The chapel was cooler than the street by fifteen degrees, and quieter than a chapel had any right to be.

They came in through the side door, Bunmi first with her hand flat on the boy's back, Sefa behind with the tin, and found Ansgar on his knees in the nave scrubbing the flagstones with a nailbrush and a bucket of soapy water. He looked up. He had a smear of grey across his round spectacles. He said, "Oh, thank goodness," and then, "Oh dear, what's happened to your faces," and then, because he was a man who had been frightened since breakfast and had run out of other things to say, "Would anyone like a biscuit?"

"We have had enough of biscuits," said Bunmi. "Is the body safe?"

"In the vestry. I've checked. Seven times. I've been checking since you left. I also put a chair against the door, though I'm not sure that counts."

Pico had gone quiet. He stood by the font with his hands behind his back and his chin tucked down, and studied the toes of his sandals with deep and elaborate attention. Nobody had shouted at him. That, Sefa thought, was probably the worst of it.

She put the tin on the altar rail. She did not open it.

"Pico," she said.

He flinched.

"Come here."

He came, one slow step at a time, as to an execution. She crouched until their eyes were level, and he screwed up his face and waited for it, and instead she put her arms round him and held on. It was a clumsy hug, all elbow and sleeve, and he went rigid for three heartbeats and then came apart.

"I'm sorry," he said into her shoulder. "I'm so sorry, I'm so sorry, that's six now, that's six sorrys, I've lost count."

"Seven," said Sefa. "But I'll allow it."

"Is the blue one really gone?"

"It's really gone."

"Was it important?"

"I don't know," she said, truthfully. "I think it was the one that mattered most, and I never got to read the label properly. I think that is going to be a theme."

The side door opened.

She did not have to look. She knew the footfall by now, the neat precise tread of a man who put each heel down with an apology. Teodor Ilves-Nakamura came into the nave with his jacket buttoned to the throat, his tablet under one arm, and a sheen of sweat on his forehead that suggested he had run part of the way and was ashamed of it.

"Good afternoon," he said. "As far as I can say. I am here under Annex six. The body is my responsibility, and I'm entitled to inspect it at any hour. I have told my supervisor that I will be inspecting it for approximately forty minutes. This is the longest inspection in the history of the customs service." He looked round the little group, at the red eyes and the dust and the tin. "I understand something has happened."

It took Sefa the better part of ten minutes to tell it. She did it in order, plainly, without a single joke. The lift, the bottles, Haldis and the humming; the photograph and the girl with the bracelet; the hostel, the locker, the card. Bunmi added the dawn on Barge Nine, in a voice like gravel, and Teodor listened with both hands clasped behind his back and his eyes on the floor, and when it was finished he said nothing for some time.

"Her real name," he said at last, "is on the lease."

"What lease?"

"The guild's lease on the Bone Quay. It is a thirty-year agreement, signed with the Orlei crown the year the river was diverted upstream. I read it once, for fun. The guild's lessor is recorded as Haldis Orrefors-Kumalo, and the witness who countersigned it was a woman named Anwen Tamarak." He raised his eyes. "Your mother was a witness, Miss Tamarak. Twenty years ago. A year before she died. It is the only document in the registry that carries her name."

Nobody spoke.

"It's your once, I'm afraid," Teodor said, looking at Sefa. "I should like to ask now. What is in the bottle I'm carrying?"

She held out her hand. He unbuttoned his breast pocket, and took out the thimble of brown glass, and laid it in her palm with the same grave courtesy with which he had laid it there.

"The first," said Sefa. "My first writ. A song."

Ansgar had brought the enamel cup without being asked. He ran the tap in the vestry until it steamed and carried it out in both hands, like a sacrament, and set it on the altar rail. They stood in a half-circle. Bunmi, solid and grey. Pico on one side, his hand tucked into the back of her belt. Ansgar behind, breathing like a kettle. And Teodor at her elbow, so close that she could feel the heat from his sleeve, his hand hovering a few inches from her back, not touching, ready.

"If you are gone more than ten seconds," he said, very low, "I shall say your name."

"And if it doesn't work?"

"Then I shall say it louder. It is the one technique at my disposal."

She broke the wax. The stopper came out with a sound like a tiny kiss. She shook the grain into the cup, and the water took it, and it turned, and unfurled, and a pale thread of steam rose up and curled in the air between them.

Sefa leaned in, and breathed.

She was in a kitchen.

It was a small kitchen, yellow, with a window over a sink and a bowl of lemons on the sill. She knew it with her whole body. She knew the floor, tiled in a pattern of blue and white that she could trace with her eyes shut, and the chair she was sitting on, which was too tall, so that her feet swung. She was four years old. She had a crust of bread in one fist.

At the table sat her mother.

She was a tall, narrow woman in a headscarf, with her sleeves rolled to the elbow and a pen between her fingers, and she was writing. The nib scratched. Her handwriting was beautiful: long, running, with a kind of tilt in it, as if the words were leaning into a wind. She was writing a list. *Eggs. Soap. Lamp oil. Ask Bunmi about the boat.* And as she wrote, she was singing under her breath.

Sefa had never forgotten the tune. That was the grief of it. She had forgotten that she had.

It went down and down, a slow rocking tune in a minor key, and turned at the third bar into something like a question. Her mother sang it without looking up, in a low husky voice that was slightly flat on the high note. The words were nonsense, or almost. *Salt on the sill and salt on the sea. Who'll keep the light on for you and for me.*

"Mama," said four-year-old Sefa, "what's the end?"

"There isn't one, rabbit." Anwen looked up. Her eyes were amber, with fine lines at the corners, and tired in a way Sefa had been too small to see. "It's only got a beginning, and a turn, and a place where you stop."

"What's the turn for?"

Her mother put down the pen. She came around the table, and lifted her onto her hip, and carried her to the window where the light came in through the lemons.

"The third bar is for when you're lost," she said. "Do you understand? If you're ever so lost you can't find your way, you sing the third bar and you stand very still, and you wait. Somebody will hear it. Somebody always does." She kissed her hair. "It's a promise. I made it up myself. I put it into everything I write."

The window brightened. The kitchen began to tilt.

"Sefa," said a voice from a long way off.

She was standing at the altar rail with her hand wrapped around the edge of the wood so tightly that her fingers had gone white. Teodor's hand was on her arm. He had not said her name louder. He had said it exactly once, at exactly the right volume, and she had come.

"Eleven seconds," he said. "I apologise for the extra one."

She laughed. It cracked in the middle. Bunmi had pulled out a handkerchief and was holding it out without looking at her, and Pico was patting her sleeve in small useless circles, and Ansgar was weeping quietly into his own cuff. She took the handkerchief. She pressed it to her face.

"She said," Sefa began, and had to stop. "She said the third bar is for when you're lost."

"Oh, lamb," said Bunmi.

Above them, high in the dome, something deep and heavy stirred.

It was the Orlei bell. It rang out over the town from its stone tower, a great round bronze note that rolled across the market and down the Quay and out onto the white pan, and then another, higher, and then a third, lower than the first, a slow descending phrase that turned, at its last note, into something that was almost a question.

Three bars.

Sefa lifted her head.

She had heard that chime every hour of every day since she was born. She had heard it at school, in the shop, in bed. It marked the shifts and the tides and the changing of the guard. She had never once, in all her life, thought of it as anything but the sound of the time.

"That's the hour chime," she said.

"The Treaty Chime," said Teodor. His face had gone strange. "It was installed twenty years ago, with the new mechanism. I know the whole of its history. I wrote a paper on it at university." He swallowed. "The composer is unrecorded. It is the only blank in the file. It has bothered me for nine years."