The Bone Quay had never been a quay for anything but bones.

It lay at the southern end of Tuzlag where the old river channel used to come in, and for three hundred years brine barges had tied up there and unloaded white loaf-salt into the sheds. Then the river dried, eleven years ago, over a single dry summer, and the barges did not go anywhere. They simply stopped, where they were, in a long curved row on the cracked grey bed, propped on cradles of salvaged railway sleepers. Wide, flat-bottomed, grey-planked. Some of them were homes now. Some were stores. Two were churches, if you were generous about the definition.

Bunmi Adeyemi-Roth lived on the fourth one in, and kept the key to the rest.

She was standing at the foot of the Barge Nine ladder when Sefa and Pico came across the pan, and she did not wave. She was seventy-one, built like a fire hydrant, with a white cap of cropped hair and a blue boiler suit that she had been wearing in one form or another since before Sefa was born. In her left hand she held a mug of tea. In her right hand she held her phone, screen out, as though it were a lantern.

"You're late," said Bunmi.

"It's twenty-five past five."

"Then you are exactly as late as I said you were." She looked at Sefa. It took about a second. It was the look she gave a hull that might or might not be sound. "You've written this morning."

"A little thing. Permit."

"What did it cost?"

"Nothing I'll miss." The lie slid out as easily as breath. "Where is he?"

Bunmi's mouth thinned, but she let it go, which was always worse than an argument. "Lamb," she said to Pico, in her sweetest voice, which was the one that would have frightened an army, "you are going to stand here, and hold my tea, and if anyone comes down the quay you are going to tell them it's a private fishing party."

"There are no fish."

"Then it will be a very short party."

Pico took the tea. He took it like a man being handed a crown.

They went up the ladder.

Barge Nine had been a salt carrier once, and still smelled of it. The hold was open to the sky, the long cargo well dry and pale, the boards bleached by years of white wind. At the far end, beneath the stump of the mast, someone had spread out a tarp. Under the tarp was a long shape.

Bunmi turned back the corner.

He was a man of perhaps forty, thin, brown-skinned, with grey beginning at the temples and a wedding ring worn on a chain around his neck instead of on his hand. He wore a long coat the colour of tobacco, over a shirt that had been good once, and walking boots with the soles split along the left toe. He lay on his back with his eyes shut and his face turned slightly towards the sun. He did not look peaceful, exactly. He looked finished. The way a glass of water looks when someone has drunk it.

"Any marks?" Sefa said.

"None. I looked. I turned his pockets. No wallet, no keys, no phone. Not even a lighter. His boots have been walked in for weeks and his socks have been darned by someone who cares about socks." Bunmi crouched, which took a moment and was not discussed. "I came up here at four to check the hatch, because of the wind. He was lying just like this."

"How long?"

"A few hours. He is still faintly warm underneath." She touched the dead man's lips with one thick finger and held it up to the light. White powder. "And this. In the mouth. The tongue is full of it."

Sefa knelt, because her knees decided it for her.

The man's hands lay folded over his stomach, as if someone had arranged them, and between the fingers of the right hand was a sheet of paper. Grey permit stock. The same cheap customs-gate paper she had used an hour ago, with the faint ruled watermark of the Orlei seal, folded once and held so tightly that the knuckles had gone yellow.

"It's blank," said Sefa.

"It's blank to me," Bunmi said. "I've held it up to the sun and I've held a candle under it. There's no mark on it at all. But I could not get it out of his grip, and I've opened the hand of more dead men than you've had hot dinners. His fingers will not give. It is as though he's still holding on to something." She watched Sefa's face. "So I did the sensible thing, and I wondered who in Tuzlag writes things that look blank."

"There's me," said Sefa.

"There's you. There's nobody else."

"There was my mother."

Bunmi said nothing at all.

It was an old silence, and Sefa knew every corner of it, and did not poke it now. She put out her hand instead and closed it around the paper, over the dead man's knuckles, and said, to him, quite gently, because it felt like the right thing to say to the dead: "Sorry. Let me have a look."

The fingers opened.

They opened as a flower might, without a sound, one after another, and the paper slid free into her palm. Bunmi drew a short breath through her nose.

"That," she said, "is a thing I did not manage."

Sefa was no longer listening. She had unfolded the sheet.

The page was not blank.

It had never been blank. The writing ran in the quiet hand, in her own handwriting, in her own grey ink, with the long slanted s that she had never been able to cure herself of, and every line of it rose off the paper into her eyes as if she had been reading it all her life. The paper was addressed to her. Of course it was. Nothing else would have opened in her hand.

The heading said: *Sefa. Read this sitting down.*

She was already sitting down. She could not have said when.

*If you are holding this, I am dead or he is, and I have probably lost the reason I wrote it. I hope I have left you enough of myself to be annoyed. This is Ruben Achterberg. I met him on the Glass Road in the rain, and I paid for him, and I cannot tell you what with, because you have it no longer. Do not give him to the garrison. Do not give him to the guild. Do not let anyone put him in water, or in salt, and do not under any circumstances trust the Brine-Master when she is kind to you.*

*He knows where I put them. All of them. Every one, back to the first. He is the only one who does. If he is dead, you will have to find the other ones. There are two. The other writer is not me.*

*Keep him breathing. I'm sorry. I know it is too late. Check the bus.*

That was all. Beneath the last line was a single small mark she knew better than her own face: the doodle of a lopsided fish that she signed with when she was happiest, or terrified, and never knew which until later.

She read the page again. The words did not change.

"Sefa," said Bunmi.

"Give me a second."

"Is it addressed to you?"

"It's from me." The laugh that came out of her was an ugly small thing, more breath than sound. "It's from me, to me, left on a stranger. I wrote it, Bunmi. It's my hand. It's the fish." She pressed her palm flat against the page as if she could hold the words down. "And I have no idea when. I've gone through the whole of GROCERIES. Not a line."

Bunmi's face did not change, but her free hand went to her chest and rested there, very briefly, as if she'd been struck. "Read it to me," she said, "and I will tell you what I think."

"I can't. You'd only hear what you hear if I read aloud. It's not a spell. It's just that it's mine."

"Then summarise."

Sefa did, steadily and precisely and in the careful voice, leaving out the line about the Brine-Master because she saw, in the old woman's eyes, that she was not the only one who knew whose name that was. She left out the part about the first. She left out *check the bus*, because it was the only line she did not need to ask about, and it lay in her chest like a coin.

When she finished, Bunmi stood up again, one joint at a time, and looked out over the pan.

The sun was beginning to rise behind the sheds. The long rows of evaporation beds were catching it, pink and then gold and then the flat hard white of noon, and far out on the horizon the border towers stood up from the glare, the Orlei bell tower on one side and the Concord's knotted-cord mast on the other, two flags hanging between them in the dead air like tired washing.

"The man was alive three days ago," Bunmi said. "The sacks at the foot of the ladder have been moved. There's a bowl of rice on the hatch. Somebody has been feeding him. Somebody has been hiding him on my quay, on my barge, under my nose, and I did not see it." She turned. "Somebody who had a key."

"I didn't know he was here."

"You did," said Bunmi. "Once."

There was nothing to say to that, and Sefa did not try. She looked down at the dead man instead, at the sun on his face, and at the wedding ring on its chain.

Then she did something she did not stop to think about. She reached out and pulled the collar of the tobacco-coloured coat a little aside.

Under it, against the skin of his throat, spreading up from the collarbone, was a pale feathery lace of white. Frost on a window. A bloom.

The same one. Her own pattern, close enough to be a signature.

Sefa heard Bunmi say her name from a long way off. She was thinking, with a clarity that felt almost restful, about the number. Thirty-nine writs. She had counted every one. She had been so careful, so proud of the counting.

And she had just read, in her own hand, about a day she did not remember paying for.

Thirty-eight, then. At best.