Pico saw him first.

"Bunmi," he called up the ladder, in a voice pitched halfway between a warning and a bid, "there's a man in a very ironed shirt."

Sefa put the letter inside her coat, against her ribs, and was on her feet before she thought about it. Bunmi had already pulled the tarp up to the dead man's chin. They looked at each other in the brief, practical way of two women who have hidden things before. Then Bunmi picked up a coil of rope from the deck and began to look busy with it.

"Let me do the talking," Sefa said.

"You are the worst liar I know."

"I'm the best liar you know."

"On paper," said Bunmi. "Out loud, you go quiet and precise. It's like watching a cat decide to be a spoon."

Sefa went to the rail.

The man standing at the foot of the ladder had stopped to hand Pico something. A coin, it looked like, a ten, offered between two fingers with a formality that was almost medical. Pico took it, looked at it, and then, to Sefa's astonishment, did not try to bargain. He just held the coin and stared.

It was Teodor Ilves-Nakamura.

He was tall in the stiff way of someone who had decided at nine years old that slouching was a moral failing and never revised his view. Twenty-nine years old, straight-backed, black hair cut short by someone who took pride in short hair, and the grey Orlei customs jacket with its brass buttons done up all the way to the throat, in the heat. A glass pen stood in his top pocket like a tiny flag. In his left hand he held a tablet in a rubber case, and in his right, a closed clipboard, which he carried the way another man would carry a hat.

He looked up. His eyes were very dark, and tired, and for some reason surprised to see her.

"Miss Tamarak," he said. "Good morning. As far as I can say."

"That's a strange way to start a day."

"It is the only accurate one." He considered the barge and the rail and the unfolding sky. "I'd like to come up. May I?"

"It's a private fishing party," said Pico.

"There are no fish."

"We're very patient."

"The boy is paying for a joke he doesn't know he made," Bunmi said, without turning around. "Come up, Mr Ilves-Nakamura. Mind the third rung. It's been saying it will go for six years."

He came up.

The odd thing was how carefully he moved, how he checked each rung with his boot before trusting it, and then at the top stood on the deck and did a slow quarter-turn, like a lighthouse, taking in the hold and the tarp and the long shape under it, and the two women and the rope. He did not look surprised again. He looked like a man confirming a rumour.

"I was informed," he said, "by the garrison tip line."

"Informed of what?"

"That there was a body on the Bone Quay." He frowned. "The message was sent at four fifty-one this morning, from a number I could not trace, and it said only BARGE NINE DEAD MAN. Captain Vosk's duty officer passed it to me because any unidentified foreign death falls to customs to register before the garrison may move it. It's in the treaty. Annex six." A very slight, embarrassed pause. "I'm one of the few people who have read Annex six."

Sefa's stomach tilted. Four fifty-one. Bunmi had said she found him at four.

Not Bunmi, then. Bunmi would not have called it in. Which meant the message had come from the same person who had been feeding him, and had known he would die, and had wanted him found.

"I haven't called anyone," said Bunmi. "I was about to."

"I see." Teodor did not say *Is that true?* but his eyes moved briefly, politely, to the rope in her hands, to the closed ladder hatch, to the untouched mug of tea Pico had been holding and had now put down, and Sefa realised he was not looking for lies. He was looking for what the truth was standing on.

"May I?" he said, and nodded at the tarp.

"He's dead," Sefa said. "There's not a lot to see."

"I appreciate that." He set down the clipboard and knelt, hinged exactly at the knee, and turned back the tarp as respectfully as if the man might be cold. For a while he did not speak. He looked at the face. He touched the back of the dead man's hand with two fingers. Then he looked at the coat, the chain at the throat, the worn boots, and the little white dust on the lips.

"Salt," said Teodor.

"It's the Sebkha," Sefa said. "It gets in everything."

"It is in his mouth, not on his mouth. The tongue is full." He rubbed a few grains between finger and thumb and, to her horror, brought the fingertip close to his face and smelled it. "It does not smell of brine. It smells of nothing."

Sefa moved as if to drop a hand to the dead man's collar, to make sure the cloth sat flat. She remembered, as her fingers brushed it, that the bloom was there. It was the oldest instinct in the world, the one that wanted to cover it. She put her hand in her pocket instead.

Teodor stood. He looked at Sefa for what felt like a long time.

"I have to tell you something," he said, "and it is not about this."

"Is it necessary?"

"I think so. It's about this morning."

Bunmi lifted her head. Pico, at the rail, stopped breathing.

"At twenty to seven," Teodor said, "a woman named Imelda Szabo came to my counter with a permit. A family-visit permit, seventy-two hours. She said it was issued by the district office. I read it, and it was in order. It was perfectly in order. The seal was correct, the dates were correct, the hospital was named, and the signature was in a hand I could not place, though I felt that I ought to. I thought it was very good work."

"Then it was," said Sefa.

"My colleague Dessa Brandt was beside me. I passed her the permit for the second signature. She held it for two seconds and said, Teodor, this is blank." He paused. He was clearly choosing every word as carefully as he would lay out a row of glass. "I said that it was not. She turned it to the window and said that there was nothing on it at all, not even a watermark. She was entirely sincere. She is not a person who makes jokes before nine."

"Odd," said Bunmi.

"Yes. So I took it back. I read it again. It was in order. I looked at her, and I looked at the paper, and I realised that what I was about to do was to tell a lie, which I cannot do." He said it quite simply, but the muscles of his throat moved as if the sentence had caught on something. "I said, *Dessa, I will take responsibility for this*. I stamped it. I let the woman through. I do not know what I stamped, Miss Tamarak. And it is the first thing in five years that I have done at that desk that I cannot account for."

He waited.

Sefa had been many things in her life, but she had never until that moment been looked at by someone whose whole body was built to receive an answer and not accept a false one. It was like standing in front of a clean window. There was no angle from which to be vague.

So she said, carefully, as truthfully as she could: "I don't see how it's any business of mine what Imelda Szabo carries."

"No," he said. "That is not what I asked."

"You haven't asked anything."

"Then I will wait until I have," said Teodor, and, to her surprise, a very small crease of humour appeared at the corner of his mouth. "The tablet, please, Pico."

Pico had somehow ended up holding it. "I was watching it for you," he said, hurriedly. "I didn't open anything."

"I know. It would have asked for a fingerprint." Teodor took it, woke it with his thumb, and began to type with swift, exact movements. "Annex six requires me to register the dead as best I can. If the deceased entered through my gate, there will be a record."

"He didn't," said Bunmi, too quickly.

"Then there will be no record, and we have lost nothing." He didn't look up. "May I borrow the coat? A moment. I would like to see the lining."

The lining was slit along the left seam, and from the slit Teodor drew out a small plastic card, no bigger than a library ticket, grey and dog-eared. An Orlei transit stub, the kind Gatepass printed for foreign visitors who did not have a phone.

He held it to the light. He read the number printed on its edge. He typed it into the tablet.

Sefa watched the screen flicker.

It was a small, ordinary thing, a pale-blue field of text with the little national crest in the corner, and she was close enough to read the line at the top: **TRANSIT RECORD FOUND.**

Teodor's thumb stopped.

"Achterberg, Ruben," he said slowly. "Entered Tuzlag gate eleven days ago, at ten past two in the afternoon. Purpose of visit, family. Duration, indefinite. Processed at Counter Two."

"Whose counter?" said Bunmi, though Sefa could tell she already knew.

"Mine."

The wind turned, flipping the corner of the tarp.

"I processed this man," Teodor said. He had gone very still. "I would have remembered. I have been doing this for five years and I do not forget a face. It is the only thing about me that people have ever described as a talent. I have no memory of him at all." He lifted his eyes, and for the first time in the conversation, they weren't asking. "There is a line below this, Miss Tamarak. Under Sponsor."

"What does it say?" She heard her own voice, thin and remarkably calm.

"It says Tamarak, Sefa. Resident, Brine and Bytes, Quay Road."

Pico made a very small sound.

"I am required," said Teodor, with a gentleness that was worse than any accusation, "to report that to the garrison. And I am not able to say I haven't."