Hwang's solution was a tray.

"Walk in carrying it," he said, pressing the thing into Seon-ho's hands: six bowls of cold noodles under cling film, two cans of iced coffee, a sachet of chilli oil in a saucer. "No one in the history of the world has ever stopped a man holding food to ask him if he is a criminal. They ask where it goes. And they feel guilty for asking."

"Is that Confucius?"

"It's my cousin Jin-pil. He drove a delivery truck." Hwang tucked the folded page into the false bottom of the tray, between the plywood and the lining, with a motion so smooth it seemed unrehearsed, which meant he had rehearsed it for eleven years. "Go. If anything goes wrong, say the noodles are for the 'Haedong Registry'. They will assume you have been summoned. They always assume that."

Seon-ho crossed the bridge to Dolsan at a walk, because a run would have been a confession. The sky had lightened to the colour of a dishcloth. By the time he reached the head of the shop's street, he could see the car: a black sedan with diplomatic-grey plates, parked across the pavement with the arrogant tidiness of a car that had never received a ticket. A small crowd of shopkeepers had formed, the sort who gather at the edge of an accident and pretend to be waiting for a bus.

Priya stood among them, her arms folded. She saw him coming. Her eyes went to the tray and then back to his face, and she gave an extremely small shake of the head that he decided meant *you idiot.*

The door of Jeongjik Copy & Notary was open. Inside, light fell on the counter, the copier, the lamp with its taped shade. Three men stood in front of Mr. Jeong, who was behind the counter, wearing a cardigan he had clearly put on over his pyjamas. Pyo Gwang-hun was one of them. He looked drawn. His lips were visibly chapped, and he kept moistening them with a small, miserable lick, as though a thing on the inside were pulling. The second man was fiftyish and stout, in a charcoal suit and the kind of rimless glasses that suggest an appointment with a pension. The third was a woman of about thirty in the same suit, with a lanyard, and she looked at nothing in particular with an expression of such complete attention that she seemed to be listening to the walls.

"Noodles," said Seon-ho, to the room at large. "For the Registry."

Nobody said a thing. The stout man turned his head. Seon-ho kept walking, slow and apologetic, like a student late for an exam, and set the tray on the counter beside the copier with a clack. The false bottom did not shift. His arms were shaking with the effort of seeming to carry something light.

"We did not order noodles," said the stout man.

"I'm told the order came in from Nam Pier. There's a note." Seon-ho produced, from nowhere, the sticker of a receipt. It said, in Hwang's forceful handwriting, *Haedong, 6 x cold.* "Is that not you?"

"It might be Accounts," the woman said. They were the first words she'd spoken. Her voice was unexpectedly warm, and she looked at him properly for the first time, and he felt a faint tightening in his scalp, a draught from an open door he could not see. "They order lunches when they're nervous."

The stout man frowned at her, then at the tray, then, with a visible effort, did what officials do when presented with an unexpected small kindness: he decided it was irrelevant. "Mr. Ryu Seon-ho," he said. "You are the restorer."

"Yes."

"I am Section Officer Bae Chan-woo of the Haedong Registry. This is Reader Han Soo-ah. You know Mr. Pyo." Pyo nodded, as if his neck were on a spring. "We are conducting an inquiry into an irregularity affecting a vessel. We have reason to believe that a document connected to it was left in these premises yesterday by a foreign national. We hold a warrant to recover it."

He held up a sheet, and the sheet glowed, faintly, in the way of a thing with a thread in it. It was beautiful work: a binding warrant, crisp and a deep cream, the Registry's wave seal in vermilion. He felt a small, professional jealousy.

"May I?" said Seon-ho.

Bae hesitated. Nobody had ever asked. After a moment he handed it over, probably out of curiosity at what the Dry kid would do.

Seon-ho read it. All of it, slowly, in the manner of a man who has been trained to read terms and conditions at an age when other children were reading comics. He had a gift for the tiny trap. After thirty seconds he looked up, and in his mild voice said, "Which premises?"

"I beg your pardon?"

"The warrant. It names 'the premises of Jeongjik Copy & Notary, Dolsan Harbour Row 14.' This is number fourteen." He pointed with the tray's chopsticks. "And it authorises recovery of 'any document held on the premises.' Past tense is not a problem. But the document you're after isn't in the premises. It's with me."

Bae blinked. "You have it?"

"No. I'm saying where it might be if I did. Mr. Jeong's contract gives me a ten-minute break at six. I have been on break since five fifty-two. I was at Hwang's." He tipped his head toward the tray. "Anything on my person, during a break, is private property outside the employer's premises. You'd need a warrant against me. Individually." He smiled, very slightly. "I'm told it takes the Registry a day to draft one. The form is nine pages."

The room was silent. Beyond the doorway, he could hear the shopkeepers breathing.

"This is a technicality," said Pyo hoarsely.

"It's a warrant," said Seon-ho. "They're all technicalities. That's why they work."

He was aware of Reader Han watching him, the way you are aware of a lighthouse. It was an effort not to look back. Then Han stepped forward, and the tightening at his scalp became a faint pressure, like fingers hovering over a keyboard, and he understood what she was doing. She was reading him. She was looking at the Writ that hung over him, as every cultivator's Writ hung over them, in a way he could not see but she could, and she was reading his sentence in full and in slow detail, like a woman checking a bill.

He stood and let her. There was nothing else he could do. He kept the smile on his face, the face of a man being politely stared at, and in the hollow of his chest he thought, very clearly: *There is nothing to read. There is nothing to read. There is nothing to read.*

Han Soo-ah frowned.

There is a particular kind of frown a professional produces on meeting something outside the manual. She tilted her head slightly. She narrowed her eyes. Then, with the air of a woman resetting a printer, she looked away.

"Dry," she said to Bae. "As the file says. A bare grate. There's nothing in there. Not even smoke."

"I told you," said Pyo, with a flash of relief that was almost insulting.

"I know what you told me, Mr. Pyo." She did not look at him. She looked at Seon-ho again, one long moment, and he felt himself being filed. "The furnace is empty. That's all."

He knew what she had seen. What she had seen was a page that was white, and she had mistaken it, as every reader would, for a floor. The fact that a blank page and a bare floor produced the same reading at first glance was the only thing standing between him and a cage. He thought of Hwang's bowl. He thought: *not yet. Not unless I give them a reason.*

Bae folded the warrant. "It seems," he said, with an air of someone conceding a point in a game he had not agreed to, "that the Registry will need to rephrase." He turned to Mr. Jeong. "I apologise for the disturbance, sir. The cooperative's collector was concerned that a party had visited your premises and might have been given improper assistance. It is a matter of national maritime security."

"It's a matter of noodles," said Mr. Jeong, who had got his voice back.

Bae gave a tight, almost fond smile. He drew from his inside pocket a cream envelope with a gold seal, and, to Seon-ho's surprise, held it out to him.

"This is for you, Mr. Ryu. A courtesy. The Registry has been reviewing the records of the Tide Hall youth clinic. There has been a calibration error with the older copper styluses. Several people tested in your year were wrongly assessed. We are inviting each of them to a complimentary re-examination." He pronounced the last two words with a kind of relish. "Thursday, ten o'clock, Nam Pier, Floor Nine. It will take twenty minutes. The Director himself has asked to attend."

Seon-ho took the envelope. The paper was heavy. In the corner, so fine he'd have missed it had he not spent his life looking at corners, ran a thread of qi. A summons. Not a request.

"The Director?" he said.

"Mr. Kang Tae-rim." Bae said the name the way people say the name of a doctor they have not yet been to. "He takes a personal interest in the Dry."

They left. Pyo went last, glancing back at the tray, at the noodles, and at Seon-ho's face with a look in which fear was beginning to learn the shape of anger. The sedan pulled away with a hush. The shopkeepers dispersed, disappointed. Priya remained in the doorway, her tablet clutched to her chest, and slowly counted on her fingers the things she wanted to say.

Mr. Jeong lifted the cling film on one bowl, sniffed, and sat down on the stool with a sigh.

"Thursday," he said. "Do you know, in thirty years, nobody has ever sent me an invitation?"

Seon-ho looked at the envelope. He had three days to learn how to become, in front of the most dangerous reader on the coast, exactly as empty as he claimed to be.