By morning there were forty-one clocks ticking in the shop, and Baek Eunhae could hear every one of them.

This was not a figure of speech. She stood at the long oak bench under the window with a loupe screwed into her right eye and a brass escapement the size of a coat button pinned between her tweezers, and she heard them the way another person might hear a crowd: the grandfather clock in the corner with its slow, ponderous beat, the little carriage clock that ran two seconds fast, the cuckoo that had not cuckooed since before she was born, the pocket watches in their glass case ticking out of step with one another like a roomful of people who could not agree. Forty-one hearts, all of them marking time. She had inherited the habit of listening from her grandmother, along with the shop, the bench, the loupe, and everything else.

Her hands were shaking.

She set the tweezers down on the felt and laid both palms flat on the wood and waited. It was a trick she had learned a long time ago. You did not fight the tremor. You gave it something heavy to push against, and you counted, and sooner or later the counting won. One, and two, and three. Four. She breathed in time with the grandfather clock. Five, six, seven. On the fortieth beat the worst of it ebbed, leaving only a fine, tireless thrum in the tips of her fingers, like the afterhum of a struck bell.

It was the sixth day before the new moon, and she had not slept properly in three years.

She did not call it insomnia. Insomnia was a thing people suffered in their own beds, a private misery of the ceiling and the clock face. What Eunhae had was a duty with a body attached. Every night, from the moment the harbor lamps came on until the first gray bleached the roofs, something in her stayed awake and listened. It listened to the city. It listened to the long, thick, grieving hush that settled over Haeryeong after dark, the leftover sorrow of people who had gone to sleep without having finished feeling what they felt, which seeped into the walls and the gutters and the tide-wet stones and slowly, slowly accumulated into shapes. The old women of the fish market called them nothing at all; they simply crossed themselves, or did not, and shut their doors early. Her grandmother had called them the Hushed, because that was what they did to the people they found. They hushed them. They took the soft, necessary ground of sleep out from under a body and left it standing, wide awake and weeping, in the middle of its own worst memory.

And the Keeper of Haeryeong kept them quiet. That was the whole of it. A woman who counted, who stood at the edge of the dark with a ticking watch and an unbroken will, and said, in a voice the Hushed could not refuse: enough, now, rest.

Eunhae was the third Keeper of her line. She was thirty-two years old and she was exhausted down to the bone.

She took up the tweezers again. The escapement slid into its seat with the faint, perfect click that was the nearest thing to joy her days still contained. She sat back, pushed the loupe up onto her forehead, and let her gaze go to the corner of the bench, where a drawer stood a hand's breadth open.

She had meant to shut it last night. She had meant to shut it for eleven years.

Inside, folded neat, lay a sweater. It was pale blue, knitted in a loose, tender, old-fashioned stitch, with a hole at the left elbow that had been darned so many times in so many different threads that the patch had become the most colorful part of it. It had five buttons. Not one of them matched. The original buttons had been mother-of-pearl, small and round, and over the years Eunhae had replaced them one by one as they cracked or came away, sewing each new one on with the same fine, careful stitch she used to secure a mainspring, with a bit of brass, with a bone toggle, with a button she had cut from the shell of a mussel on the harbor wall. The sweater had become a kind of ledger. Every repair was a year she had managed to survive.

She had not touched it last night when she came back. She had walked in from the cold, sat down on the floor of the shop with her back against the bench, and for a very long time she had simply sat there, with her hands between her knees, listening to the forty-one clocks and trying to understand what she had just done.

She had gone to Dawnbridge.

She had told herself she was going to buy something to sleep. It was a ridiculous excuse and she had known it was ridiculous even as she walked up the slope in the wind, past the shuttered noodle shop, past the cat that sat on the steps of the temple. Nothing in any pharmacy on earth could do for her what she needed. But the new moon was six nights off, and for the first time in three years her nerve had failed her. For the first time in three years, she had stood alone at the shore of the dark and understood, with absolute cold clarity, that she would not be able to hold it by herself again.

And so she had walked, without letting herself ask where she was walking to, up the hill to the pharmacy with the green cross. And through the glass she had seen her.

Eleven years ago, on the night of her grandmother's funeral, Eunhae had been twenty-one years old. She had stood in the street outside that same pharmacy at three in the morning with a Hushed trailing at her heels like a stray dog, and a ticking watch in her fist that she did not know how to use, and no one in the world to tell her what to do. Her grandmother was a week in the ground. The Keeper's duty had landed on her like a collapsing roof. Garam was gone that night, out in the harbor quarter, grieving in her own way, and Eunhae had wandered up the hill because it was the only lit place in the city and because she had thought, with the stunned logic of the bereaved, that if she stood in a lit place long enough, the dark might forget her.

A girl had come out of the pharmacy.

She was perhaps eighteen. She was carrying a white paper bag and she was hurrying, with her head down, in the way of someone who had a sick person waiting at home. She had very long hair, tied back, and a pale-blue sweater, and she had looked up just as she passed and seen Eunhae standing in the cold in her funeral clothes with tears running unnoticed down her face.

She had stopped. She had not said, Are you all right. She had not said anything like that, which would have made Eunhae hate her. She had simply looked for one breath, with a pair of the clearest, kindest, most tired eyes Eunhae had ever seen, and then she had pulled the sweater off over her head, right there, in the wind, and put it around Eunhae's shoulders.

"You look cold," the girl had said. "Keep it. I have another one at home."

And then she had gone, running, with the paper bag clutched to her chest, and the Hushed that had been following Eunhae had hesitated, wavered, and slunk away into the dark, as if it had been shamed. Eunhae had stood there with the warmth of a stranger's body still in the wool, and felt, for the first time since the funeral, that she could breathe.

She had gone back a week later, and a month later, and a year later. The girl never came out again at that hour. The night clerk changed. The years went on. Eunhae learned to be a Keeper and was, by every measure that mattered, a good one. She mended the sweater. She told herself it was a sentimental habit. She told herself she was keeping it for the day she might find the owner and give it back.

Then, last night, the owner had looked up from behind a counter, with a paper cup of warm water in her hand, and Eunhae had known her instantly, in the way that you know your own handwriting in a stranger's letter. She was older, naturally. The hair was darker and longer and the face more tired. But the eyes were exactly the same. And when the Hushed had come into the pharmacy, when it had settled over the old man like a hand pressing down on a candle flame, the woman had walked into it with no fear whatsoever. She had knelt on the cold floor and held his hands and talked about tomatoes, and the thing that had been drowning him had simply given up.

Eunhae had never seen anything like it. Her grandmother, in all the years of her life, had never seen anything like it. There were people the Hushed passed over, the numb and the lucky and the unimaginative. There were people they preyed upon. But a person they could not touch, who could stand inside an unfinished grief and not be swallowed, who in fact seemed to draw the sting out of it merely by being kind...

Eunhae closed her eyes.

She knew what that was. She had read about it in her grandmother's journals so many times that the pages had gone soft. There was a name for it, a very old name, and the name was anchor.

The bell above the door chimed.

She did not look up at once. She knew the footsteps. They were slow, a little uneven, and they came with a rustle of paper, and with them a voice she would have known in the dark, warm and rough and amused.

"You look like a clock somebody forgot to wind."

"Good morning, Garam," said Eunhae.

Oh Garam shouldered the door shut behind her and set a paper bag on the end of the bench. She was thirty-six, short, round-cheeked and dark-haired, with a cap of curls she kept pinned up in a way that never quite worked, and she wore a long gray cardigan with a hole in one pocket that she refused to mend. Her eyes were large and warm and brown, and under each of them lay a violet crescent so deep it looked like a bruise. She had owned the all-night cafe at the bottom of the hill for nine years. She had also, for most of her life, been the thing Eunhae was now avoiding saying out loud.

"Red bean buns," Garam said. "Two of them are yours, and you are going to eat them, and you are not going to argue with me, because you look like death in a cardigan."

"I do not wear a cardigan."

"Then it is a very good impression." Garam tore a bun in half and pressed one half into Eunhae's hand, and Eunhae, for want of anything better to do with her face, ate it. It was soft and sweet and still faintly warm. Her stomach, which had been a clenched fist since the night before, gave a tentative, grateful turn.

"Better," said Garam, watching her. "Now. Tell me."

"There is nothing to tell."

"Eunhae."

"It is almost the new moon. I am tired. That is all."

"Hold out your hand."

"No."

"Hold. Out. Your. Hand."

They looked at each other for a long moment, the shop ticking all around them. In the end, because Garam had held her hair out of her face the first time she was sick from the Hushed's touch, and had sat up with her through the worst of her grandmother's death, and had once walked six miles through a typhoon to bring her soup, Eunhae held out her right hand.

It shook. It had been shaking all morning, but with Garam looking at it, it seemed to shake harder, as if in shame. Garam took it in both of hers and held it still, and her thumb moved over the knuckles, very gently, in the way of a person who had spent most of her adult life taking the shudder out of someone else.

"You are worse than last month," she said quietly.

"It has been worse every month."

"I know. I know it has." Garam's voice did not break, but it flattened, the way a voice does when it is working hard not to. "You need an anchor again."

"No."

"Eunhae, you are thirty-two years old and you are shaking like a leaf. You cannot do this alone. Your grandmother could not do it alone, and she had me, and she still..." She stopped. She pressed her lips together. When she spoke again it was softer. "I am so sorry. I would do it. You know I would. But I cannot, and it is not because I do not love you. It is because of what it costs."

"I know what it costs." The words came out harsher than Eunhae meant, and she shut her eyes, and made herself say the rest more gently. "I know, Garam. That is exactly why I will not ask anyone. I have seen what it did to you."

Garam looked at her. There was something wry and sorrowful in the lines of her face, and her free hand rose, without her seeming to notice, to touch the shadow beneath her left eye. She had been a young woman, once, with an ordinary night and an ordinary sleep. She had given the whole of it to the Baek women, first to Ongjo, and then to Eunhae, lending them her rest, her quiet, her unspent dreams, a night at a time, for a decade. Three years ago, her body had simply stopped being able to sleep at all. She said it was fine. She said she had always been a night owl. She had turned her sleeplessness into a business and kept the cafe open until dawn, and the whole district loved her for it.

"There will be someone," Garam said. "There always is."

"Please do not."

"Did you go out last night?" Garam said, and in the same instant her eyes flicked, with terrible shrewdness, to the open drawer.

Eunhae felt the heat go up her neck. "I had to see to the harbor."

"You went to Dawnbridge."

"I needed something to help me sleep."

"Liar," said Garam, with great tenderness. She put the bun down. Her whole face had changed, softened and gone luminous, like a lamp turned up. "Eunhae. Was it her?"

"I do not know what you mean."

"You have kept a sweater in a drawer for eleven years and you are asking me to believe that I do not know what I mean?" Garam's voice cracked on a laugh. "She is real, then. After all this time. She is a real person, and she works in a pharmacy, and you went in there at three in the morning, and..." Her hand flew to her mouth. "Did you speak to her?"

"I asked for sleeping pills."

"And?"

"And she gave me a cup of warm water." Eunhae said it so quietly she was not sure she had said it aloud. "She did not recognize me."

"Of course she did not. You were twenty-one and half dead. She was a child." Garam wiped her eyes with the heel of her hand, and she was laughing, a little, and a little not. "She gave you water. That is her all over, is it not? That is exactly what she would do."

"There was a Hushed in the shop," Eunhae said.

Garam stopped laughing.

"It had taken hold of an old man. A neighbor, I think. It was stronger than it ought to have been, so close to the dark of the moon. And she walked up to it, Garam. She did not see it, not clearly. But she felt it. She felt it and went straight in, and she took the old man's hands, and talked to him, and it let go." Eunhae's own voice had begun to waver. She pressed her lips together to still it. "It simply let go."

For a long moment Garam said nothing at all. The clocks ticked. The morning light fell in a long gold bar across the bench, across the brass and the felt and the half-eaten bun, and lit the fine dust in the air, which turned and glittered as slowly as snow.

"Eunhae," Garam said at last, very carefully. "Do you understand what you are telling me?"

"I understand."

"Your grandmother searched for forty years. She wrote it in the journals. A person who can stand inside it, who holds the grief and does not break." Garam's voice dropped. "She said they were rarer than a green moon."

"I know."

"And you are going to leave her alone."

"I am going to leave her out of it," said Eunhae, and her chest hurt. "It is not a fair thing to ask of anyone, Garam. You, of all people, know. She does not know what she is. She is a pharmacist who is kind to old men. She is not..." She stopped, and she looked down at her hands, at the trembling, and at the ghostly pale band of skin on her wrist where a watch had once sat. "She deserves a life. She does not deserve mine."

Garam looked at her for a very long time. She did not argue. She did the thing she had always done, which was worse than any argument: she reached over, picked up the second half of the bun, and put it back into Eunhae's hand.

"Eat," she said. "And then think about it, properly. Not with your fear. With the rest of you." She picked up her bag. At the door she hesitated, one hand on the frame. "The last time we put this off," she said, "it was your grandmother. And you know how that ended."

The bell chimed. The door closed. Eunhae sat with her back against the bench and a bun in her hand and the ticking of forty-one clocks all around her, and did not eat it.

She worked through the morning because it was the only way she knew to keep from going mad. A railway watch with a cracked jewel. A carriage clock whose owner, an elderly widow, had written on the repair ticket, It stopped the day he died, please do not make it run too well. Eunhae had cleaned the movement and left the slightest hesitation in the chime, as one leaves a place in a bed. Noon came and went. The light shifted across the floor. At some point she realized she had put the loupe down and was sitting with her hands in her lap again, doing nothing, staring at the drawer.

She stood. She crossed the shop. She took the sweater out and held it against her chest for a moment, folded as it was, with her chin on the top of it, and closed her eyes. The wool was soft. It smelled of nothing at all. It had stopped carrying the scent of its first owner years ago, and what it held now was the shop, the oil and brass and old wood, the faint cool smell of her own hands.

She put it back. She shut the drawer.

At twenty minutes past four, the bell rang again.

Eunhae had her back to the door. She was reaching for a jar of screws on the high shelf and she did not turn at once; she was expecting a customer, one of her regulars, the retired schoolteacher with the wristwatch collection, or the boy who came in to look at the cuckoo. "A moment," she said, and she found the jar and brought it down. Then she turned.

It was a quarter second before her mind caught up with her eyes.

Yeon Haeseul stood just inside the threshold.

She had changed out of the white coat. She wore a dark green knitted dress and a long coat of oatmeal wool, and her hair was loose now, falling in a thick dark wave over one shoulder. Her cheeks were pink from the wind. She looked younger in the daylight and also more tired, the exhaustion drawn in fine lines at the corners of her eyes, and she was holding something in both hands, wrapped in a handkerchief, with the carefulness of a person carrying a bird.

"Excuse me," she said. "I am sorry to bother you. Is this Slow Hours?"

For a moment Eunhae could not speak. The whole shop seemed to have gone very still, every clock in it ticking in an enormous, held-breath hush. She felt the tremor in her hand and slid it into her apron pocket.

"Yes," she said. "It is."

"I found a card." Haeseul gave a small, wry, embarrassed smile. "At the pharmacy. Somebody left it last night. It was you, wasn't it? I recognized your voice when you spoke just now." A pause. "I do not know why I came. I do not usually follow cards."

"You do not have to explain."

"I have a watch." Haeseul unfolded the handkerchief, and in the middle of it lay a small, slender wristwatch with a worn leather strap, its crystal faintly scratched, its hands frozen at twelve minutes past four. "It was my mother's. It has not run in two years. I have taken it to two other shops, and they both said it was not worth repairing, and I thought..." She stopped. Her mouth moved. "I do not know what I thought. That you looked like someone who might not say that."

Eunhae came out from behind the bench. She did not trust herself to cross the room quickly, so she crossed it slowly, with the unhurried gait she used for nervous customers, and held out both her hands.

"May I?"

Haeseul laid the watch in her palms.

The instant it touched her skin, Eunhae felt it. She had known she would. She felt it the way she felt the Hushed in the walls of the city, a low, deep, waiting sorrow, only this was not a stranger's grief, drifting and unclaimed. This was one woman's love, gone sour in the keeping. It was concentrated in the little brass body of the watch like water in a stone. It was the long gray corridor and the beeping machines and a hand growing lighter in hers. It was the clock that did not move.

She held it very steady, though her heart was pounding.

"It stopped at four-twelve," she said.

"Yes." Haeseul's voice was soft. "That was when she..." A breath. "It was in the afternoon. A Tuesday. I did not even realize until I got home that the watch had stopped. I just took it off her wrist and put it in my pocket, and when I looked at it again, that was the time."

"You wound it?"

"I could not. I tried. It would not take."

"Springs do that, sometimes." Eunhae turned the watch over. There was an inscription on the back, tiny, in a looping copperplate hand. She read it without meaning to, and then she could not stop herself from reading it twice. To Suhee, for all the hours we have. "It is a very good movement. Swiss, I think, from the nineteen-seventies. Someone chose it with great care."

"My father," said Haeseul. "He gave it to her on their wedding day. He left when I was nine." She said it quite simply, without bitterness, like a woman reading a line from a ledger. "But she wore it every day for thirty years, so I suppose she thought it was worth keeping."

"I think it was." Eunhae looked up. She had not meant to. Haeseul was standing very close, closer than customers usually stood, near enough that Eunhae could see the faint, dark, precise rim around her irises, and the small mole at the edge of her jaw, and a thread of silver in the hair above her left ear that she had not seen the night before. It was absurd. It was eleven years. It was a whole lifetime. "I can repair it," she said. "It will take three days. I will need to take the movement apart."

"Is it expensive?"

"No."

Haeseul looked at her. "That is not an honest answer."

"It is the only one I have."

A flicker crossed Haeseul's face, surprise and suspicion and a tiny, helpless, answering warmth, and Eunhae saw it and cursed herself, because it was exactly the sort of thing she had promised herself she would not do. She was supposed to be keeping her distance. She was supposed to be choosing the safe, sensible, bloodless course.

"Forgive me," Haeseul said slowly. "I am going to say something strange, and you may tell me to mind my own business. But last night, at the pharmacy, you looked at me as if you knew me."

Eunhae's mouth had gone dry. "Did I?"

"Yes. And just now, again. It is a very particular look." Haeseul tilted her head. "I do not think we have met. I would have remembered. But I keep thinking..."

"You look like someone I owed a coat," Eunhae said.

The words were out before she could stop them. She heard them fall into the silence like a coin down a well. Her face went hot to the roots of her hair.

Haeseul stared at her. And then, to Eunhae's astonishment, she laughed. It was an unguarded laugh, low and warm and surprised out of her, and it changed her whole face, the weariness falling away from it for a moment as if a hand had wiped a pane of glass.

"A coat," Haeseul said. "Is that so? And did you ever pay it back?"

"Not yet."

"Well." She was still smiling, and the smile did something to the air in the shop that Eunhae could not afford to think about. "If I am the one you owe, I suppose I will have to wait and see. But I would rather you fixed my mother's watch first."

"I will," said Eunhae. "Three days."

"Three days." Haeseul wrapped the empty handkerchief, tucked it into her pocket, and hesitated, one hand on the edge of the bench. "That card said before the new moon," she said. "Was that about the watch?"

It was the question Eunhae had been dreading since the bell rang. She stood with her hands at her sides and the ticking of forty-one clocks all around her, and found, with a strange, cold clarity, that she could not lie. Not about this. Not to that face.

"Not entirely," she said.

"Then what was it about?"

"I do not know how to tell you yet." It was the most honest thing she had said to anyone in years. "I would like to. I think I owe you more than a coat. But I need a few days to find the words, and I need you to trust me that it is not a thing I am hiding for any bad reason."

Haeseul studied her. The light from the window lay across her cheek, and her eyes were very dark and very steady, and Eunhae thought: she is deciding whether I am worth the risk. She had seen that look in the face of the sick, and the tired, and the lonely, and now she understood exactly where it came from. It was the look of someone who had been left, and had decided long ago to leave the first door open anyway.

"All right," Haeseul said at last. "Three days. For the watch, and for the words."

She went to the door. At the threshold she turned, and for a moment the afternoon light was behind her and Eunhae could not see her expression, only the outline of her, slight and warm and straight, with the long dark hair stirring in the draft.

"Your hands," Haeseul said. "You keep putting one in your pocket. It is shaking, isn't it?"

Eunhae said nothing.

"You should eat something. And rest, if you can." A small, rueful smile. "I realize that is rich, coming from me. Good afternoon, Miss Baek."

The bell chimed. The door closed. Eunhae stood motionless in the middle of her shop with her hand still pressed into her pocket, and the afternoon went on ticking around her. Miss Baek, Haeseul had said, and Eunhae glanced at the framed repair license on the wall by the door, where her grandmother's name and her own sat side by side in gilt letters. Of course. A woman who read labels for a living would read a wall.

Slowly, Eunhae took her hand from her pocket and looked at it. It was not shaking. For the first time in six days, in six weeks, in what felt like six years, it lay in the light open and quite still.

She looked at the watch. She looked at the drawer. She counted the days on her fingers, the way her grandmother had taught her, folding them one by one against her palm, and when she reached the end of the count, there were five nights left.

"Five," Eunhae said aloud, to the room, to the clocks, to no one. "Then I will tell her."

Forty-one clocks ticked on in the golden dust, and not one of them disagreed.