"Capillary action," Seon-ho said.

Priya Venkataraman considered this. She had come three steps into the shop, setting each boot down flat and testing the floor as if it might be rented, and now she stopped beside the counter and bent until her face was level with the brown line.

"Capillary action," she repeated, "produces a wicking pattern. Feathered edges, a gradient toward the dry end. This has a clean edge and a consistent weight. It's also fourteen strokes long and it curves left at the end like a man trying to leave a party." She straightened. "I've inspected hull welds with less deliberate geometry."

"Gall ink does that. It oxidises when it meets tannin. The counter's been wiped with tea for thirty years."

"Has it?" She looked at Mr. Jeong, still on the floor.

"Forty," said Mr. Jeong, from somewhere around his shins. "My wife believed in it."

Seon-ho closed his eyes for a quarter of a second. When he opened them, Priya was holding the tablet in front of her like a shield and taking a photograph of the counter, and the little white sound the phone made went through him like a fish bone.

"Please don't," he said.

"Why?"

"Because it's evidence of nothing, and you'll look at it later and decide it is evidence of something."

"That is exactly what I do for a living." She lowered the tablet but did not put it away. "Mr. Ryu. I've been in this city nineteen days. In that time I have been lied to by a harbour pilot, two lawyers, and the ferry timetable, and I have developed a sense for it. You lie with great economy, which I respect. You do not lie with *conviction*, which I find interesting."

Mr. Jeong got up, using the counter. He was still holding the pen. He looked at Priya, then at Seon-ho, then at the two of them together, and came to the conclusion that this was not a conversation he needed to be furniture in. "I'm going to buy a coffee," he announced. "From the shop. Across the road. Where there is coffee." He went out, trailing cardigan. The bell rang behind him, and the room, with its pressure gone, felt about forty square metres larger.

Seon-ho put the brush in its jar, because it was the only thing in reach that would not look like a gesture.

"Who told you I couldn't be sensed?" he said.

"A taxi driver. Very loud. She had a Russian name and a Korean accent and a theory that my aura was 'tidy'." Priya almost smiled. "She said that if I wanted anything certified, anything strange, you were the man. She also said you were single, but I assumed that was a different kind of enquiry."

Dil. Of course it was Dil. Dilnoza Kim had a nose for other people's problems and a mouth that could not leave one alone, and she had once told an entire bus that Seon-ho was an orphan, which was not true, and which he had never corrected, because it made fewer people ask about his mother.

"She exaggerates."

"I assumed that too." Priya set her rucksack on the counter. "I'll say what I am, so that we are standing on the same floor. I am a marine surveyor with the Madras Register of Shipping, seconded to a salvage inquiry here for six weeks. I am also a cultivator, in a lineage from Kerala that reads weight and motion through the feet. Second layer of Breath. I'm not powerful, and I'm not a threat to you." She said that last part quickly, and it sounded like something she had prepared, in a list, on a bus. "The point is that when your boss's visitors came in, the whole floor shifted. I could feel it from the pavement. And when the big man held the paper, the floor under *you* did not shift at all. I have never felt that. People move the floor even asleep. You don't. It is as if you were not standing on anything."

The sentence landed in the middle of him and sat down. *As if you were not standing on anything.*

"That's a clinical term, is it?" he said. "Not standing on anything."

"It is a description. The clinical term is probably worse."

"It's *dry*," said Seon-ho. "The clinic wrote it on the form. I have a certificate somewhere. I tested at zero, I'm a zero, and the one thing zero people are known for is that nothing happens near them. I'm furniture with a tax number." He found he was talking too fast and made himself take a breath. "You saw a line on a counter and a man leave. I'd say that's two events."

"I'd say three." She counted on her fingers. "One: the paper in his hand changed. I couldn't see how, but the pressure in the room reversed direction. For two seconds, he was lighter and you were holding the weight. Two: you are standing here with a perfectly steady hand and a sweat stain under each arm that was not there when I came in, which means you were acting afraid and not very afraid. Three: you haven't asked me to leave."

"I'm too tired to ask anybody to do anything."

"That," she said, "is the first thing you've said that I believe."

He laughed. It surprised him and came out as a short, ugly bark, and he put the back of his wrist against his mouth. It had been four hours of sleep and the strangest minutes of his week and now, somehow, he was being out-argued in a copy shop by a woman with a hair tie made of a bootlace.

"All right," he said. "Suppose I believe that you aren't a threat. What do you want, Ms. Venkataraman?"

"Priya."

"What do you want, Priya?"

She unzipped the rucksack, took out a clear sleeve, and laid it on the counter between them like a card she had been holding for a long time.

"Certified copies. Four pages. They're from a vessel called the *Haeun Star*, a car carrier registered in Panama, which left Gwangryeong outer harbour on the fourteenth of last month with two thousand vehicles and a crew of nineteen, and has not been seen since. No wreck. No distress call. The salvage inquiry says it is lost with all hands. The insurers have already paid, which is suspicious on its own. The documents I want copied are from the port authority's departure file." She paused. "My mentor was the surveyor who cleared that ship to sail. Now people are saying he signed what he shouldn't have. He died in August. He can't answer them."

He saw how she held her jaw as she said it, and the word *died* went by without anything on her face. He recognised that. It was how he said *father*.

"Then why not photocopy them?"

"Because they need to be legally certified for a hearing in Busan, and the originals I'm allowed to touch for exactly one more day. And," she hesitated, "because the third page is damaged. I want a restorer to say what the damage is. Your boss's shop is the only one in the harbour district with a restorer who isn't connected to the cooperative."

"That's a low bar," said Seon-ho. "Anyone I work for has one employee."

He slid the sleeve toward him with two fingers, because a document was a document and his hands wanted to see it before his head had a vote. The first two pages were routine: a clearance certificate, a cargo summary, stamps. The third was a handwritten supplement, a pilot's note, creased and water-stained along one margin. He angled the lamp and read the Korean aloud, almost without noticing. A pilot named Ko had boarded at 22:40, the weather was good, the tide was low and moonless, the pilot had been dropped at the outer buoy. Ordinary. A little too ordinary, in the way of a lie that has been ironed.

Then he turned the sheet and looked at the stained margin, and the lamp seemed to go very quiet.

Beside the water mark, so small it could have been a grain in the paper, someone had written a line. It was drawn with a very fine pen. It was fourteen strokes long.

The last stroke curved left, like a man leaving a party.

He did not move his face. He had been practising not moving his face since he was sixteen, and he had never in his life needed it more. He knew the pressure of that wrist. He knew where the nib had paused on the fifth stroke because the writer had always paused there, a half-second of breath held, a habit he had once been scolded for copying. He knew, in the part of him that did not take instruction from his face, that nobody else on earth wrote this hand.

Nobody except himself. And one other man, who had been declared dead when Seon-ho was thirteen.

"Mr. Ryu?" said Priya.

"The stain is tea," he said, and his voice was perfectly level, which was a lie, the largest he had told all day. "I'll do the copy. It will take until tomorrow. And I'll need to keep the original overnight."

"I said they were only mine for one more day."

"Then I'll need to keep it tonight."

She watched him for a long moment, her weight rolling a little from heel to ball, reading something through the soles of her boots that he could not feel. Then she said, quite gently, "You're not going to tell me what you saw, are you."

"I'm going to tell you at ten tomorrow," said Seon-ho, "when I know what I'm saying."

She left a card on the counter. When the door closed behind her, he stood alone in the shop with the lamp and the half-mended deed and the page from a ship that had vanished, and put his thumb very slowly over the little curved line, as if it were a pulse.