Registrar Faustina Oyelowo-Brandt had a smile that arrived five seconds before she did.

“Ottilie! Come in, come in, sit, you must have a hundred things on, but you must have this one. It’s a good one. It’s a *development opportunity.*” She said it the way other people said *lottery win.* The Registrar’s office on the top floor of the Records Hall had a view of the whole of Gantry Row, and Faustina had arranged her desk so that no visitor could look at anything else; she liked to be seen against the water, a small, brisk figure in a mustard jacket, with her hands clasped and her feet not quite reaching the floor. “Tidemark. You’ve seen the letter.”

“I have.”

“A *Resilience Review.* Isn’t that a lovely phrase? It sounds like a spa.” She laughed, then stopped, then looked slightly worried. “Of course it is not a spa. It is a rather serious audit, and they want everything on TideNet from 2022, and I can think of no one in this building better qualified to prepare it than you.” A beat. “Everyone in the building agrees.”

“Everyone.”

“I asked three people. They all said Ottilie, then looked at the floor.” The Registrar beamed. “And I’d like to say, strictly between ourselves, that the Deputy Registrar post is opening in the spring. Acting capacity, to start. I can’t promise anything. But the Board does like a person who has demonstrated *poise under external scrutiny.*”

She let that sit. It was a very large carrot. It was the largest carrot Ottilie had been offered in nine years, and it came with a salary grade that would cover the whole of her mother’s fees and a small garden. She looked at the Registrar’s cheerful, trusting, oblivious face, and felt the faint nausea of a person standing at the edge of two cliffs at once.

“I would be glad to prepare the pack,” she said. “May I ask for latitude on the timetable?”

“Whatever you need! Take thirty days. Take twenty-nine, so we’re early.” The Registrar tilted her head. “Is there something I should know? You look a bit grey. Are you eating? I have a nephew who does juice.”

“I have a headache.”

“Overfull!” said Faustina, delighted to have remembered the word. “Poor thing. Go home at four, I insist.”

*

She did not go home at four. She went to the dome, where Pereira-Oduya was waiting in the Warden’s office with a legal pad covered in arrows.

“Schedule Nine,” he said, without preamble. “Nobody has invoked it since the Dunmore pontoon dispute in 2024, and that was resolved by a sandwich. But it is, I regret to inform you, the answer to both of our problems.”

“Both?” said the Warden.

“The first problem is the Tenant’s letter. We are obliged to respond on the substance by Monday. The substance is: *to whom should a notice of occupancy be addressed?* The honest answer is *we don’t know, because we have never decided whether it is an occupier.* Schedule Nine is the Charter’s mechanism for deciding. It is a formal notice-and-hearing procedure. The Authority serves a *Notice of Intended Determination* on the party in occupation, stating what the Authority proposes to do. The party has ninety days to respond. After that, a hearing before the Charter Tribunal.” He drew a sharp square on his pad. “It stops every clock. Nobody can touch the Tenant until the hearing is done. It is, if you like, a very slow, very polite, very legal way of saying *hold on.*”

“And the second problem?”

“The second problem is Tidemark.” He tapped the square. “While a Schedule Nine proceeding is open, all correspondence with the party concerned is privileged under Article Twelve. The Authority is obliged to hold it in confidence for the benefit of the proceedings. Tidemark has audit rights over infrastructure *records.* It has no rights over papers belonging to a pending tribunal. We hand them the logs, minus nine years of the Tenant’s letters, with a note saying *privileged, see Article Twelve.* They will complain. They will lose.”

Ottilie said, slowly, “It is not a lie.”

“It is the opposite of a lie. It is a legal fact.”

“It is also the thing that makes the Tenant formally a party.”

“Yes,” said Pereira-Oduya, and he looked at her for the first time with something near respect. “That, I’m afraid, is the cost. In order to keep it from Tidemark, we must recognise it. In order to protect it, we must give it standing. It is, in the profession, a classic trap: the only way to keep a thing safe is to admit it exists.”

The Warden turned from the window. “And how is the notice served?”

“Ah.” The lawyer’s mouth twitched. “Schedule Nine, paragraph four. *Notice shall be served in person, by a natural person not being an officer of the Authority, at the address of the party concerned, and the party shall acknowledge receipt in writing.* An address. A physical one. And someone to hand it over.”

“Where is its address?”

“Where it first said it lived,” said Ottilie. She did not need to check. “Gate 14. Marlowe Street. The former Post Office. The east stairwell.”

“A stairwell.”

“*A residence is occupied.*” She closed her eyes for a moment. “It is the first place it asked for a lamp.”

There was a pause.

“We need a person who is not an officer of the Authority,” said the Warden, “who can dive nineteen metres to a drowned building and read a legal notice to a lamp.” He folded his hands. “I suppose you have no one in mind.”

She did, as it happened. She had had him in mind since the Registrar’s office. She had been afraid that if she said his name aloud in the dome, the room would hear in her voice what she had not yet admitted she felt.

“I may,” she said.

*

The Santa Inês was a squat blue-and-white working skiff moored at the very end of Lees Quay, between a fish-gutting platform and a tarpaulin-covered heap that was either a boat or a very large dog. She had a cuddy cabin, a diving stage on the stern, and a string of paper lanterns along her rail, one for each of Inês’s birthdays, hung with a care that suggested the lanterns mattered more than the boat.

Ottilie arrived at ten past six, carrying a folder and a loaf of bread, because her mother had always said you did not arrive at a boat without something to put on a table. She had read the Dredge profile three times and consulted Ansel, who had said, with real enthusiasm, that visiting a new friend was a *wonderful social investment,* and then offered her a premium confidence pack.

“It’s the audit lady!” shouted a voice from the cabin. “She’s brought *bread!*”

Inês shot out like a cork. She was smaller than she had looked on the screen and entirely made of elbows, in a school pinafore and the grey waterproof shoes, which she was wearing, Ottilie noted, with the left on the right foot. “I’m having cereal for dinner,” she announced. “It’s allowed. It’s Wednesday. Papa says on Wednesdays the rules are suspended.”

“I said *relaxed,*” said Quim, emerging behind her with a tea towel on his shoulder and flour in his beard. “*Slightly* relaxed. Hello. You came.”

“I brought bread.”

“I see that. You brought it like a woman delivering a subpoena.”

“It’s rye.”

“Then I withdraw the remark.”

Dinner was eaten in the cuddy at a table that folded out of the wall, among diving manuals and crayons and a framed photograph of a stern, magnificent old woman in a wide hat. Inês ate her cereal with the precision of a surgeon and conducted an interrogation between mouthfuls. Did Ottilie have a boat? No. A cat? No. Was she a witch? No. How old was she? Thirty-four. Was that old? Relative to what. Was she married? No. Did she have a boyfriend? “Inês,” said Quim, in the voice of a man trying to hold a door shut against the sea. Did she have a *friend?*

Ottilie considered it with the gravity she gave all direct questions.

“I have a neighbour,” she said. “And a man called Pem who brings me coffee. And I have a mother.”

“Is your mother nice?”

“She was extremely clever.”

“Was?”

“She forgets, now. Things.”

“Like what?”

“Me, sometimes.”

Inês stopped chewing. She looked at Ottilie for a long moment with her father’s eyebrow, lifted a little, and said, “That’s sad. Do you tell her your name?”

“Every Sunday.”

“Good,” said Inês, with enormous finality. “Then you’re being a friend.”

Quim had gone very quiet. He passed his daughter the milk. It was a thing he did with his hands, Ottilie noticed, when he did not trust his voice: give something to somebody else.

After the cereal was done, and the bread eaten, and Inês sent off to wash her face, with a threat of television that she appeared to find entirely credible, Ottilie opened the folder. She laid out one sheet of paper. The words *Notice of Intended Determination* sat across the top in a legal typeface.

“It needs delivering,” she said. “In person. By someone who is not an officer of the Authority. To the east stairwell of the former Marlowe Street Post Office. By a diver.” She breathed. “The Office will pay you the standard hazardous service fee. Four hundred credits. I am not permitted to tell you what it is for, and I am about to tell you what it is for.”

He read it. He read it slowly, with his lips moving slightly, the way a man reads a menu in a language he half-understands. At the foot of the page she watched him find the name of the addressee.

*The Tenant, Gate 14, Marlowe Street.*

“I’ll do it,” said Quim.

“You have not asked what happens afterwards.”

“I’ll do it tonight.”

“Quim, it may be dangerous. I do not know that it is. I do not know that it isn’t. Everyone who has dealt with it has told me to be afraid, and everything it has done to me has been polite.” She heard her own voice crack on the last word. “That is what frightens me.”

“Yeah,” he said, more gently. “It’s what frightens me too.” He lifted his eyes, and the lantern light turned them to amber. “Ottilie. I have a ten-year-old’s school fees due in March and a boat that leaks. But I’ll tell you what. In eleven years of this job nobody has ever once asked me to carry a letter to someone who wanted it.” He touched the edge of the page. “I think I’d like to see that.”

She wanted to say, *Don’t be romantic,* and *You’ll be killed,* and, more disturbingly, *Thank you.* In the end she said nothing, and he took the notice from her hand and folded it into his top pocket, over the heart, as if to see how it fitted.

“Ten tomorrow morning,” he said. “Slack tide. I’ll bring a flask. And Ottilie?”

“Yes.”

“Don’t wait up. I mean, you’re not going to, it’s a figure of speech. But I’ll call. I always call. I promise.”

It was a small promise, the kind he made like breathing, and she would learn what it was worth. At the time, she only nodded. Down the quay, in the dark, one of the paper lanterns rocked and turned on its string, and the water under the Santa Inês breathed in and out as though something in it were listening.