The ferry canteen on Pier Four sold coffee in paper cups that had been designed by someone who hated both coffee and cups. Priya Venkataraman drank hers anyway, with the expression of a woman signing off on a defective weld.

"Here is what I propose," she said. "One. You tell me what you saw on the third page. Two. I tell you why I need to know. Three. We agree, in advance, that neither of us is going to lie for at least an hour. After that we may resume normal operations."

"That's not how people talk."

"It's how I talk when I'm frightened, and I am frightened, so I'd advise you to take it."

He had not expected her to say it. It was ten past eight on a damp morning. The canteen was half empty, steamed up, and smelled of fish cake and floor polish. Through the window, a ferry was loading a line of delivery scooters, each rider with a thermal box on the back and a face lit blue from below. Priya sat with her back to the wall, boots flat on the floor, her tablet face down on the table, and he understood that the arrangement of her body had been chosen: she could feel anyone coming across the tiles.

He took the folded page out of his inner pocket. He had slipped it from Hwang's tray in the toilet of the shop while Mr. Jeong was eating Hwang's noodles and Priya was pretending to inspect a photocopier.

"I want to say first," he said, "that I'm not good at this. Telling the truth."

"I noticed. You do it like a man defusing a sandwich."

He smoothed the page out and turned the margin toward her. "This is the stain you asked about. There's a line inside it. Fourteen strokes. Too small to see unless you know it's there."

Priya leaned in until her nose was almost on the paper. Her breath moved a corner of it. She said nothing for a long time.

"I can see nothing," she said at last. "Wait." She closed one eye. "Yes. A scratch. A hair." She sat back. "What does it say?"

"I can't tell you that part yet."

"You said an hour of no lying."

"That's not lying. It's an exemption."

"They're called exemptions when you have a clause." But she let it go, and he saw her do it, the effort of it passing across her face like a cloud across a hillside. "Can you tell me whose hand it is?"

This was the moment. He could feel it, as plainly as the cold of the cup.

"Mine," he said. "Or it looks like mine. It's a script I use. Only I and one other person ever learned it. He's my father. He's been dead eleven years."

She waited.

"Except that the ink is a month old," said Seon-ho. "And I'm sitting in a canteen with the only evidence I've ever had that he isn't."

Priya looked at him for a very long moment. Then, with a care that might have been tenderness had she been anyone else, she nudged her own coffee across the table and took his empty cup.

"All right," she said. "That's a real one. I'll give you a real one back."

She flipped the tablet over. On the screen was a map of the strait, a grey wedge of water running between Dolsan and the long dark thumb of Ongdo Island, with the outer harbour at its mouth. Three red crosses glowed on it. Her fingertip hovered above each.

"The *Haeun Star* is the third ship. Not the first. The first was an ore carrier, the *Daesan Pride*, nineteen months ago. The second was a tanker, the *Marigold N.*, eight months ago. Both cleared outer harbour on a moonless tide. Both reported nothing after the pilot disembarked. No wreckage. No oil. No survivors. In both cases a departure file was lodged, the pilot's note was properly witnessed, and the insurers paid inside ninety days." She tapped the screen. "Three ships. Roughly eight hundred million won of cargo apiece, and fifty-three crew. Everyone says it's the weather, the strait, bad luck."

"You don't."

"I think the pilot notes are wrong. I think somebody is forging the pilot disembarkation, so that the vessel is considered to have left safely, and the insurers have no one to blame." Her knuckles were white on the edge of the table. "And my mentor, Mr. Raghunathan, cleared all three. Thirty-one years in the Register, and he cleared them all. He told me, a week before he died, that he'd found something in the strait. He wouldn't say what. He said it wasn't safe to put in writing."

"Then he was wiser than I'd expect of a man who cleared three vanished ships."

"He was the *best man I ever met,*" said Priya, very quietly, and the word *met* cracked a little in the middle, as if it had been trodden on. "And I can't prove it. Not to the hearing in Busan, not to anyone. Nobody wants to be the one who says that a dead man's signature has been used."

He looked at the tablet. At the three crosses. At the tiny, accurate arrows she had drawn along each ship's last known heading, bending, one after another, toward the same dark patch on the chart.

He said, "The pilot of the *Haeun Star* was a man called Ko. He was a student of the noodle seller on Cheongpa Hill, and the note the file says he wrote was written with the wrong hand. My father's line says he never left the ship."

She went completely still. Then she opened her mouth and shut it.

"That's the one," she said. "That's the thing I couldn't see." She breathed out. "Pilot notes. A man who didn't leave. All three ships, probably. Somebody boarded, somebody wrote the paper, and somebody on the *Haeun Star* knew it was being done." She pressed the heels of her hands to her eyes. "I should have known. I should have asked who the *pilots* were."

"You should have slept," said Seon-ho. "When did you last?"

"Before you."

"Before me, what?"

"Before I ate your boss's sympathetic noodle." Her mouth twitched, in what he was fairly sure was her first genuine smile. It changed her face the way a window changes a wall. Then she frowned at the map again, and the smile went somewhere private.

"What I can't explain," she said, "is the moon. Three disappearances, three new moons. I checked the almanac and I checked it again. I'm a surveyor. I don't believe in the moon as a causal agent. But the ships left on the darkest nights of the month, within an hour of slack water, and there's a thing in my lineage, an old saying: *when the sky closes its eye, the sea opens its mouth.* My teacher in Kollam used to say it when we ran drills on the beach at night. I thought it was a thing you tell children so they come in before dinner."

"And now?"

"Now I stand on the quay at midnight on a dark tide and my feet tell me the water is *thinking.*" She said it quite flatly, and then looked embarrassed, and drank her coffee to cover it. "That is not a sentence I'd ever put in a report."

"Put it in the footnotes," said Seon-ho. "Nobody reads those. They'll treat it as authoritative."

She gave him a look. He couldn't tell if she was offended or filing the joke for later. "When is the next new moon?" he asked.

"Twenty-six days. There's a refrigerated cargo ship scheduled out on that tide. The *Sunjin Dawn.* Sixteen crew." She said the number the way people say the age of a child. "I have twenty-six days to find out what happens in a strait and persuade a hearing it wasn't a dead man's error. I have a salvage inquiry that wants a signature. And you," she said, with the brisk precision of a woman who has decided to use what is in front of her, "have a father, a script, and a talent for being underestimated."

"I've never thought of that as a talent."

"It's the only one I've seen so far that's worked on a Registry officer." She pointed a finger at him. "Don't make it a habit. It will stop being funny when it costs you something."

He thought of the night he would not sleep and said nothing.

Then she was writing in the air with her finger, ticking off a list only she could see. "Right. Terms. One, I don't tell the inquiry about your father or the hand. Two, you tell me everything you find, however strange. Three, you don't tell *me*, a person who just met you, to stop looking at the strait."

"Four," said Seon-ho, "you don't tell anyone how I stand."

"How you stand?"

"You said I wasn't standing on anything. If a Registry Reader hears that from a surveyor, I'd rather not find out what happens."

She drew a breath, then nodded. "That's fair. And you don't tell me why."

"I don't tell you why."

"For now."

"For now," he agreed, and found he could say it. They shook on it, over the paper cups, with an awkwardness that he suspected neither of them would have been able to explain. Her palm was dry and callused. Her grip was a formal one, a precise two-second shake, and then she let go and wrote something on the back of the napkin, folded it, and slid it into his hand.

"My number," she said. "The one I answer. The other one is for the inquiry."

His own phone buzzed. He glanced down, ready to ignore it, and then did not ignore it.

*Lourdes (Ward 4): Seon-ho. Get to the hospital now. Man in a grey suit in your mom's room. Not on visitor list. Has her chart. Told him wait, he said he'd already waited long enough. I'm standing in door. I'm not moving but I can't hold him forever.*

The second message arrived before he had finished reading the first.

*Lourdes (Ward 4): He's asking if she has a son. I said no. Come anyway.*

Priya was already standing. She had read his face as she read the floor. "Where?"

"Sunrise Care. The hill. It's fifteen minutes."

"It's eight," said Priya, hooking her rucksack. "I'll drive."