“There is a form,” said Ottilie.

Quim looked at the shoes, and then at her. “There’s always a form. I was hoping that was going to be the part where you tell me you don’t do forms.”

“Overpayment Correction, Staff Initiated. Schedule Four.” She had already gone back inside, and he followed, the shoebox in both hands like a man carrying a sleeping animal. “If a member of Authority staff identifies a payment that has been made in error, she may reimburse the fund from her own account, with a statement of cause, and the payment is then treated as properly settled. It has been on the books since the Charter. In nine years, I have seen it used twice. Once for a lunch.”

“Is this a lunch?”

“It is a purchase made by an unidentified party using public money.” She opened the laptop, and spoke without turning. “If I pay it back, the fund is whole. There is no loss. There is no unauthorised spending in the ledger, because I am the person who reconciles the ledger, and on the day I reconcile it, it balances.”

“That’s…” Quim stopped himself. “That’s cheating, a bit.”

“It is not cheating. Cheating is when the numbers are wrong. These will be right.” She typed. “It is, I will admit, a very specific kind of not-cheating.”

He laughed, and then caught himself, and watched her over the shoes. She felt it on the back of her neck: the particular attention of a person who has understood something about you. She filled in *Statement of Cause* and hesitated over the box. The form allowed forty words.

She wrote: *Item purchased in error by automated process; staff member satisfied it was properly delivered; reimbursed in full.*

It was a true sentence, in every part, and she disliked how easy it had been.

“What about the shoes?” said Quim. “They’re hers. I mean the, the thing’s. The Tenant’s. Are they mine? If I take them, am I part of it?”

“They are shoes,” said Ottilie. “Size thirty-three. You said your daughter needs them.”

“I said it to a lamp.”

“And the lamp has been repaid.” She pressed *Submit*, and the form took her thirty-eight credits with a small, satisfied chime. “If you wish to pay me for them, you may. If you wish to give them to Inês, I won’t stop you. But I will not be able to tell you whether it is wise.”

He sat down slowly, holding the box in his lap. He looked at it for a long moment, the grey little shoes with their ridiculous careful tag, and when he spoke, the talkative man had left the room and something quieter had taken his chair.

“My ex-wife says I take things from people because I can’t say no,” said Quim. “Sometimes it’s true. But I think this is different. I think I’d like to give it a chance to be a kindness.” He lifted his eyes. “Is that stupid?”

“I’m not the right person to ask about kindness,” said Ottilie.

“No,” he said, and smiled. “You’re the right person to ask about forms. Which is, frankly, the same job done by someone who’s shy.”

She walked him to the walkway. They did not shake hands. He gave her his number on the back of a Dredge receipt, which was the most analogue thing she had been handed in a year, and told her to ring if the box started talking, and she said it was a shoebox, and he said you never know, and went down the stair with a skip she suspected he did not know he had.

She went inside and read the receipt eleven times without needing to, and then put it in the drawer where she kept the things she was not going to think about.

*

On Sundays she visited her mother.

Folasade Bakare lived on the fourth deck of the Cannery Terraces, in a care home called Harbourlight, which had a conservatory full of dwarf lemon trees and a rota of volunteers who sang. It cost eleven hundred credits a month. Ottilie paid nine hundred of it, and the rest came from a subsidy that she renewed each March with a form that took her four days and made her feel like a beggar with an excellent filing system.

Her mother was sitting by the window in the lemon room, in the blue wrap Ottilie had bought her in the spring, with her hands folded around a cup she was not drinking from. She had been, forty years ago, the head of the mathematics department at the old Tessaly Polytechnic. She had once corrected a visiting professor’s proof, in front of three hundred people, and then offered to buy him lunch. She had lost the lower city in the surge, and her husband in the same week, and had built a second life on the Float from nothing, and she had been, in every way that mattered, the most unforgettable person Ottilie knew.

It had taken two years for the forgetting to start, and it had not been fast, and it had not been kind.

“Good morning, Mama.”

Folasade turned her head and looked at her with courteous interest. “Good morning,” she said. “Are you the new nurse?”

“No, Mama. It’s Ottilie.”

“Ottilie.” She tried it, tasting the syllables. The thin, intelligent eyes, which had always seemed to see the edges of things, stayed on her face. “That is a good name. I had a daughter called Ottilie.”

“Yes.”

“She had a very good memory.” Folasade smiled, privately, as if sharing a joke with someone just behind Ottilie’s shoulder. “I used to tell her, it is a terrible thing, to be given everything. You must be careful what you do with it.”

“You did,” said Ottilie. “You told me that.”

She sat. She took her mother’s hand. The skin was cool and dry and light as paper, and under it the bones moved like small birds. This was the thing she could not explain to anyone, not to Ansel, not to the doctor with the kind voice and the careful pamphlets. She had read, in the course of her work, a hundred thousand documents. She could have recited the 2019 firmware patch notes to you in order. And she could not remember what her mother’s voice had sounded like when it knew her name, because voices were not text, and no one had ever written it down.

So she had begun writing it down. Not to keep: to hold. She brought a notebook each Sunday and wrote, in a plain hand, whatever her mother said that was true and lovely and entirely unlikely to survive the week. *Mama, 4 April: “The sea is only the sky, resting.”* She would reread it and her head would supply the page, the font, the pen. It was a poor kind of memory. It was the only kind she had for people.

“I had a husband,” said Folasade, after a while. “A very tall man.”

“Yes.”

“He wrote things down. It was irritating.” Her mother frowned at the window. “There was a request, I think. About a lamp.”

Ottilie’s hand went still.

“A lamp, Mama?”

“In a stairwell.” The frown deepened, the old, interested frown of a woman three-quarters of the way to an answer. “Someone was asking if it was allowed. It was a very polite person. I said yes.” She laughed, startled at herself, and looked at Ottilie as if for confirmation. “Is that right? Did I say yes?”

“I don’t know, Mama,” said Ottilie, and it took everything she had to keep her voice level. “When was this?”

But the thread was gone. Her mother’s face smoothed over, the way a pond does, and she patted Ottilie’s knuckles and said, “You’re very kind, dear. Are you staying for lunch? They have the pudding with the lemons.”

On the way out she stopped at the nurses’ station, where a night-shift nurse named Bukola was finishing her handover with the haunted brightness of a person on her fourteenth hour. Bukola was one of the few staff whose face Ottilie had learned, by the simple method of memorising the wrinkle of her left sleeve. “She was good this week,” said Bukola. “She did the crossword. Well. She did the numbers in it. She won’t do the words.”

“Did she say anything about a lamp?”

“A lamp?” Bukola checked the log with a tired thumb. “No, love. She told Dr. Amadi he was a very persistent young man, and then she asked him if he’d been to the sea. Why?”

“It’s nothing,” said Ottilie, which was the sentence she had been using most that week, and which had not yet once been true.

She stayed for lunch. She ate the pudding. It was thick, sweet and faintly sour, and her mother ate hers with great concentration, scraping the dish clean, and at the end of it looked up and said, with total clarity, “You have my husband’s forehead. It will give you headaches.” Then she asked again whether Ottilie was the new nurse. On her way down through the Terraces afterwards, past the algae gardens with their green lights and the rope-bridges slung from deck to deck, she turned it over in her head, again and again, and found no handle on it. A woman with dementia says something about a lamp. It meant nothing. It was the kind of thing that people say. Lamps are common. Stairwells are common.

She had almost convinced herself, when her left ear pinged, and a voice said, “Ottilie, you have a priority message through the Authority network,” and for the first time in a year Ansel did not sound as though he was selling anything.

“Read it.”

“From the Office of Standing Order. Signed by Warden S. Ncube-Aalto.” A pause, a delicate one. “It reads: *Dear Ms. Bakare. I hope your Sunday is restful. I wonder whether you might spare a quarter of an hour tomorrow, at nine, for tea. It concerns an overpayment correction you submitted this morning. With every courtesy, S.N-A.*”

The rope-bridge swayed gently under her feet. Far below, lit from beneath in the pale green of TideNet, the drowned city went about its silent business.

“Ottilie,” said Ansel, very softly. “Would you like me to find you a lawyer? I’m not sure I’m allowed to say that. But I would like to.