The old weigh-tower stood at the edge of the sheds like a drinking straw someone had forgotten to throw away.

It was a tall, thin brick stack with a rusted iron ladder up one side and a flat roof at the top where salt sacks had once been hoisted for weighing. It was condemned. It had been condemned for nine years. It had a notice on it saying so, in two languages, and a third notice on top of that, hand-lettered, which said PICO'S ABSOLUTELY NOT HERE.

Sefa climbed.

She was not a good climber, and the bloom on her arm gave a faint, sandpaper itch whenever she gripped, so she took it slowly. By the time her head came level with the parapet she had stopped being angry and begun to be something far less comfortable. She lifted herself over the lip onto the roof, where the morning wind was already beginning to lift the white dust off the pans, and found him.

He sat with his back against the chimney, hood up, knees pulled to his chest. He had a battered pink phone in his lap that he was clearly not looking at, and a salt-runner's satchel by his foot, and on the brick beside him he had made a very small pile of things: three coins, a pencil stub, a folded handkerchief, a key. Everything he owned that wasn't on him.

"I'm not coming down," said Pico, to his knees.

"I didn't ask you to."

"If you're going to shout, shout from there. Wind carries it. I'll hear all of it and nobody else will." He wiped his nose on his sleeve. "I'm going to say I'm sorry now, so I have it in. Sorry. That's four sorrys, if you count the ones I was going to say later."

Sefa sat down against the chimney, on the opposite side of the little pile. The brick was warm. Neither of them looked at the other.

"What did she say to you?" she asked.

"Who?"

"Pico."

He was quiet. The wind turned over a corner of the tarpaper roof and let it fall.

"I met her on the quay," he said finally. "After I gave Bunmi her tea. Madam Brine-Master was just walking, with a tray, like she'd come for the sunrise. She asked how I was. Nobody asks how I am. They ask what I want, or where I've been, or what's in my pocket." He spoke fast, in a low, flat voice, like a bank clerk reading out a debt. "She said, you look cold. She said, have you a bed, and I said I've got places. And she said the hostel at the guild has a spare. A real one. With a locker. With a lock on the locker, and my name on a card."

Sefa said nothing.

"She asked if you were all right. She said she worried. She said, was there anything you'd found, and I said no, I don't think so, and then I said yes. I said Bunmi sent me to fetch you because the dead man had one of your papers." His voice cracked straight across the middle. "I said a letter. I said you'd read it. I said you'd gone all careful."

"How much did she pay you?"

"She didn't pay me. That's the thing. I thought she'd pay. She just said, thank you, Pico, and smiled, and I felt like I'd done something good." He pressed his lips together, hard. "That's worse, isn't it? That's the worst way."

"It's very good work," Sefa said. "For her."

"Is it?"

"She has a gift," she said, "for finding what a person's been waiting for and holding it out before they know they're hungry." She stretched out her legs. Her left arm ached. "I walked into that chapel this morning knowing she was a snake, and I nearly asked her for a biscuit."

Pico lifted his head. His eyes were very bright. "You're not going to hit me?"

"Have I ever hit you?"

"Once with a spoon. On accident."

"That was a marmalade incident."

He laughed, a short broken laugh, and then wiped his face with both hands and said, in an entirely different voice, as though a bad tooth had finally been pulled, "That's not all. There's more. I have to say it before I lose my nerve."

"All right."

"I wasn't surprised."

"About what?"

"The man. On the barge." He did not look at her. He looked at the little pile on the brick. "I knew he was there. I've known for nine days. I'm the one who's been feeding him."

Sefa sat completely still.

"The rice on the hatch," Pico said. "That was me. Three times a day. In the foil trays from the Pan Aunties' Friday sale, because they hold the heat. And a flask. And I swapped his bucket on Wednesdays." He swallowed. "You paid me. You said it was the biggest job anyone had ever given me and I wasn't to tell a soul. Not Bunmi, and not the Aunties, and not the customs man, and not even you."

"Not even me."

"You said you might forget." His voice dropped almost to nothing. "You said you were going to do something big, and that afterwards you wouldn't remember the man, or me being in it, and I was to go on feeding him anyway. You said, whatever I say, whatever I do, you keep feeding him. Even if I come and ask who he is." He looked at her then, directly, with his chin up and his mouth shaking. "And this morning you came into the Quay and said, who's that? And I thought, she's done it, she's gone and forgotten. And I didn't say a word. Because you told me not to."

Sefa found she could not feel her own hands.

There were many things she might have said. She went through them with the slow clarity of someone paging through a large and unforgiving book. *You should have told me.* *You're eleven.* *You could have got hurt.* *You were so brave, and I did that to you.*

"You kept the rice warm," she said, which was the only true thing she could find.

Pico put his face on his knees and howled.

She let him. She shuffled round the chimney and sat beside him, shoulder to shoulder, and did not touch him, because he was a boy who bit when touched while crying, and just let the wind take the sound across the sheds. After a while the howl became a hiccup, and the hiccup became a series of long, shuddering breaths. He wiped his face on the cuff of his hood.

"He died anyway," he said.

"He did."

"It wasn't the food."

"No. It wasn't the food." She watched a long tongue of white dust lick across the nearest pan. "Someone took him off the barge, or came to the barge, or did whatever they did, between your last tray and Bunmi's check. And then phoned the garrison at four fifty-one to make sure we all found him quickly."

"Who?"

"I don't know yet."

"I've got a key," Pico said suddenly. "To the barges. You gave it to me. Bunmi doesn't know. I've never lost it, I swear, I sleep with it in my sock." He dug at his pile. "Look. Look, it's here."

"I believe you."

"And I've got this."

He turned out the inside of his satchel. From a tear in the lining he drew a small folded square of grey paper, creased to softness, held shut with a bit of red wool.

"You said I wasn't to give it to you until the third day," he said. "After the man had been fed three times a day for nine. You said, when it's the third morning since I stop remembering, give it me. No sooner. I counted. I thought it'd be tomorrow, but then you came in this morning with the careful voice and I thought, maybe it's today. Maybe I got it wrong. I'm not good at counting if I'm sad."

Sefa took the note. It weighed nothing. The wool was tied in a bow she recognised with the part of her that never forgot a knot: her own double loop, made with her left hand, which she always used when the right one was shaking.

She undid it.

The page was addressed, in her own long slanting hand, to her. Of course it was. Pico, looking over her arm, saw only a clean grey sheet; he made a small shocked noise and then said, "Is it a prank?"

"It's mine."

She read it. There were eleven words.

*Pico has the key to the bus. Do not let him come with you. He will.*

Sefa folded it again very carefully, and put it with the other one against her ribs. She did not look at the boy beside her. She did not need to. She could feel him vibrating there in the wind like a plucked string, ready to offer her his entire inventory of bad ideas and his one good one.

"Chief Forger?" said Pico.

"Yes."

"What does it say?"

Far below them, across the white pan, the bell in the Orlei tower began to ring for seven o'clock, and the first shift of salt-raker began, with a great rumbling of carts, to move out onto the Sebkha.

"It says," said Sefa, "that you're going to be absolutely impossible."