The Hall of the Tuzlag Salt Guild had been built to impress people who owed it money.

It stood at the head of the market square, four storeys of white-washed stone with green shutters and a clock tower that was always three minutes fast, so that the guild could say it had never kept anyone waiting. Banners hung from the first floor, a salt rake crossed with a quill. Over the great door, carved in blue-grey marble, was the guild's motto in two languages: WHAT IS WEIGHED IS KEPT.

Sefa had walked under it ten thousand times without reading it. Today she read it twice.

A receptionist in a pressed grey blouse looked up from behind a desk of polished teak, smiled before Sefa had finished saying her name, and said, "Oh yes, Ms Tamarak, she's expecting you. Third floor. Would you like a water? We have still, and we have a kind with a little salt." She said it without irony. Behind her a screen the size of a door showed a looped film of workers in white overalls raking pans at sunset to the sound of a single cello. Under it ran a ticker: *BRINEBANK: YOUR DAY, YOUR VALUE. NOW 12% MORE ON SUNDAYS.*

"What's Brinebank?" said Sefa.

The receptionist's smile did not alter by a millimetre. "It's our community platform. You can download it free."

The lift took its time. Sefa stood in it with the decoy letter in a plastic sleeve under her arm and the real ones strapped flat under her blouse with a roll of surgical tape, which Bunmi had applied with the brisk cruelty of a sailor sealing a hull. She had left her phone on the barge. She had also left Pico, with strict orders and a fistful of the Aunties' leftover fried dough.

The third-floor corridor was carpeted, and silent, and smelled of lavender.

Haldis's office was at the end. The door stood open.

"Sefa, dear," said Haldis. "Come and sit. I've put the kettle on. And do take off that dreadful coat, you'll roast."

It was a large, calm room. A long window looked out over the market, where the sailcloth awnings made a patchwork of red and ochre, and, beyond the roofs, the long white sweep of the Sebkha, shimmering. A rug in blue and cream. A desk with nothing on it but a pen and a framed child's drawing in crayon: a house, a stick-woman with a big yellow smile, a sun with a face. Along one wall stood a glass-fronted cabinet, shoulder-high, lined with perhaps two hundred small stoppered bottles on velvet shelves, each with a little ivory label.

Sefa did not look at the bottles. She took the chair that was pulled out for her and held the plastic sleeve in her lap like an offering.

"You've brought it," said Haldis.

"It was in his hand when Bunmi found him."

"Of course it was." The ringed fingers came out. "May I?"

Sefa handed it across.

It was the strangest sensation she had ever had in her life, to watch a woman read her own forgery. The Brine-Master drew the page from the sleeve and held it up to the window light, and her eyes moved from line to line with perfect composure. She read about Nils. She read about the brother who had worked the pans. She read, near the end, *I have nothing for you*, and Sefa saw her mouth tighten a fraction, the small involuntary flinch of a woman who had been sure and was now not.

"Oh," said Haldis, very softly. "Poor man."

She laid the page down on the desk, squaring it with the edge. She sat for a time in silence. When she looked up again her face had changed. It had become gentler, and more tired, and more human, and Sefa hated it.

"I owe you an apology," Haldis said. "I made a threat at the chapel. I am not proud of it. I was frightened, Sefa. I thought he might have been carrying something that would hurt this town. I see now that he wasn't. He was just a lost man." She touched the vial at her throat. "I'm very sorry."

It worked, Sefa thought. It worked, and she felt a cold slide of triumph and a worse slide of shame, because the apology had also worked, a little, on her.

"That's all right," she said.

"It isn't, but you're kind. Tea?"

She poured it. Sefa did not drink it, and Haldis did not notice, or let it pass. They sat with the steam rising between them, and the clock on the wall ticked three minutes ahead of the rest of the world.

"May I tell you what the guild does?" said Haldis. "Not the salt. Everyone knows the salt. I mean the other thing."

"Brinebank."

"So you saw the screen." She smiled. "It's very simple. You know how hard it is here. Rents rising since the river went. The mines laying off a third of the rakers. Everybody in Tuzlag has a bad day they would pay anything to be rid of. The day their husband left. The day the bailiffs came. The night a child was ill." She spread her hands. "We offer to take it off them. They download the app, they choose a day, they come to the clinic downstairs. A nurse sits with them for twenty minutes. They give a little salt, a pinch, from the tongue. And then it's gone, and we pay their rent."

Sefa heard her own pulse in her ears.

"And that's legal."

"It is consensual, and signed, and entirely safe." Haldis's tone was patient, almost sad. "I know how it sounds. But I've sat across this desk from women who haven't slept in a year, Sefa. I've sat across from a man who couldn't remember his own son's face without screaming. And I've watched them walk out of the clinic lighter than they came in. Can you tell me that's a crime?"

"What happened to Lenny Marsh?"

A very small pause.

"Lenny," said Haldis. "Yes. Brother Ansgar has been talking." She sighed. "Lenny sold us a day, three months ago. His wife Ula died eight years back. He had spent the whole of that time in a house with her coat on the hook, unable to move it. He wanted to sell the day of the funeral. That is all he wanted."

"He doesn't remember her name."

"That," said Haldis, "was not intended. It happens, in rare cases. When a memory is stitched into too many others. The salt takes more than was asked. It is a risk, I admit, that we explain at the clinic." She looked at Sefa with great and perfect sorrow. "We are working to make it better. That is what I would like your help with."

"My help."

"One writ." Haldis leaned forward. "A single paper. Addressed to Captain Vosk. A small thing: that any unclaimed dead found on guild-leased ground be released to the guild for examination within the hour, and that the garrison accept this as a proper instruction from its own command. That is all. We would learn from him how the salt moves in a body. We could save others like Lenny."

"You want me to forge an order to a soldier."

"I want you to do what you do, dear, which is to put the right words where they will be heard." Her voice was beautifully warm. "I would pay what you like. I would pay in anything you like."

"I won't."

"You haven't heard the price."

"I don't need to. There isn't one." Sefa stood up. Her knees felt like wet string. "I'm sorry about Lenny. I'm sorry about whoever's in those bottles. But I won't write it."

Haldis did not move. She sat quietly behind the desk with her ringed hands folded, her mustard scarf bright in the window light, and the child's crayon house at her elbow. She looked at Sefa for a long moment. There was no anger in her face at all.

"I thought you might say that," she said. "That's why I brought something to remind you what you've lost."

She opened the desk drawer.

Sefa had been braced for a gun, a contract, a photograph of Pico. What came out was a small brown bottle, no larger than a thimble, stoppered with wax and labelled in a neat upright hand she knew better than her own.

*MAMA'S LULLABY (3 BARS ONLY). LOST AT 19. FIRST WRIT.*

Her own label. Her own slip of masking tape. The twin of the first twist in the biscuit tin under the bus.

"I have the first," said Haldis gently. "I have had it for seven years. You were nineteen and you came to me because you didn't know what was happening, and I held your hand. I said it would be all right. I took that grain from your arm myself. And you've never asked what became of it."

The room had tilted. Sefa put a hand on the back of the chair.

"There are four others in the cabinet behind you," Haldis said. "There are more in the cellar. I can give you every one. I would give them all, if you would only help me end the thing that is killing you." She drew out the stopper with one nail. A thread of white rose from the neck of the bottle, and she raised her face to it, and closed her eyes, and, very softly, she began to hum.

Three bars.

It was a slow, rocking tune in a minor key, going down and down like a woman climbing a stair in the dark, and then turning, at the last note, into something almost like a question. Sefa had not heard it in seven years. She had not known that she hadn't.

She found that she was crying, and that she did not know how long she had been.