"Then say it," said Sefa.

"Say what?"

"That you have to report me. Say it to me again, slowly, so that I can hear which words are holding the weight."

Teodor Ilves-Nakamura looked at her with the expression of a man being asked to sing. On the far side of the hold, Bunmi had stopped pretending to coil the rope. Pico, who understood most things about money and nothing about shame, had slid down to sit on a hatch cover with his chin on his knees and his eyes going from one adult to the next like a spectator at a tennis match he had bet on.

"I am required by Annex six," Teodor said, "to report any link between the deceased and a resident of Tuzlag to the garrison commander."

"Required when?"

"Within the working day."

"And your working day is?"

"Seven to six. With a lunch of thirty minutes, which I have not taken since March."

"It is ten to six in the morning," Sefa said.

"It is six minutes to six."

"It is six minutes to six in the morning," said Sefa, "and your working day began at seven, and you were called out of your bed to stand on a dead barge, so by any reasonable definition you haven't started. You have a full day's worth of working day in front of you." She heard herself speeding up and made herself slow. "I'm not asking you to hide it. I'm asking you not to file it until you have to. Twelve hours. Until six this evening. If it's a lie, then do not do it."

The line of his jaw went tight, a small, visible fight. Then, with a slowness that was almost heartbreaking, he opened his mouth.

"It is not a lie," said Teodor, "to file a report at the last permitted minute. It is a schedule."

The breath went out of the hold.

"Oh, lamb," said Bunmi, with real warmth, and for once she did not make it a threat.

"I want to make clear," Teodor added, going slightly pink above the collar, "that I am not agreeing to anything improper. If Captain Vosk should ask me directly whether I have information about the deceased, I will tell her. I will not be able to do otherwise. And at six o'clock this evening, if you have not given me a better answer, I will file the sponsor line exactly as it stands."

"A better answer than what?"

"Than none," he said. "I would like a better answer than none, Miss Tamarak. I think you would like one as well."

She had no reply to that. It was the first time anyone in this entire business had said what she was actually thinking.

The body was the next problem, and it was solved by a man who arrived at a run and then spent a full minute apologising for running.

"Sorry, so sorry, I heard, the group chat, I was only in the chapel, I always sit with the morning's weigh-in before the sheds open, I didn't mean to run, is it very bad?" Brother Ansgar Dlamini came up the ladder in a tangle of grey robe and canvas shoes, with a battered satchel banging on one hip and a tiny brass scale hung from his belt that rattled when he moved. He was thirty-eight and soft-faced, with round steel glasses that had been mended at the hinge with a twist of wire, and the permanently startled look of a deer who has been put in charge of a library.

He stopped when he saw the tarp.

"Oh," he said. "Oh dear."

"Brother," Teodor said, and nodded. They knew each other. Everyone in Tuzlag who dealt with paper or salt knew each other, in the way of people sharing a small boat in a very large storm. "Annex six allows an unidentified foreign death to lie in a chapel of record for up to twenty-four hours before the garrison medical officer may collect it. The chapel must weigh and register the tithe-salt of the dead. It is an old provision, written for sailors."

"It is," said Ansgar, and wrung his hands. "Nobody has used it in years. We do have a cold room. It's the vestry. It's rather small. I keep the candles in it."

"Then I request the deceased be moved there," said Teodor, "under the care of the chapel, and recorded as received at six minutes past six."

Sefa understood, a beat later, what he'd done. He had handed Vosk's medical officer a legal wall twenty-four hours thick. He had also, she thought, made himself the only man in the border post who knew exactly where the body was.

It didn't occur to her until later that he had done it without being asked.

They brought the handcart up from the quay, the folding one the chapel used for sacks, and the four of them got Ruben Achterberg onto it under a clean tarp. Pico, ordered to walk ahead and warn people off, took the job with the grim solemnity of a pallbearer. Ansgar walked alongside holding the dead man's wrist as if he were afraid of dropping a very long sentence. Halfway across the pan, in the cold new light, he leaned over to Sefa and said in a hurried, breathy whisper:

"I weighed one of these. Last month. A man who came to the chapel with his mother, and then the tithe-salt was strange. And I wrote it down, in the book. I think you should see the book."

"What was strange about it?"

"It was heavier than he was," Ansgar said. "I mean, not heavier than he was. I mean, the salt weighed more than it should, and it had a sort of, I don't know how to say this, a sort of grain. Like a thumbprint. And it, oh, I'm sorry. I'm sorry. I'll show you later. Not in front of the, the customs." He lowered his voice still further. "I'm sorry. I'm babbling. I always babble when I've seen something I shouldn't."

"What have you seen?"

"I haven't looked at his throat," said Ansgar, with an immense, trembling dignity. "I haven't looked at it, and I won't."

Sefa thought: you already did.

The salt chapel of Tuzlag was a white drum of a building with a low dome, built to look like a stack of sugar and mostly managing it. Inside it was cool and smelled of candle wax and damp paper. There was a plain altar, a wall of shelves lined with glass jars of tithe-salt each labelled in Ansgar's cramped handwriting, and, in an alcove behind a curtain, the vestry, which turned out to be a small, windowless room with a stainless-steel counter and a humming little fridge.

"The candles are in the fridge," Ansgar said, apologetically. "They last longer."

They laid the dead man on the counter. Ansgar drew the curtain across and set about taking the dead man's boots off, with reverence, as though they were holy relics. Bunmi went to look for a broom, because she could not bear to stand in a room where nobody was cleaning. Pico was sent for sweet tea and told, on pain of death, not to eat the biscuits on the way back.

Which left Sefa and Teodor standing alone by the door of the vestry, in a space not quite large enough for two people who did not know what to say to each other.

"I should thank you," she said.

"You shouldn't. I haven't done anything you'd call a favour." He looked at the curtain, and then at the floor. "I am not good at this."

"At what?"

"At standing on one side of a thing and being fair to the other." He took the glass pen out of his top pocket, looked at it, and put it back. "There's a thing I haven't told you."

"There's always a thing."

"I haven't forgotten only him," said Teodor. "I mean. I do not think I have forgotten only him. Eleven days ago, a man came through my counter, and there is a hole in my day the shape of that man. But I have looked at my notes, Miss Tamarak, and there is also a shape missing from the Tuesday before. A quarter of an hour. I know that I had my lunch, because there is a wrapper in my bin, and a pen cap in my hand, but I have no recollection of eating. And I thought, it is the heat. It is the shifts. I am twenty-nine and I have gone soft."

"You haven't gone soft," said Sefa, in a voice she barely recognised.

He rubbed the base of his right thumb with his left forefinger, a small unconscious, circular motion, the sort of thing people do to a place that has been itching. She had seen him do it twice already, on the barge, when he reached for the tablet, and once as he pressed the dead man's hand. It was his stamping hand. The skin at the base of the thumb was a little red.

"May I see that?" Sefa said.

"It's nothing. I have a small irritation."

"Humour me. I fix phones. I'm used to looking at things that someone swears are fine."

He held out his hand, palm up, as formally as if offering her a document.

She took it in both of hers. His skin was warm and dry and callused along the ridge of the thumb from a lifetime of holding a pen. There was a faint smell of ink and soap and the clean metal edge of a stamp. She turned the hand towards the light from the doorway.

It was tiny. She would have missed it if she had not spent an hour this morning staring at its twin on her own forearm.

A single bright grain of white, set into the flesh at the base of his thumb, no bigger than the head of a pin. Below it, almost too faint to see, ran two feathery threads, like the first frost of the year.

Sefa did not say anything for such a long time that Teodor frowned.

"Is it a splinter?" he asked.

"No," she said, and found that her own hands, holding his, were trembling. "It's a mine."

"I beg your pardon?"

But she was looking, over his shoulder, at the curtain, and at the long still shape behind it, and thinking of the line in her own handwriting that said *the other writer is not me*.