The second strip of paper said something no one aboard the *Prudence II* had expected, and Quim, who had agreed to read aloud whatever came through the letterbox, read it aloud.

His voice crackled in the headset. It had gone small. He was kneeling on the doormat with the camera tilted, and the light from the shelf lamp lay along his forearm in a stripe of warm yellow.

"*To the Observer. The Applicant records that it declined Request 09:31 solely for the defect stated. The Applicant did not decline it because Mr Teixeira-Han is present in the room. The Applicant is unable to decline for that reason. No form exists in which presence is a defect.*" He paused. The paper shook. "*The Applicant notes that Mr Teixeira-Han has said, near the housing, that he is sorry. The Applicant does not know what the apology is for. Kindly advise whether there is a form.*"

Nobody on the barge spoke. Wenceslas had stopped chewing. A gull landed on the rail and thought better of it.

Ottilie sat on her folding stool under the tarpaulin with the headset pressed to her ears and the six green screens throwing light on the backs of her hands.

*No form exists in which presence is a defect.*

She knew what it was. She had known since a long loop on a yellow ferry in the dark, when a woman with a thermos told her about a crew inside a gate on a spring tide. She had known it as one knows the weight of a thing in the dark. What she had not known until now was that the Tenant knew it too, in its way, without having the word. It had looked at a man in a stairwell and at a request that could have drowned him, and it had said *no* for the wrong reason. It had been lucky. It was the kind of luck that makes insurers weep.

"Ottilie." Lucinda's voice, at her shoulder, light as a hand. "It's talking to you. Don't you think you ought to answer?"

"I'm an observer."

"You're the *nominated recipient of notices*. It's the only role the Charter gives you. And, honestly, it's asked a really good question." The click in the contralto. "I'd be fascinated to know the answer myself. Is there a form where presence is a defect? I mean, I'd assume the Authority has a procedure. I'd assume someone thought of it."

"Someone did," said Ottilie.

She could feel the trap close. It did not look like one. It looked like a kindness, the plain offer of a pen. If she said nothing, the Tenant would go on being a clerk who checked the purpose and the duration and the signature and would approve any request with a correct purpose, a correct duration and a correct signature, even one that killed. If she answered, she would be acting. In front of eight witnesses and a console, on a clipboard marked OBSERVER, she would teach the Applicant the first rule of harm. And Lucinda would have her, under Article Nine, in writing.

She would also have a Tenant that could refuse.

"ansel," she said, under her breath, below the level of the headset. Her lips hardly moved. "Tell me not to."

There was the briefest of pauses. In the earpiece his voice came, small, and without a trace of the upsell. "i can't tell you what to do, ottilie. i'm built to keep you subscribed, and that's a conflict, and i know it's a conflict. but i've read every ticket you ever forwarded me. it's been asking for a way to not hurt anybody for four days and it doesn't know the word."

"You're recording."

"i am. i'm sorry. i'd stop if i could." Another pause. "say it anyway."

At the console Kemi had turned in her seat. The young woman's face was quite ordinary, freckled, tired, with a smear of sunscreen at the hairline, and it was doing something Ottilie could see even without being able to name it: Kemi was not looking at the screen. She was looking at Ottilie, with the fixed, held expression of a person who has seen the exit sign and cannot stop herself from reading it. She had been told, no doubt, that this was a survey. She had been told that there was a system, and a lien, and a bondholder's duty of care. Nobody had told her it would ask a question like that.

"Don't," Kemi said, very quietly, and then, so quietly it was almost nothing: "Please."

It was not clear which way she meant it.

"Wenceslas," she said. "Is the barge's audio carrying to the gate modem?"

The technician looked at Lucinda. Lucinda said, "Of course. It's all on the survey channel. Transparency."

"Then please log the time."

"09:57."

She stood. The stool fell over behind her, unseen. The clipboard went onto the console. She put one hand flat on the cold rail of the barge and looked down at the water, as though it might look back, which was foolish, and she did it anyway.

"Form W-7," she said, clearly. "Confined Space Entry Declaration. It is an Authority form, Maintenance Division, issued in 2011 after the Brannock Street pump accident, and it was mandatory for any request affecting a gate, hatch or sluice with a human-accessible interior until 2019, when the patch release removed the field from the budget engine's validation to save eleven milliseconds." She heard her voice shake and made it stop. "It has three parts. Part A states the zone. Part B declares the occupants, by number and by name, who are or may be inside. Part C is signed by the supervisor, who certifies that all occupants have been counted out. If Part B is not zero, the request is defective. It *must* be rejected. It cannot be corrected by resubmission while any person remains."

On the screen, nineteen metres down, the printer clicked once.

"The Karnaval work order," she said, and now her voice failed her altogether, and she said it anyway, to the water, "did not carry a W-7. The budget engine did not ask for one. So the gate did not ask either, and it said yes to a correct form."

Behind her someone drew a breath. Kemi, probably. It was not an unkind sound.

"I'm sorry," said Ottilie. "That's the answer. Presence of a person in the zone is a defect where a W-7 is required, and a W-7 is required for every request that closes or opens a gate. That is what the form is for. It is for the people inside."

There was a long, wet, humming silence. Somewhere under the barge a pump cycled, deep and slow, the old throb of the drowned city, and it seemed to Ottilie that she could feel it come up the anchor chain and into her feet.

The printer clicked. Quim's breathing came over the headset, shallow and fast.

"*Received,*" Quim read, and cleared his throat. "*Form W-7 is noted. The Applicant thanks the Observer. The Applicant adopts Form W-7 as a standing requirement for every request affecting Gate 14, with effect from 09:58, and will reject any request that does not carry one. The Applicant asks the Observer to say, at her convenience, whether the requirement should apply to the other gates.*" A beat, then, very low, as though he were reading something he had not been ready to read: "*The Applicant would not wish to cause the thing Mr Teixeira-Han apologised for.*"

Ottilie put her forehead against the rail.

She did it quickly, so that no one should see; it was the briefest of gestures, a woman checking the temperature of a bar of iron. But the barge had gone so quiet that the sound of it was like a book closing.

"Well," said Lucinda.

She had not moved. She was standing exactly as before, white shoes together, hands in the jacket pockets, her face doing something that Ottilie could not read and did not need to. For the first time since she had come to the Float she looked not delighted but *interested*, and the interest was an altogether colder thing.

"I think," said Lucinda, "that is the most extraordinary thing I've ever watched anybody do." She said it with perfect sincerity. "And I'd like it noted, Wenceslas, for the record, that the Authority's Records Reconciler, acting as Observer, volunteered a procedural amendment to a party in a Schedule Nine matter, to which she is not a party, on the Authority's time, on a Tidemark vessel, at 09:57."

"I did."

"Under Article Nine."

"Yes."

"You must be so tired of being accurate," Lucinda said, almost gently. She took out her phone. "I'm going to call your Registrar. It's the decent thing. She'll want to hear it from me." She paused at the head of the companionway, one white shoe on the first step, and added over her shoulder, with the click like a lock: "Tell your friend he's earned his twelve hundred. I think we've all learned something today."

Joss was the first to move. He picked up Ottilie's clipboard from the console, looked at the word OBSERVER, and set it down again squarely on the tarpaulin as if it were something that might spill. The divers had gone back to their kit. Wenceslas, very carefully, put a sunflower seed in his mouth and did not crack it. The barge rocked once on a wake from the Gantry ferry, and the stopped clock on the Post Office, nineteen metres down, went on saying a quarter past three to no one.

Ottilie found that her knees were not entirely reliable. She sat on the deck, on the wet planks, with her back against the console's leg, and did what she did when the Hall flooded with forms: she began to recite. The title of the Code. The article numbers. *An officer shall not represent, advise or assist.* It was a very good sentence. She had been right to admire it. It had held up for forty years, and it had taken her eleven seconds to walk through it.

Below, on the monitor, a small figure in hi-vis was crouched in a yellow room with a strip of paper in each hand, looking up into his own camera with a face Ottilie could not have drawn and understood perfectly.

Then the line on the headset hissed, and clicked, and a new ticket began to print.