A ladle, Eunhae told herself, not a flood.

She said it in the washroom of the clock shop at eleven o'clock the next night, with her palms braced on either side of the little iron sink and her face a pale blur in the speckled mirror. She said it again as she buttoned the clean white shirt, and again as she took the silver watch off the nail by the door and weighed it in her hand. A ladle. A single measured dip. One hour, no more. She had thought about it for most of the day, between mending a music box and failing to eat a bowl of rice, and she had come to the conclusion that the only way to take a small thing from a person is to know, to the grain, how large it is.

It was not a skill she possessed. In thirty-two years she had never once tried to draw lightly. The Keeper's art was a matter of weight: you put down the whole of your need and let the ground take it, and the ground, if it was deep enough, did not complain. Her grandmother had never taught her to take less. It had not occurred to either of them that there was an alternative.

But Haeseul had said sip, and Eunhae had written it on the back of her hand in ink, as a child writes a spelling word, and she thought: I will learn it. I will learn it tonight if it kills me.

She was waiting outside the hospital at a quarter to two, in the thin gray jacket, with the collar turned up against a bitter little wind off the harbor. The building loomed over the road like a ship at anchor, all its windows dark but for the green glow of the ward corridors. Beside her on the curb, wrapped in an enormous knitted scarf, Garam stamped her feet and blew into her cupped hands.

"Nurse Ko says we have a quarter of an hour before the rounds," she said. "She will look the other way for anything under two. If it goes on longer, we must plead a family emergency."

"We are not family."

"We are, tonight." Garam grinned with chattering teeth. "I told her you were the cousin from the country. She said you looked it."

"Thank you."

"It was meant as a compliment."

Eunhae did not answer. She was watching the road. She had known the figure would appear before it did, in that dreadful, wordless, instinctive way, like a person who hears a footstep on a stair before the door opens, and when it came round the corner by the bus shelter she felt the whole of her skin go warm and tight.

Haeseul walked quickly, with her bag over her shoulder and her coat open and her face white in the streetlamp. She had her hair tied back in a low knot, and she had pulled the sleeves of her cardigan down over the heels of her hands. She looked small and straight and very tired. She looked like a person who has made up her mind and does not wish to discuss it.

"Am I late?" she said.

"No," said Eunhae. "I was early."

"You look dreadful."

"I have been told."

"Have you eaten?"

"Some of it."

"What does that mean?" said Haeseul, and then, over the top of her own question, with a faint reluctant crease at the corner of her mouth: "Never mind. I will not start. We have a patient." She turned to Garam. "Thank you for coming."

"I would not be anywhere else," said Garam, quite gravely, and took both their arms.

The corridor on the third floor was blue with night lighting and smelled of antiseptic. Nurse Ko, a long, thin, silent woman with a pencil behind each ear, nodded to them at the station without a word and turned her back to study a chart. They went past on their toes. A machine beeped somewhere. A patient coughed. In the room at the end of the hall, a pale slit of light lay under the door, and Eunhae felt the pressure of the thing within it before her hand touched the handle, a deep, slow, aching weight, like the pull of an undertow.

"It is strong," she said.

"I know," said Haeseul.

"You can feel it?"

"I have been able to since I was a child. I thought it was only sadness." She did not look at her. "Go on. I will be right behind you."

Gyeol lay in the narrow bed as he had lain for three days, on his back, with his hands at his sides and his face turned a little toward the window. The curtains had been left open. A wedge of cold streetlight fell across the blanket. His mother had been persuaded to go home and sleep, but she had left her cardigan on the chair, and a small foil package of dried persimmons on the locker, and a photograph propped against the water jug. It was a snapshot of a laughing boy of nine on a beach, holding up a crab. Eunhae looked at it, and then she looked at the real face on the pillow, so still, so serenely absent, and the knowledge of what she had done came over her like cold water.

She had done this. She had taken the hand when she should not have. She had let the count falter, and the thing in the corner had found its way in through the gap.

"Eunhae," said Haeseul, gently.

She straightened. "Yes."

"What do you need?"

"I need you to sit." She drew a chair up to the head of the bed and set it at an angle. "Here. Where you can reach him. I will stand across from you. I need to be able to see your face."

Haeseul sat. She put her bag at her feet, and folded her hands on her knee, and Garam, without being asked, went and stood by the door with her back against it, as a sentry stands.

Eunhae took out the watch. She opened it, and the little white face looked up at her in the dimness. Her hand was steady. She noted that, distantly, the way one notes the weather: her hand was not shaking, because the woman in the chair across the bed had not yet been asked for anything, and the quiet she carried had already begun to seep into the room.

"I am going to tell you how much I will take," she said. "As I promised. I intend to take one hour. That is all. I will draw it slowly, in small pieces, so that you can feel it come and go. If I take more than an hour, I will stop, and I will say so, and you may take your hand away."

"One hour," said Haeseul.

"Of your sleep. Which, if I understand it, is the thing that I am borrowing." She lowered her voice. "I do not know that I can do this properly. I have never tried. If I get it wrong, you must say so at once."

"I will."

"May I?"

"Yes."

Eunhae put out her hand. Haeseul's came to meet it across the blanket, and for the first time in four days they touched. It was a very light touch, her fingertips just resting on the pulse at the inside of Haeseul's wrist, over the cold twin rings of the seal. The skin was warm. The pulse was fast. And beneath it, deep down, in the place where the ground had opened on the night of the new moon, Eunhae felt a small, soft, waiting stillness, like water in a cupped palm.

She drew.

It was like nothing she had ever done. It was like taking a single breath of water from the bottom of a well, through a straw, with great care. She felt it come up, thin and bright and cold, a ribbon of quiet that wound through her arm and into her chest, and she held it there, and let it fill her, and stopped.

"There," she said. "That is the first part. Is it all right?"

"It is..." Haeseul drew a small unsteady breath. She was looking at their hands. "It is like losing a drop of something. It is not unpleasant. It is only that I notice it."

"Good. I will take another."

She took another. And another. It was the slowest labor of her life. Each time she waited for the answer, and each time the answer came, a nod, a murmured word, a faint quickening of the pulse beneath her fingers, and each time she felt the ground beneath her grow a very little firmer, until at last she stood in a pool of still, bright, silent strength, enough to hold the weight of a house.

"That is an hour," she said. "That is all."

"I think so," said Haeseul. Her face was pale, but her eyes were clear. "I think that is just about an hour."

"Can you stand it?"

"I can."

Something went through Eunhae then, a quick warm pang, not of triumph, exactly, but of a gratitude so sharp that it hurt. She bent her head, so that Haeseul should not see her face, and she began, softly, to count.

One. And two. And three.

The room changed. It did not grow darker, or colder, but it leaned. She felt the pressure in the walls shift, as a sleeper shifts in a bed, and the hum of the machines took on a hollow note, and the green hills on the monitor above the bed paused for the length of a heartbeat and began again. Four. Five. And on the pillow, between one breath and the next, Han Gyeol's lips moved.

He was humming.

It was a very small sound, so low that for a moment she thought she had imagined it. It was a tune in five falling notes, slow and rocking and tender, with a little catch at the end of each phrase like a mother's breath. It rose and it fell and it went round again, over and over, a song to be sung to someone very small in a dark room, and the boy on the bed did not wake, and his face did not change. But the sound went on.

"Gyeol?" said Haeseul, in a whisper.

"It is not him," said Eunhae.

Her voice sounded odd to her. She had stopped counting. She stood quite still with her hand on Haeseul's wrist and every hair on her body standing on end, and the humming rose and fell in the cold room, and she knew it. She knew it as one knows one's own name in a stranger's mouth. It had been the first thing she ever heard. It had come to her through the wall of her bedroom on the nights she could not sleep as a child, a low, rough, tuneless old woman's voice, humming five notes over and over to a thing in the dark that would not hush.

"Eunhae," said Haeseul. "What is it?"

"I know that song."

"What song?"

"It is hers." She could not say more. It was her grandmother's. It was Ongjo's, the only song she ever sang, and it was not a lullaby for the living. It was what she had sung to the Hushed when the count would not serve. She had sung it to the ones that were beyond counting, the lost, the lonely, the mothers. She had sung it over the old man in the schoolhouse, and the girl who drowned on the east quay, and the baby that never woke in the fish market on the winter morning when Eunhae was nine years old.

And now it rose out of a twenty-three-year-old pharmacy student in a hospital bed.

"Keep counting," said Garam, from the door, in a strange tight voice. "Eunhae. Do not stop. It is coming up. Can you not feel it? It is coming up through him like a bubble through water."

She felt it.

The air beside the bed thickened, and darkened, and drew itself up. It rose out of the pillow, out of the boy's slack open mouth, out of the folds of the blanket, a long slow gray exhalation that took on, as it climbed, the shape of a woman. She was bowed. She was thin. She wore a cardigan and a long plain skirt, and she held a bundle against her chest, and she was weeping, softly, with her head bent over it, as one weeps over a sleeping child so as not to wake it.

"Oh," said Haeseul, very quietly.

She had not let go of Eunhae's hand. The pulse in her wrist was beating hard and quick, but her face, turned up toward the shape, was perfectly steady. It was grave and tender and terribly kind. It was the face of a woman who had stood at a great many bedsides, and had never once walked out of the room.

"May I speak to her?" she said.

Eunhae's throat had closed. She nodded.

"May I stand?"

She nodded again. Haeseul rose. She did it slowly, with her fingers still wrapped round Eunhae's wrist, and she took one step toward the gray figure, and stopped, a pace from the bed, in the cold wedge of streetlight. She did not reach out. She stood with her head a little bowed, as one stands at a graveside, and she spoke in the low, even, unhurried voice that she had used for old Mr. Gu.

"Hello," she said. "I am Haeseul. I think you have been waiting a long time."

The bowed head lifted.

"I am not going to take him from you," Haeseul said. "I do not think that is what you want. I think you only want to be told that he is safe. That is what I would want." A small pause. "He is not your baby. I am so sorry. He is a boy, a grown boy, and he has a mother of his own who is asleep in a chair at home, and she loves him very much. I think you have been holding him because he reminded you. He is warm, and he listens. That is a rare thing."

The shape did not move. The weeping went on, soundless, immense.

"My mother died two years ago," said Haeseul.

Eunhae stopped breathing.

"I was not in the room." The words fell, one by one, quite plain, into the quiet. "I went to fetch a different dose. I thought I had a quarter of an hour. She went in twelve minutes, alone, with the window open, and when I came back there was a nurse in the doorway with a clipboard and a face that said it all. I have been carrying that for two years. I have not told anyone. I have not told the woman standing beside me, who held my hand through the whole of a night and never once asked me why it was shaking." She drew a breath. It shook. "I think that you did not leave your child either. I think that you went to fetch something, a blanket, a bottle, water, and when you came back it was too late. And I think that you have been looking for that quarter of an hour ever since."

The gray woman had gone quite still.

"It was not your fault," said Haeseul. "I wish somebody had said it to me. I wish it very much. I was told it a hundred times, by a hundred people, and it was only words. So I will not say it. I will only say that I understand. That I know what the quarter of an hour is like. That there is no way to go back into it, and that it is a very great weight, and that you are allowed to put it down."

She stopped. She was crying. She was crying without any sound, quite openly, with the tears running down her face and her hands hanging at her sides, and she did not wipe them. She stood in the blue light with her chin up, and said, as if to a friend: "I will stay here. I will stay with you for as long as you like. And when you are ready, someone will take him from your arms. I promise you. They are very gentle. They will not let him fall."

Eunhae did not know how long they stood there. It might have been a minute. It might have been an hour. The only sound in the room was the soft humming of the monitors and the slow dripping of a tap down the corridor, and the weeping of the gray woman, which had begun, very gradually, to change. It grew quieter. It grew lighter. It stopped being the weeping of someone who has lost, and became the weeping of someone who has been found.

And then, quite slowly, the gray woman bent forward and laid her bundle down on the blanket, on Gyeol's folded hands, as softly as she would have laid down a loaf of bread. She straightened. She looked up, and for one instant Eunhae saw her face, round and plain and worn, with deep lines at the corners of the mouth and eyes the color of river water, and the face was young. It was only twenty-five, perhaps, and it was smiling.

She mouthed two words. Eunhae could not read them. But Haeseul, who had gone completely white, whispered, "You are welcome."

The shape thinned. It rose, a gray veil of breath, up and up toward the ceiling, and where it passed the air grew warm. Then it was a fleck of dust in a beam of light. Then it was nothing.

The bundle on the blanket was gone.

Gyeol's chest rose, and sank, and rose again.

"Oh," said Garam from the door, and slid down the wood until she was sitting on the floor with her face in her hands.

It was twenty minutes to five when he woke.

They had not moved. Nurse Ko had been and gone. The window was turning from black to gray, and the first birds had begun in the plane trees along the road, and the three of them sat in the little room in a kind of exhausted stupor, Garam on the floor, Haeseul in the chair with her eyes shut and Eunhae standing at the foot of the bed with one hand still gripping the rail.

"Noona?"

The voice was cracked and faint and perfectly ordinary.

Haeseul's eyes flew open.

"Gyeol!" She was out of the chair and at his side before Eunhae could blink. She had his face between her hands, and her palms were shaking, and she was laughing and weeping and checking his pupils all at once. "Gyeol. Look at me. Follow my finger. Do you know where you are?"

"In the hospital." He blinked up at her, owlish and confused, with a deep crease between his brows. "I think. Why am I in the hospital? Why are you holding my face?"

"Because I am very glad to see it."

"Noona, you are crying."

"I am not."

"You are crying on me."

"It is the fluorescent lights," said Haeseul, and burst into tears.

The door opened. A small round figure in a tea-colored cardigan stood in the gap, with a plastic bag of fruit in her arms and her mouth open in a perfect O. She dropped the bag. Eunhae heard persimmons roll across the floor. Then Mrs. Han was across the room, and had flung herself down upon the bed, and the whole narrow frame creaked, and Gyeol said "Eomma, you will break the IV," in a muffled voice, and she said "Be quiet, be quiet, be quiet," and held him.

Eunhae turned away.

She stood at the window, with her back to the room, and looked down at the road. The light was coming. The street lamps were going pale. A bus drew up at the stop and a woman in a white uniform climbed down, yawning, with a lunch box under her arm. It was the beginning of an ordinary morning. And behind her, in the room, a boy was saying in a sleepy, plaintive voice that he was hungry, and a woman was saying yes, yes, of course, and somebody was laughing with her hand over her mouth.

She heard the step beside her. She did not turn.

"You did it," said Haeseul.

"You did it."

"We did." She had come to stand at the window. She was pale and puffy-eyed and tear-streaked, and she smiled, a little unsteadily, at the glass. "I have been wanting to say a thing, and I think I had better say it before I lose my nerve. You were very good."

"I was nothing of the kind."

"You were. You held it. You did not take more than you said. I was watching, and I would have felt it." A short breath. "It was an hour. You promised an hour, and it was an hour. I will write it in the book. That is all I wanted to tell you."

"Haeseul..."

"I am not saying it is forgiven." Her voice dropped. "I am saying that it was honest, and I noticed. That is all."

She held out her wrist.

She did it as one hands over a chart, plainly, without ceremony, and Eunhae looked at it, and the room seemed to go quiet. There were two rings on the inside of the wrist, pale and silvery. The first stood complete, twelve small ticks, like the numerals of a dial. The second lay below it, narrower and newer, and Eunhae counted along it with her eyes, once, and then again, because she could not make the figure come out differently. There were eight.

"It was seven at midnight," said Haeseul. "I counted in the lavatory, with the door locked, like a woman checking for a lump." She smiled a little, tiredly. "One mark more, for one hour. I do not suppose that is a coincidence."

"I do not know," said Eunhae.

It was true. It was also not the whole of the truth, and she knew it as she said it. She did not know what the marks counted. But she had been turning the numbers over for three days, in the dead hours at the bench, and she had caught herself on the edge of a thought that she did not want to finish. Twelve, on the night of the new moon: lamplight to dawn. Seven, on the morning of the flood, in the grip of a thing that had felt like a week. One, tonight, for one measured hour. She stopped herself there. It was a door, and she did not open it. She stood in the pale morning with her hand gripping the window rail and thought: coward, coward, coward.

"I did not know that it counted anything," she said. "I will not guess aloud and be wrong. I am sorry."

"Then I shall keep my own tally," said Haeseul. "In the book. And we will compare, you and I, at the end of the month." She lowered her arm and drew the cuff down over the rings. "It is not a reproach. It is only that I am a pharmacist, and I like to know the dose."

She looked at Eunhae for a moment longer. Then she touched her sleeve, once, lightly, a brief and quite unasked touch that lasted no longer than a breath, and turned and went back to the bed.

Eunhae stayed where she was. She stood at the window and watched the sun come up behind the apartment blocks, and heard her own heart beating, and could not feel the warm place on her sleeve without thinking of the number.

"Eunhae."

It was Garam. She had come up beside her without a sound. She was very pale, and her face was wet, and her curls, in the morning light, looked suddenly gray at the temples, as though a frost had touched them. She was not looking at the bed. She was looking at the window, and her eyes were wide and dark and full of something that Eunhae had not seen in them since the morning of the funeral.

"That song," she said.

"Garam."

"Where did he learn it?"

"I do not know."

"He is twenty-three. He is from a fishing village two hundred miles north. He has never been in your shop. He has never met your grandmother." Her voice was a whisper, low and fierce. "Five notes, falling, with a catch in the last bar. She never taught it to anyone. She never wrote it down. She hummed it once or twice a year, and not for anyone to hear. I was with her for twelve years, Eunhae, and I heard it perhaps five times. I could not sing it back to you now."

"I know."

"Then how does a boy from the coast hum it in his sleep?" She gripped Eunhae's arm. Her fingers were cold. "Who is in there with him?"

Behind them, in the little room, Mrs. Han was laughing and weeping and feeding her son a persimmon. And the morning light fell in long clear bars across the floor, as warm as milk, and Eunhae stood in it with her skin crawling, and did not know how to answer.