The pilots' dormitory on Dolsan Quay was above a ship chandler's and smelled, on the stairs, of paraffin, boiled cabbage and wet rope. Priya went up first with her hands visible. Seon-ho followed, one step at a time, carrying a bag of tangerines he had not paid for. Dil had put it in his arms at the cab door and said that people trust a man with fruit.

The door on the third landing stood ajar, and from behind it came the hiss of a pan and a child's voice reciting the times tables, flat and fast, like a prisoner who has learned the one trick that gets her out of trouble.

"Mr. Seo?" said Priya.

A man in an undershirt and a cook's apron turned from the stove. He was fifty, wide, tanned to the colour of a boot, with the heavy blunt hands of a man who spent his working life holding a wheel against the sea. A cigarette was unlit behind his ear. At the table, wrapped in a duvet, a girl of about nine sat with a workbook open in front of her and a thin tube taped to the back of her hand.

"The inquiry," said Seo. He said it without heat. "I told them everything on the Tuesday."

"I'm not with the inquiry," said Priya. "I was. I was dismissed on Thursday for submitting copies of Ko's departure note."

There was a pause while he took this in.

"Ko," he said. "Yes. I was at his funeral."

"Funeral for whom?" said Seon-ho. "The ship went down with the body aboard."

"There was a service." Seo tipped the pan onto three plates. "The Pilots' Association does one for a man even when there isn't a man." He gestured with the spatula at the table. "Sit. Eat. You come into a house, you eat. Min-seo, put the book away."

They ate. It was a stew of ham and instant noodles and kimchi, the kind that Seon-ho's mother used to make on Thursdays, and he was suddenly so tired that he felt his eyes begin to close over the spoon. The girl, Min-seo, watched him do it with great interest.

"You're like Dad," she said. "He goes to sleep in the car."

"It's a technique," said Seon-ho.

"Dad says that too."

Priya had finished first, because she ate the way she did everything. She wiped her mouth, squared her chopsticks across the bowl, and said, in the voice she used when she was reading a clause aloud, "Mr. Seo. You are due to pilot the Sunjin Dawn out of the outer harbour on the new moon. A note exists in the Hall's safe saying that you left her at the buoy. We think the same note was prepared for Ko, and for the pilots before him. We think none of them left."

"Ko left," said Seo.

"He did not," said Seon-ho.

"I know he didn't." Seo put down the spatula. He said it quite gently, to the table. "I knew in March. When they asked me to do the Marigold N. I told them no. They asked again in the summer, for the Pride. I said, give it to somebody else, I have a daughter. They gave it to Ko, because Ko didn't." He rubbed his face with one big hand. "Ko had no one. A mother in Busan. So they paid him, and he went."

"They pay you?" said Priya.

"Twenty million for the run, and a bonus that I don't understand. I'm to leave at the buoy. That's what the paper says, and I'll sign it." Seo looked at Min-seo, who had gone back to her tables and was murmuring seven eights under her breath. "You see my girl."

"I see her," said Seon-ho.

"Her kidneys. The doctors said a donor, eighteen months, maybe two years. The Registry has a health scheme for the harbour trades. They said they could find a match." He said the word with a sort of horror, as a man says a word in a dream. "They have a list nobody else has got. I don't ask where it comes from."

Nobody said anything. Seon-ho looked at the tangerines in the bag and then at the bandage on the child's hand, and thought of Room 412 and a nine-hundred-thousand-won bed, and felt something in his chest that he did not wish to name.

"If you sail," said Priya, very evenly, "and you do not leave at the buoy, I think you will not be coming back."

"I am going to leave at the buoy."

"How?"

Seo hesitated. Then he took the unlit cigarette from behind his ear and turned it over in his fingers, a man looking for the end of a thread.

"A second pilot comes aboard," he said. "At the outer buoy, off the starboard side, from a tug. Always. He takes the wheel. That's the arrangement, he takes the wheel and I go down the ladder with my bag, and the tug brings me home. Nobody sees it. It's the middle of the night, there's no moon, there's a pilot's licence on the bridge and the paper in the safe says I left. It's the cleanest thing I ever did." His mouth twisted. "Ko wouldn't go down the ladder."

"Why not?" said Seon-ho.

"I don't know. He rang me from the bridge before it happened. On a satellite phone. He said, *the second pilot isn't a pilot, Jae-ho.* He said, *I know this man's feet.* Then the call went. Like that." Seo clicked his fingers. "Like the line was cut."

Priya's hand had tightened on the tablet. "Feet," she said.

"That's what he said. I thought he was drunk."

"He wasn't drunk," said Priya. Her voice shook just very slightly. "Ko was a cultivator. A mid-level one, a river lineage. He read a man by how he stood on a deck. If he said he knew the second pilot's feet, then he'd met him. He recognised how he walked."

"Who?"

"I don't know," said Priya. Under the table, Seon-ho saw her sock-footed toe tap, tap, tap against the leg of her chair, not in a rhythm but a pattern. A list being made by the body. "But he's a man Ko knew. Possibly one of his own people."

Seon-ho took the paper from his pocket. It was the Sunjin Dawn note with its red ring and its blunt rust-coloured letters. *WITNESSED: NO.* He laid it on the table beside the stew.

"Mr. Seo," he said. "I'm a clerk. I'm not clever, but I read what I'm given. This note doesn't work any more. Mr. Min stamped it yesterday and the stamp told the truth. It says you didn't leave the ship, and no one saw you do it, and that the note was prepared by somebody who is not you. If this goes into the insurer's file, the Sunjin Dawn can't be declared lost. Do you understand what that means?"

Seo stared. "It means they'll have to cancel."

"It means the Registry can't make this sailing pay. They'll cancel it, or they'll have to find another way to do it, and that takes them time. You don't have to sail."

There was a long silence. The girl had stopped murmuring. She looked from one face to another with her chin on the workbook and the tube taped to her hand shining like a worm.

"I'll be honest with you," said Seo, lowering his voice and glancing at the girl. "If the note is spoiled, there's a man in a grey coat who comes and sits in my kitchen. I've met him. Politely, he sits. He asks whether the child is comfortable. Then he asks whether she would be more comfortable in a hospital with a better ward." He turned the cigarette over again. "I don't think he has ever once raised his voice."

"Tak," said Seon-ho.

"I never got his name. Gloves. Very clean gloves."

Priya looked at Seon-ho across the table, and in that look was a whole numbered argument: that a man could not be asked to put his daughter on a scale against nineteen strangers, and that a man could not be asked not to. She did not say it. She picked up a tangerine instead and began to peel it in one long spiral, which was what she did with her hands when her mouth was not allowed.

"Dad?" said Min-seo.

"It's all right, my love."

"Are you sailing the big ship?"

"I'm thinking," said Seo. "I'm thinking very hard."

The phone on the shelf began to ring. It was an old handset, battered, with a cracked screen. He looked at it and something went across his face, the instinct of a father who has been waiting by a telephone for two years. He crossed the room in three steps. "Seo. Yes. Speaking."

He listened. Seon-ho watched the colour travel down his neck.

"Tomorrow," he said. "No. No, that's very early. You said eighteen months. You said it'd be a long, no. No, I understand. She's... yes. The day after the, yes. Wednesday. Of course." He put his hand over his eyes. "You've found a donor."

He listened for a long time. Priya sat quite still. Dil's cab, below, honked once, politely.

"Thank you," said Pilot Seo Jae-ho. "Thank you. Thank God, thank you. I'll bring her in myself."

He set the phone on the shelf as though it were made of eggshell. He did not turn round. His shoulders had dropped, and then he put his hand on the wall and his whole back shook, and Min-seo got down off the chair in her duvet and went and put her arms around his leg.

"They've got a kidney," said Seo, to the wall. "For my girl. The operation is on the day after the new moon." He wiped his face on the apron. He turned. His eyes were red and they were very clear. "I'm sorry. I'm very sorry. I'd like to help. But I think you've got to understand. I'm the man that sails."

On the stairs afterward neither of them spoke until the second landing. Priya stopped with her hand on the rail. "Ko knew the second pilot," she said. "His lineage lives on rivers. He could tell a man by how he stood on a deck. So the man has been on decks, he is a cultivator, and he was someone Ko had every reason to trust." She breathed out. "Do you know what I'm afraid of?"

"Tell me."

"That when we find out who it is, I'll have met him. At the Register. At a funeral." Her thumb knocked once on the rail. "I'd like that not to be on any list."