The app said UNDER REVIEW, and it had said it for forty-one days.

Imelda Szabo held her phone out across the counter as if the screen might change its mind if Sefa looked at it hard enough. It was a pink phone with a cracked corner, and the glowing grey circle on it went round and round. Gatepass: Your Application Is Important To Us. Beneath it, a little line of text in the apologetic font that government apps always use. Estimated time: unavailable.

"My mother is in the hospital in Karabel," Imelda said. "It is eleven kilometres. I can see the hospital car park from the top of the sheds. And a machine in a city I have never been to is thinking about it."

"Thinking is generous," said Sefa Tamarak. "I'd say it's gone for a sandwich."

It was ten past five in the morning and the shop was not open. The shutter was down, the sign said BRINE & BYTES: PRINTING, PHONE REPAIR, KEYS CUT, and the only light in the back room came from the photocopier's standby glow and a desk lamp with a bent neck. Sefa had let Imelda in through the yard door because Imelda had knocked three times, the polite knock of someone who has been told no by every other door in Tuzlag and is trying a different tone of voice.

She was twenty-six, with ink under her nails that never fully washed out, and a long sleeve buttoned at the wrist even though the back room was already warm. Her hair was tied up with a bootlace. She looked, as Bunmi liked to say, like a woman who had lost an argument with a bag of flour and was still being gracious about it.

"What does she need you for?" Sefa asked. "Your mother. Be specific. The specific part is the one that works."

"She cannot lift the blanket off her own legs. They are saying it is her heart, and her heart is saying it is her legs. There is a form. The form needs her signature and a sister, and I am the sister. I am the whole of the sister department."

Sefa took a sheet of cheap grey permit stock from the drawer, the kind the customs gate printed on, and laid it on the blotter. She did not need a template. The stock was only a body; the writ lived in the hand.

She took her nib out of its case. It was an old steel thing with a split tip, not special, and she had paid forty coins for a box of twelve in the market under the sailcloth. She dipped it in the little pot of salt-ink she brewed herself on the back burner of the kitchenette, a murky grey that smelled faintly of a clean bathroom.

There were rules, and she kept them the way other people keep a knife drawer organised.

The first rule was that the writ had to be addressed. A name, a reader, a person the paper was for. A permit written to nobody was only a permit.

The second rule was that she had to mean it.

The third rule she did not say aloud, because it was the one she did not like to look at in the dim light of the lamp.

"Who reads this?" she asked.

"The gate. The man at the gate."

"Which man? There are four on the day shift. One of them sleeps with his eyes open and you can't tell which."

Imelda hesitated. "There is one who looks at the paper properly. He is tall. He has a very straight back, and a little glass pen in his top pocket. He once sent a woman away for six minutes because her photo had the wrong kind of smile."

"Teodor Ilves-Nakamura," Sefa said, and wrote it, and felt the nib catch.

That was the part nobody tells you. Ink does not feel like anything. It was a soft sliding drag, as if the paper wanted to take the words from her and could not quite reach, and the letters came out in the quiet hand: a slanted, running script that looked ordinary for exactly as long as you were not meant to read it. She wrote the clause, then the dates, the name of the hospital, Imelda's name and the mother's name, Ilka Szabo, and a line of seven words that did not exist on any form in either kingdom.

The paper took the sense of it. Under her lamp the grey sheet shimmered faintly, as if a draught had crossed it, and then the ink went dull and settled.

Sefa blew on it. She turned it so that Imelda could see.

Imelda leaned over the counter. "It's blank."

"That's right."

"There is nothing on it."

"There's plenty on it. It is just not addressed to you." She slid the sheet into a plastic sleeve and pushed it across. "Hand it to Mr Ilves-Nakamura and say good morning. He'll read a perfectly proper cross-border family visit permit, issued by the district office, valid seventy-two hours. He'll stamp it. Do not tell him it was blank. You'll find, if you try to, that you don't want to."

Imelda held the sleeve like something hot. "What do I owe you?"

"Thirty. For the paper."

"That's all?"

"It's all anyone can afford," Sefa said, which was true, and also not an answer.

She knew the moment it happened. It never failed to arrive, and it never announced itself. There was just a small, clean absence at the back of her mind, like a tooth that had been there all her life and then wasn't. The sort of thing that makes your tongue go looking.

Sefa kept her face still. She watched Imelda count out three ten-coin pieces, one of them with its edge worn almost smooth by someone's thumb. She said, "Mind the wind on the way to the gate. The pans are shifting," and she smiled at the woman and let her out the yard door into the grey half-light.

Then she sat down on the stool, very carefully, and pushed her sleeve back.

The bloom was there, as it always was. A pale mark above the wrist bone, no larger than a thumbprint last winter, now the size of her palm, and spreading up the inside of her forearm in feathery white lines like frost on a window. It did not hurt. That was the cruelest piece of design. It looked like lace, and when she touched it the skin felt very faintly gritty, like something had been spilled and not wiped up.

And there, at the leading edge, a new fleck. Bright, sharp, wet-looking. A single grain of salt, set into her skin.

"Right," said Sefa, to the photocopier. "What was it?"

She took out her phone. She had a note on it called GROCERIES, because nobody ever opens a note called GROCERIES, and she opened it and read down the list she kept there. It wasn't groceries. It was a long column of dated lines, each one beginning with the same two words: Before writing. Today's, entered at ten to five, said: Before writing: Imelda at the yard door. Pink phone. Ribbon tie on her bag. Cold tea in the thermos on the shelf. Wearing blue socks, odd ones. Sun not up. Pico owes me four coins.

She read it twice and then searched her own head for what was missing.

The shelf was there. The thermos. She could have told you what the tea smelled like. Blue socks, yes. Pico owing money, certainly, Pico always owed money.

It took her nearly a minute, and a cold feeling that moved down her back like a bead of water, to find it.

She had known what colour the bus was.

A bus. She had been on it, and it had been one particular colour, and she'd been about nine, and someone had been sitting beside her holding a paper bag of fried dough, and had laughed. She could see the paper bag. She could see an oil stain spreading on one corner of it. She could not see the colour of the bus, or the face of the person holding the bag, or the road.

She had known that this morning. She'd known it last night. And her list, which was supposed to catch her falls, had no idea, because you cannot write down a thing you do not know you are about to lose.

"Thirty-nine," she said quietly, to nobody, and then, to the lamp, "Don't make a face at me."

She made herself do the small things. She fed the nib a clean cloth. She capped the pot. She washed her hands in the yard sink with the bar of gritty yellow soap, and the cold water stung the bloom a little, and she thought, in the cheerful voice she used for lying to herself: it could have been worse, it could have been my name.

Then the yard door banged open hard enough to bounce.

"CHIEF FORGER."

Pico Anwar came in sideways with his hood up, eleven years old and about the size of a stack of folded towels, with a salt-runner's canvas satchel across his chest and a streak of white on his cheek where he'd wiped his face with the wrong hand. He was holding his phone, and as always the phone was much better than his clothes.

"You owe me four coins," said Sefa, before he could speak.

"I owe you three. You counted the one from Tuesday twice and that's fraud, which is a crime in two kingdoms, and I'd know." He skidded to a stop at the counter. His eyes were very wide. "Sefa. Bunmi's been messaging the Pan Aunties group like her thumbs are on fire, and nobody's answering her because it's five in the morning, so she sent me. She says come to the Quay. Now. Not after breakfast. Now."

"Is the barge leaking again?"

"There's a dead man on Barge Nine."

Sefa did not say anything. The photocopier clicked as it cooled.

"Bunmi found him," Pico said, in a rush, and then he looked at the floor, and then at her sleeve, which had slid down over the bloom again, and back up at her face, and she saw him decide to be eleven and not say what he'd seen. "He's not from here. No bag, no phone, nothing. Just a coat. And he's holding a paper. Bunmi says he's holding it so tight she can't get it out of his hand." He swallowed. "She says you'll want to see it. She says it's yours."

"Mine."

"One of yours. She said that. She said it twice, with the capital letters." He held out his phone, thumb pressing the screen. Bunmi's last message sat there in the group chat, below a row of crying faces from Auntie Rosalind about a bad fish delivery: *Tell the girl to come to Barge Nine. Dead man's got her hand on him.*

Sefa read it.

Then she took her own phone, and opened GROCERIES, and scrolled back slowly through every line she had written since she was nineteen. She went looking for a dead man, for a coat, for a paper, for any writ she'd made for any stranger who might have carried it this far.

There was nothing. Not a line.

She had never written to him. She was sure of it. She was as sure as she had been, ten minutes ago, about the colour of a bus.

"Chief Forger?" said Pico, very quietly. "You've gone the voice."

"What voice?"

"The careful one," he said. "The one where you're scared."

"I'm not scared," said Sefa, and picked up her coat, and found, with the small sick certainty of a woman who has now done this thirty-nine times, that she could not remember where she had put her keys, and that this time it was probably only the keys.