"You can't give her the real one," said Bunmi.

"I know."

"And you can't go without anything. She'll smell it on you."

"I know that, too."

"Then there is only one other thing a woman with your trade can do," said Bunmi, "and I'd rather you took up knitting."

It was twenty past nine. The plantain had been eaten, mostly by Pico, who had returned from Barge Two with a paper crown made by the Dunmore children and an expression of such bland innocence that Bunmi had given him a second plate to keep him from asking questions. He sat now at the far end of the table, swinging his legs and drawing something that might have been a bus. The radio had moved on to cricket.

Sefa had the two letters laid out in front of her, side by side, and the biscuit tin shut at her elbow. She did not touch the blue twist. She had put it back in its slot between the eighth and the empty gap of its brothers and turned the lid so the child with the apples faced the wall.

The plan was not complicated. That was the worst of it. She would write a letter, a new one, on grey customs stock, addressed to Haldis Orrefors-Kumalo, in a style Haldis could not fail to take for the original. Whatever the Brine-Master read on it, she would believe was what Ruben Achterberg had carried in his dead hand. And what she read would be harmless. A stranger's note to his brother. A story as dull as a damp towel.

"If it works," said Sefa, "she'll go away believing she has it. She'll stop looking. At least until she checks."

"And when she checks?"

"Then she'll find it says what I wrote. Which is exactly what she saw." She turned the nib in her fingers. "A writ doesn't change. That's the point of it."

"And what does it cost?"

Sefa looked at her.

"A memory," said Bunmi. "Don't make that face. I know the rule. What does it cost, this time? You don't know. I don't know. Nobody on this earth can tell you. Do you want to go in there bargaining with a woman who has all her teeth, and stay the same as you were?" Her voice rose. "You'll go in there with a hole in you, and she'll find the edge of it."

"I'll go in there with a letter."

"You will go in as you are, and say you've lost it, and take whatever she throws."

"She'll tell Vosk I stole evidence."

"Let her."

"They'll arrest me, Bunmi. They'll take me to the garrison and put me in a room with no window and ask me what I do, and I'll have to tell them or lie, and I can't lie as well as you think. And Ruben's letter says not to give him to the garrison." Her hands were steady; it was her voice that shook. "He's dead. But the letter says not to. I don't know why. I don't know what's under it. All I know is that I wrote it, to myself, with every tool I had, and I'd have to be a worse fool than I am to ignore it."

The old woman said nothing. The fire popped in the stove. Pico had stopped drawing.

"Do it, then," said Bunmi, at last, very quietly. "But write the list first."

Sefa had already taken out her phone. It was off the grid, in flight mode, and she opened the note called GROCERIES with a thumb that felt almost cheerful. The habit of it was a comfort. She typed, slowly and carefully, the way she always did, in short lines, a list of the plain things in the room.

*Before writing: Bunmi's barge, green light. Plantain, cold. Radio: cricket. Pico has a paper crown, red and gold. Bunmi's boiler suit, blue, a hole in the left knee. Teodor said 'at six, then'. Haldis wore a mustard scarf. Mama's name was Anwen. Bunmi swore on the keel of the Marigold. The bus is number 9.*

She looked at it for a while. It was an ugly, pitiful, brave little list. Then she put the phone face down on the table.

"Right," she said. "Everybody out of my light."

Pico didn't move.

"I want to watch," he said.

"No."

"I've never seen it. You never let me. Everyone says it's the best thing in Tuzlag and I've never once—"

"Pico."

"I could hold the lamp."

"You could hold the door," said Bunmi, standing, "from the outside, with me, and find out whether the Dunmore kids' goat is still on the roof of Barge Two. Come, lamb." She put a hand on his shoulder. He went, with a martyred look.

After they had gone, the barge was very quiet. Outside, a gull was working at something on the roof, a patient tick-tick-tick of beak on iron, and the stove ticked back at it. Sefa realised she was waiting for someone to stop her. Nobody was going to. That was what it meant to be the only one who could.

She thought, for no reason, of Teodor's careful hands, offering her the palm with its single bright grain, and put the thought away. There was no room for it on the table.

Sefa sat with the sheet of grey stock in front of her. She did not hurry. She uncapped the pot, and the smell came up, the clean bleach smell of salt-ink. She wet the split nib, and held it above the paper.

She wrote the name first. It was the name of a reader she knew, a name she could say in her sleep.

*To the Brine-Master Haldis Orrefors-Kumalo, at the Hall of the Tuzlag Salt Guild.*

The nib caught. The paper wanted the words. They poured out of her in the quiet hand: the long slanted s, the looping t, and on every line a faint dragging resistance as the world sorted what was true from what she meant. She wrote that her name was Ruben, which was true. She wrote that she had come to find a brother who had worked the pans, which was not. She wrote of a long road and a bad winter and a debt to a man called Nils who had gone away. She wrote about the cold. She wrote, for the last line, in a dry plain hand that the Brine-Master would trust: *I have nothing for you. I have never carried anything. I am sorry for the trouble.*

Then she signed it with a fish.

It was not meant to be a fish. It was meant to be a small plain signature. But the nib was already moving by habit, and the lopsided little tail was done before she noticed.

"Oh," said Sefa, softly. "Bother."

The paper shimmered. The ink drew in, as if the sheet were taking a breath, and the shine went out. She held the page to the lamp, and it was a blank grey rectangle, as clean and empty as the surface of the Sebkha at noon.

Then she waited for the loss.

It did not come at once. That was always the cruelty. It lingered at the door, politely, like a debt collector in a good coat. She sat with her hands in her lap, and counted her breath, and listened to the cricket, and felt nothing at all, until Bunmi came back in with a clatter of boots and a basket of eggs and said, in her ordinary rasping voice:

"Done?"

"Done."

"Did it take?"

"It took." She held it up. "I feel fine."

"You look it." Bunmi set the basket on the table and went to the stove. "Are you eating those eggs, or will I be standing here all day?" And then, as she lit the burner, she said, without looking round, in the tone of an old woman making conversation to fill a silence, "I was thinking, out there. About that water. You remember the flood the first spring, when you were eight? And the channel filled, and I put you in the shallows with a rope round your middle, and you wouldn't let go of the side for love nor money. You screamed the whole bank down. And then you stopped screaming, and you just floated. You looked up at me and you said—"

She stopped.

It was a very small stop. It was the sort of stop a person makes when a stair that has always been there is not.

"I said what?" said Sefa, pleasantly.

There was no sound in the barge but the radio and the tick of the hot ring. Bunmi did not turn round. Her broad blue back was perfectly still. Her hand, on the knob of the stove, was white at the knuckle.

"What do you remember?" she said.

"About what?"

"About the channel, lamb."

Sefa opened her mouth to say *the channel, yes, of course*, and found that she was reaching for a stair.

There was a river. She knew there had been a river. She knew that it dried when she was fifteen. She knew that she had swum, at some point, because she could do it. But there was no flood. There was no rope. There was no sky above a face with its cap pushed back, no cold green water holding her up, and no sentence at the end of it that she had said and been forgiven for.

She sat quite still.

"Oh," she said.

Bunmi turned. She looked at her. The look went on for a very long time. And then the old woman, who had sworn on the keel and had never broken it, took the egg she was holding and put it back, with great care, in the basket.

"It was nothing," said Bunmi. "It was just a thing. It was an old story. Eat your eggs."