Hostel 2 was a cold store with ideas above its station.

It stood in the lane behind the Hall, joined to it by a covered walkway of ribbed plastic that sweated in the heat, and until three years ago it had held crates of fish. Now the loading bay had been painted a cheerful yellow and fitted with automatic doors. A banner over them read, in friendly lower-case, *home is where the bed is.* Beneath the banner was a laminated QR code. Beside the QR code was a laminated cartoon of a child asleep on a cloud.

Bunmi looked at the cartoon the way a ship's captain looks at a reef.

"I want it known," she said, "that I have walked past this place for three years and thought it was kind."

"It is kind," said Sefa. "That's the trouble with it."

They went in through the yellow doors. A cool air-conditioned hush closed round them. The lobby had been done in pale wood and soft grey felt and plants with very clean leaves, and behind a curved desk a young man in a polo shirt with the blue drop on his breast looked up and arranged his face.

"Hi there! Welcome to Hostel Two! Are you checking in or checking on?"

"On," said Bunmi. "A boy. Eleven. About so high. Looks like a stack of towels with opinions."

The young man's smile held. "Oh, you'll mean Pico! He's settling in. He's been so lovely. Are you family?"

"I'm the closest thing he's got to a hurricane," said Bunmi.

"We have a visiting hour policy, I'm afraid, so if you could just download the app—"

Sefa had already walked past him.

It was not brave. It was rather the opposite. She had learned a long time ago that the way to get through any door in Tuzlag was to look as though you had been told to. She went along a corridor lined with framed motivational posters, past a common room where six or seven children were watching a cartoon with the sound off, past a laundry from which came the warm sweet smell of clean sheets, and a girl of nine or ten sitting alone on the bottom step of a staircase with her knees together and her hands in her lap. The girl looked up as Sefa passed. She had a round, careful, pleasant face, and the stillness of a child who has been told to wait and is very good at it.

"You've got sparkles too," she said.

Sefa's sleeve had ridden up an inch. She tugged it down. "Have I?"

"I got mine on Tuesday." The girl turned over her wrist, and there, pale on the brown skin, was a single crystal of white, bright as a sequin. "They said it means I'm brave. I don't remember being brave. I don't remember a lot of Tuesday." She considered this without alarm. "I think it was a good swap, though. I get to stay here."

Sefa could not find a word. She nodded, and went on, and felt the child's mild eyes between her shoulder blades all the way to the end of the corridor, where, past a long wall of tall grey steel lockers. Each locker had a little screen set into its door, glowing blue. Most of them said LOCKED.

The one at the end, number fourteen, said, in friendly white letters: *HI PICO! SET YOUR CODE.*

She stopped.

She heard Bunmi coming up behind her, and the receptionist, a little way back, saying "Excuse me, ma'am, excuse me," in a voice that hadn't yet decided whether to be alarmed. She did not turn. She put her hand on the locker door. It was cool and faintly humming.

"He wouldn't," said Bunmi.

"He said somewhere the bus didn't know."

"In a locker. In the guild's building. In a locker that has his name on it and a camera over it."

"Where nobody would think to look," said Sefa, and put her forehead against the metal for a moment, and laughed, once, helplessly. "Oh, Pico. You glorious idiot."

There was a camera. It sat in the ceiling above the lockers, a smooth white dome, and its small red light was on.

"Chief Forger?"

He was standing in the doorway of the laundry, with a stack of folded sheets in his arms that came up to his chin. His hood was down. His hair had been combed, which was somehow the most frightening thing about him. He had a lanyard around his neck with a plastic card on it, and the card had his name and his photograph and a barcode. He looked, for the first time in his life, like a child who belonged to somebody.

"You said three," Sefa said.

"It's not three."

"It's twenty to two. Why have you got a lanyard?"

"It's for the door. Everybody has one." He put the sheets down on the floor, very carefully, in a neat stack. "They gave me a plate. There was a woman, Chief Forger, she was so nice, she had a van and she said it was just for a look. She said I could leave any time and I believed her because I can tell when people lie. I'm a professional." He stopped. His chin trembled. "I couldn't hide it in the bus because everyone knows the bus. I couldn't put it in the weigh-tower because the roof leaks. So I put it here. It's the safest place in Tuzlag, because it's the last place you'd look. That's a rule of strategy."

"Whose rule?"

"Mine," he said, and burst into tears.

Bunmi crossed the corridor in two strides and picked him up under the arms, all of him, lanyard and wet cheeks and kicking sneakers, and held him against the front of her boiler suit. "Oh, my lamb," she said, in the voice that frightened armies, and it was a terrible and tender thing to hear. "My foolish, wicked lamb."

He wept into her collar. After a moment he said, muffled, "I haven't done anything. I haven't signed. They had a tablet. They said I'd get two hundred coins just for trying it, for a bad day, just a small one, and I said no, and she said that's fine, no pressure, and then she went away. And then they called for me over the speaker, and I thought, I'll just go and say no again to a person's face."

"Called you where?" said Sefa.

A chime sounded, a pleasant two-note chime, from the speaker above the lockers. A warm recorded voice spoke.

*Pico Anwar, please come to Clinic Room Three. Pico Anwar, please come to Clinic Room Three. Your appointment is ready.*

They stood in the corridor and looked at one another.

"I didn't make an appointment," said Pico.

"No," said Sefa. "You didn't."

The receptionist had caught up. He stood at the end of the corridor with his hands clasped, breathing quickly, and a second figure behind him: a tall man of about fifty in a grey suit with the blue drop on the lapel, an easy, silvery, handsome face and a lanyard that said MANAGER, and under it, GERRIT SALO.

"Good afternoon," he said, in a mellow voice like a good radio presenter. "I do apologise. Is there a difficulty?"

"There is no difficulty," Bunmi said. "We're leaving."

"Of course. Of course you are." He smiled. It was a dazzling, reasonable smile. "May I only say that the boy is a resident, under the guild's care, and I'm sure we would all prefer to follow the correct procedure. There is a handover form."

"He is not a resident. He's an eleven-year-old and I'm his guardian."

"Are you?" said Gerrit Salo, with gentle interest. "Because the records say that Pico Anwar is a ward of nobody. The records say that his mother died and his father is unknown and there is a note in the municipal file that the nearest relative is a Ms Sefa Tamarak of Quay Road, who, as of this morning, is the subject of an inquiry by the garrison." He spread his hands. "I only want to do right by him."

There was a silence in which Sefa could hear the cartoon in the common room, mouths opening and closing without sound.

She stepped to the locker. Her hand found the little screen.

"Code?" she said, to Pico, quite softly.

"I haven't set one."

"Then it's open."

She pulled. The door swung out on its soft hinge. Inside, on the single steel shelf, between a pair of folded pyjamas and a small plush giraffe that someone had put there to welcome him, sat the biscuit tin with the rosy child on the lid.

She took it out. She held it against her chest. It weighed what it had weighed before.

"Thank you for looking after it," she said to Gerrit Salo.

"Not at all. It's what we're here for." He did not look at the tin. He looked, with every sign of warm concern, at her face. "And do give my best to the Brine-Master. She did say you'd be along."

Bunmi was already walking, with Pico on her hip, and Sefa went after her, through the lobby, past the plants and the felt and the young man in the polo shirt, and out through the yellow doors into the heat. The light was a physical blow. She did not stop until they were halfway down the lane, in the shade of a rusted gantry, where the walkway of sweating plastic lay across the sky like a vein.

Then she knelt, put the tin on the dust, and lifted the lid.

The twists lay in their slots, white, round, sealed with red. She counted them with a finger, as she had counted her writs. One. Two. Three. Four, five, six.

Seven. Eight.

The ninth slot was empty.

There was a smear of blue wax on the cardboard and nothing else. The blue twist, the double-sealed one, the one that said DO NOT BREATHE THIS ALONE, was gone.

In the empty space, in its place, lay a tiny rectangle of ivory card, no larger than a bottle label. On it, in a neat upright hand she had last seen on a ledger in the Hall, Haldis had written three words.

*Thank you, dear.*