier.

"Gran," said the boy. "I'm fine."

"You're not fine," said Bok-nam. "Your collar's done up."

"They said it was the uniform."

"Have you eaten?"

"They've got a canteen." He gave a small sick smile, and as he did the light from the window caught a glint on his lower molar, a bright white tooth too new for a mouth that age. "It's all right. Really. They're very nice. It's very quiet." His eyes went, once, to something past the camera. "It's so quiet here, Gran. I can't hear anything at all."

Seon-ho felt it land. So did Priya, who made a sound, short, in her throat.

"What does that mean?" he said softly, to the boy, to the screen. "Quiet?"

Jun-seo looked at the camera for the first time. He seemed to see the tall young man next to his grandmother, a face he'd never seen, a rope bracelet on a wrist. "Whatever they've done," he said, "it doesn't hum. In here. I put my ear to the wall. I put it to the floor. There's no water in this building at all." He swallowed. His voice came very small. "It's the first time in my life it's been quiet. I'm so scared."

The screen went white, then black. The phone buzzed once, and a text came in from an unlisted number.

*The call is logged. The Placement Officer who manages Cohort B is Mr. Tak. Visits are Wednesdays, supervised. I cannot do that again. S.*

Bok-nam sat holding the dark phone in both hands. She did not cry. She looked at the notebooks on the desk, and then at the sky through the lean-to window, which was clear and pale and without a single cloud.

"He said it doesn't hum," she said. "Does it hum there? On Nam Pier?"

Priya answered. She had gone very still, in her socks, on the floor of the boy's room. "It should," she said. "It's the sea. The whole pier should hum. Mrs. Ha, if there's no water under that building, then somebody has built a room that the sea can't reach. And I don't know any way to do that except to put something in the way."

Out on the drying racks, the squid turned slowly in the wind, a hundred pale shapes on their strings, like questions.