"Take it," said Haldis.

The tune had stopped. Sefa did not know when. She stood in the middle of the blue and cream rug with her hand pressed hard against her mouth, as if she could hold the last note in, and the Brine-Master was around the desk now, standing close but not touching, with the bottle held out on her flat palm like a bird she had caught.

"I won't write it," said Sefa. Her voice came out cracked and small.

"I know. I'm not asking you to. It isn't a trade." Haldis's face was full of a sorrow so complete that for a moment Sefa could not look at it. "It is yours. I have kept it safe, that is all. I have kept them all safe, in case you ever wanted them. If I had meant to buy you, my dear, I would have held it back and made you say please."

"That's what you're doing now."

"Is it?" Haldis gave a tired little smile. "Then I'm worse at it than I thought. Take it, Sefa. Breathe it with someone you trust, and not alone, or you'll feel like the floor has gone. And then, when you are ready to talk, come back. Or don't. The offer will keep."

Sefa should have refused. She knew it with the part of her that had read *do not trust the Brine-Master when she is kind to you* a dozen times that morning. She knew it with the knuckles of her left hand, which were white. She looked at the little brown bottle, at the wax, at her own capitals on the strip of masking tape, and she thought about three bars of music she had not been able to hum for seven years.

She took it.

It was warm from the woman's hand. It weighed almost nothing.

"How did you get it?" she said. "How, Haldis? I had no idea what was happening to me at nineteen. I had no idea what I was. I didn't walk into your Hall and ask you for help. I'd have remembered."

"You wouldn't." Very gently. "That is rather the point of the thing."

"Who told you what I was?"

"Your mother," said Haldis.

Sefa went cold from the scalp down.

"We were girls on the pans together," the Brine-Master said. "She was a year younger. She had the loveliest handwriting I ever saw." The ringed fingers moved to the vial at her throat. "Go home, Sefa. Eat something. We'll talk when you've slept."

She did not remember the lift. She remembered the receptionist saying, "Have a lovely afternoon, Ms Tamarak," and the two glass doors sliding apart, and then the sun hitting her face like a slap, and the whole noise of the market square, with its car horns, its radio music, its cries of tomatoes, its smell of frying onion and hot stone, coming at her at once.

She went down the great steps with the bottle in her fist and sat on the bottom one, abruptly, with her back to the wall.

"Miss Tamarak."

He was standing on the pavement three metres off, very upright, with a paper bag in one hand and the tablet in the other. His jacket was buttoned to the throat. He had the look of a man who had planned a speech on the way here and found it, somewhere on the steps, gone.

"Teodor," she said.

"I'm on my lunch." He lifted the bag, as though to prove it. "Thirty minutes. It's the first I've taken since March. I thought, if I'm going to have one, I ought to have it somewhere I might be useful."

"That's a terrible reason to have lunch."

"It is the only reason I could think of that I could say without difficulty." He glanced at the doors behind her, at the green shutters, at the marble motto. "You have been crying."

"I haven't."

"You have." There was no accusation in it at all. He said it the way you tell somebody they have a leaf in their hair. "I won't ask why. I have no right. But I would like to sit down, if you don't mind, and I would like you not to make me stand there looking at you."

He sat on the step beside her, about a hand's width off, knees together, bag on his lap. He took out a sandwich wrapped in baking paper and, after a moment's thought, broke it exactly in half and held out one piece.

"It's cheese," he said. "I was told it was cheese. I cannot swear."

Sefa laughed. It came out as a hiccup, wet and cracked and entirely undignified, and it hurt, and it was the best thing she had felt all morning. She took the half sandwich. It was cheese. There was also a faint, distinct note of damp cardboard.

"Thank you," she said.

"You're welcome. As far as I can say."

They ate for a moment in silence. In the square a boy on a scooter was weaving through the stalls, a delivery bag on his back with the Brinebank logo on it, a stylised blue drop.

"I have to tell you a thing," said Teodor, "and I would like to say it very fast."

"Oh no."

"At ten o'clock Captain Vosk called me to her office." He stared straight ahead. "She does not do it often. I was in the middle of a transit queue. She had a cup of coffee and a map of the Quay and no expression. She said, 'Ilves-Nakamura, you were at the Bone Quay at dawn. Have you any information about the deceased?'"

Sefa put down her sandwich.

"It is a direct question," Teodor said. His voice was very steady, and his hands, where they lay on his knees, were not. "I said yes. I could not say no. I tried. I want you to know that I tried. I stood there with my mouth open for what I believe was eleven seconds, and my throat closed, and she watched me. She said, 'You can't, can you.' And I said, 'No, ma'am.'"

"What did you tell her?"

"Only what she asked. Only that I had information." He swallowed. "She did not ask what it was. She said that she would send for you at two. And that I was to say nothing further until then, which I agreed to, because it is the one thing I am very, very good at." The corner of his mouth moved, briefly, in a terrible little smile. "So it is not six o'clock. I am sorry. I have spent the whole morning being proud of my loophole and she walked straight through it in a single question."

"It wasn't a loophole," said Sefa. "It was a kindness."

"It was a delay."

"It's what I'd call it, if I were saying it to you. I wouldn't use the other word."

He turned his head. His dark eyes found hers, and held, and she saw the exhaustion in them, and something else underneath: a tight, careful, enormous fear, not of Vosk, not of the garrison, but of her opinion.

"You are not angry," he said.

"I'm furious. I'm furious about nine different things, and you are not one of them." She wiped her face with the heel of her hand. The bottle in her fist knocked against her knee. "Teodor. If I give you something, will you promise to hold it, and not ask me what it is?"

"I can't promise that."

"I know."

"I can promise to hold it, and to ask you only once."

"That's the best offer I've had today." She put the little brown bottle in his palm, and folded his fingers over it. His hand was warm. "Keep it in a pocket with a button. If they search me, I'd rather they didn't find it."

He looked at the bottle. He read the label. His lips moved over it silently, once, and she saw him understand that it was her handwriting, and that the thing was personal, and that she had not told him. He put it in his breast pocket, behind the glass pen, and fastened the button.

"What is it?" he asked.

"That's your once."

"Ah." He considered. "Then I will keep it for another day."

There was a sound behind them: the long low growl of a diesel engine, rolling across the cobbles. A heavy olive-green utility vehicle with an Orlei crest on the door came into the square, parting the market like a ship through weed. It stopped in front of the Hall steps. The passenger window slid down.

The woman who leaned out was forty-four years old, narrow-faced and sunburned, in a field jacket with the sleeves rolled to the elbow. Her hair was cropped to a grey-brown stubble. She had a cigarette, unlit, between two fingers, and the fixed, patient, heavy-lidded look of someone who had been up all night and intended to be up all the next.

"Ms Tamarak," said Captain Anahit Vosk. "You're early for two. I do like that in a person."

Teodor stood up so fast that the paper bag fell off his lap.

"Ilves-Nakamura. Back to your counter." She did not look at him. "I won't need you till six. Ms Tamarak, get in."

There was a good deal of the market square watching. A stallholder with a net of lemons had stopped breathing. A pair of schoolgirls on the kerb were filming on their phones.

Sefa got up. Her legs held. She thought of the two folded notes taped flat against her skin. She thought, absurdly, of the second half of her sandwich, still on the step.

She climbed into the vehicle, and the door shut with a sound like a vault.