She did not read it that afternoon.

She carried the notebook to the kitchen table and sat with it for the better part of an hour, one hand flat on the cover, like a person guarding a sleeping animal. The light slid across the floor. The stationery shop downstairs pulled down its shutters. Twice she opened the first page and read the line in pencil and closed the book again, and the second time she got up and filled the kettle, because a woman who had just discovered a stranger's book in her own coat pocket needed something to do with her hands.

It was not fear. She tried to name what it was and settled on the word that cost her the least. It was strategy. A Tracker did not walk into an unknown thread without testing the tension first, and she had no idea what this thing was pulling on.

The thing it was pulling on, she suspected, was her.

In the end she took the book to a tea house by the river at noon the next day, in the full flat daylight, in a public room where nothing frightening could happen. She had slept three hours. She had not gone to the station the night before. She had stood in the lane at midnight with her hand on the gate and found, to her own disgust, that she could not make her feet go down the hill. She had gone to bed instead, with the notebook under her pillow like a girl hiding a letter, and had woken with the sun on her face and a sense of having broken a rule she could not name.

The tea house was called the Willow Step, and it had been there as long as the river. Its tables stood on a long wooden deck over the water, shaded by a tattered awning, and the owner knew her well enough to bring her the green tea without being asked. She took the corner table. She set the cup at her left hand and the notebook at her right, and she looked at it for a while across the narrow gap of wood between them.

"Just read it," she said under her breath. "It's a book."

She opened it.

The second page began in the middle of a sentence. The handwriting was small, even, and slightly slanted, in pencil so fine that the lines looked etched. She read the first paragraph and felt the hair stand up along her arms.

*Night 1. She came in at 12:21 by the station clock. Cream trench coat, dark braid, a thread roll at her left hip, a silver ring on her left thumb that she turns when she is thinking. She stood in the doorway for a full minute before she crossed the hall. Her walk is that of someone who has never once been late and has decided to be furious about it. I said, "You're late, Ninth." It was a poor line. It was the only one I had.*

She read it a second time. Then a third.

It was her. Every detail was hers. The coat, the braid, the habit with the ring that she had not known anyone noticed. And the writer had noticed it all in the space of a single minute with the coolness of a man taking inventory, and he had set it down in plain unadorned sentences without any attempt at flattery.

She turned the page.

*She told me she had come to send me. She said it correctly, with her name and her number, so that nothing would be done in the dark. I have not been told anything so respectfully in a very long time. She did not look at me directly until she had to, and when she did I saw her decide not to like me. I think she decides most things that way, in advance, as a form of armor. I respect it. I have worn the same.*

*I asked for one thing, that she ask me how I am. Once a night. She did not agree. But she did not say no.*

Nahee set down her cup. The tea had gone cold. She did not remember lifting it.

She read on. The account of the knot was exact and unadorned, the thread flaring white, the bell tolling the thirteen strokes, the second strand sliding from his wrist to hers. He had set down each moment in the order it occurred, without judgment, and where he did not understand he said so. *I do not know why the thread divided. I have never seen it do so. It may be nothing.* There was a sentence she had to read twice, because the ordinary words in it seemed to rearrange themselves. *When she took my hand to bind it, I felt, for the first time in a long while, that I was being held by someone who did not know she was doing it.*

Then the name.

*At the end, with the light coming, she said my name aloud. I had not heard it spoken as something to be kept in longer than I can say. I have been called a great many things. Ghost. Mistake. Hazard. Entry. I think she meant it only as a spell against forgetting. But it was the first time in my life that my name was used as a weapon in my defense, and I did not know what to do with my face.*

She put her hand over her mouth.

A sound came out of the river, the plash of a pole, a barge sliding past with a load of crates, and a woman at the next table laughed at something. The ordinary noises of the world went on around her. She sat with the book open in front of her and a rawness spreading through her chest, as if she had accidentally walked into a room where someone was undressing.

He had seen her. That was the thing. In one night, in one hour of one night, a man whom she could not remember had looked at her more carefully than anyone had in twenty years, and then he had written it down, and then, at the risk of whatever it cost him, he had put it in her pocket.

It made her furious. It made her unbearably sad. It made her want to read faster.

She turned back through the book instead.

The older pages were dense. They did not begin on Night 1. They went back, and back, and further than she would have believed a single notebook could hold. The paper changed. It grew coarse, then yellow, then fragile as dried leaves. The ink changed with it, from pencil to pen to a thick brown ink that had faded to the color of tea. The handwriting shifted in small, steady stages, a curl on one letter in one era, a slant in another, until the very pen seemed to change in his hand with the passing of years. Some of the pages were in scripts she could not read at all.

And each page had a name on it. A single name, underlined, at the head of every entry.

*Eun-seo. Bomi. Tae-jin. The Tracker called Hollis, who had a limp. Pyeong. Madam Goh of the lower market. Ilsu. The boy with the kite.* There were hundreds. She stopped counting after forty. Every one was a person who had walked into the station at midnight and been loved there for a night, and been forgotten by the dawn, and had been written down, dutifully and gently, by the only man in the city who could not forget.

The weight of it came down on her slowly. This was not a diary. It was a ledger of a different kind, a register of every kindness he had received and every kindness he had given. He had been keeping it for longer than she had been alive. He had been keeping it for longer than her grandmother's grandmother had been alive.

He was so much older than the face in the portrait.

She thought, with a clarity that was almost physical, *how lonely.*

Then she thought, *no,* and shut the thought away at once.

Somewhere near the back of the book, where the paper was newest, a single page had been marked with a strip of folded red thread. She almost did not stop. Her thumb was moving on by itself, like a hand turning a prayer wheel. But the thread caught her eye, bright against the cream, and she opened the book at the marker.

The handwriting on this page was different. It was larger, and it pressed harder, and the lines were not so even. As if the writer had written it in a hurry, or in a different frame of mind.

*Ninth,*

*Do not believe the word "soul" in your contract. I have no thread because I am not dead. That is the whole of the matter. I am something else, and Hall knows it, and they have called me by the wrong name for the same reason that people call a wolf a dog. It is easier to send a thing away if it has no face.*

*I will not ask you to believe me. I will ask you only to look. Ask me anything and I will answer truly. Ask Hall the same, and see what they do with the question.*

*I am sorry to put this on paper. I wanted you to have it before you have the chance to forget why you are cautious.*

She read it three times.

Then she read the part that came after, which was only a single line at the bottom of the page, in a smaller hand, as if added later.

*She will not remember reading this. But I will know that she did, which is the only way I have ever been able to keep anything.*

Her eyes stung. She looked up sharply at the river, and pressed the heel of her hand against one eye, and told herself she was tired.

Not dead.

The contract said *wandering soul, hazardous.* It said *Method: Tracker's sending, by thread.* She had read it four times on the step of Granny's house. She knew that the sending of a living man was forbidden in the guild, because Barun had told her so over twenty years, in a hundred small lessons. A Tracker finds the dead, he used to say. A Tracker does not touch the living. The first time you do, you become something else.

She thought of the number on the lien. She thought of the blank line on the contract that said *additional* in a hand that had known exactly how to tempt her.

*Ask Hall the same, and see what they do with the question.*

She closed the book.

She put it on the table and sat with her hands pressed between her knees, looking at the grain of the wood. There was a cold, level feeling in her stomach, the feeling of a thread going taut. She had been prepared to dislike a hazardous soul. She had not been prepared to be given a reason to distrust the people who were paying her.

*I will not do it,* she thought, and then, *I have no choice,* and the two thoughts sat side by side, neither of them winning.

She was reaching for her tea when she noticed the words.

She had read three pages in the last quarter of an hour, and a small part of her, the practical part, the part that noticed things, had been quietly taking inventory. It had counted the details in the page about the knot. It had counted the lines about her coat and her braid. And now, in the stillness after the closing of the book, it informed her that she could no longer remember a word of what the writing said.

She opened the notebook again.

The page about the knot was still there, small and slanted, in pencil. She read it. She understood every word. And when she lifted her eyes and tried to recall the sentence she had just read, it slid out of her head like water through a net.

She tried again. She read the first line, *At the end, with the light coming, she said my name aloud*, and shut her eyes, and tried to say it back to herself. She had the gist. She knew it was about the name. She could not get the words.

A small cold fear ran through her.

It was not the book. She knew it was not the book. It was the thing the old woman had said in the garden, and the thing the notebook itself had been telling her all along. A knot like this does not care what you remember. Whatever she read of his, whatever she was told, whatever was handed to her from his side, it was lifted away from her within minutes, the way sand is taken from a tide line. She had been reading with all her attention, and it was already gone.

She thought of the hollow in her memory of the night. She thought of the bar of nothing across the middle of it.

The pencil was by her hand. It was a stub, nothing special, one that she carried in her thread roll for marking knots. She picked it up and turned over the back of her tea house receipt, and without deciding to do it she began to write.

She wrote in her own square quick hand. She did not copy his words. She would not have known how. She wrote the one thing in the whole morning that had struck her hardest, in the plainest words she owned.

*He sits at the north end of the bench and he never asks for anything.*

She stared at it.

She did not know where the sentence had come from. She had not read it in the book. She had not remembered it from the night. It had come up out of the same deep place that the knot was tied in, and it had arrived whole, and her hand had written it before her mind had approved.

She looked at the paper. She closed her eyes. She counted to twenty, slowly, in the manner Barun had taught her, and opened them again.

The line was still there. And she remembered it. Not the way she remembered a fact, but the way she remembered her own name, with a weight that did not move.

"Oh," Nahee said softly, to the empty table.

It did not take a genius to see the principle. Whatever he told her went out like a tide. Whatever she chose, in her own words, in her own hand, stayed. The knot would take what was given. It would not take what was made.

She sat there with the receipt in her hand and the river sliding past, and she felt, for the first time since she had walked out of the station, that she had put a foot on something solid.

It did not make her feel better. It made her feel the way she did when a thread she had been tracing for hours finally turned and showed her what was at the end of it, and what was at the end was not what she had expected.

There was a man at the north end of a bench who had been alone for more than two centuries. She had been hired to send him away. And her own hand had just written that he never asked for anything.

She was angry at herself for knowing it.

She was angrier, and this was the part she did not look at directly, because she had spent half a day reading about a stranger and the stranger had not once been unkind. He had not blamed her. He had not begged. He had set down her coat and her braid and her bad temper in his careful pencil, and called it respect.

*I pity him,* she thought, with an irritation so sharp it surprised her.

*No. I do not pity him.* She snapped the notebook shut. *I cannot afford to.*

The waiter came with fresh tea. She thanked him and did not drink it.

The afternoon went by on the deck of the Willow Step in a long slow slide of light. The barges went down the river, and the barges came back. She wrote a few more lines on the receipt, short ones, in her own hand. *The clock stopped at one minute past twelve. He laughs like someone who has not had the chance in years. I do not know what I am going to do.* She read them over and put the receipt carefully between the pages of the book.

When the sun began to set, she paid for her tea and left the tea house. She walked up the hill with the notebook in her pocket and her hand curled round it, telling herself that she was going to the guildhall, or to Barun's workshop, or home.

She was halfway up the old stair before she looked down and saw, with a lurch of her stomach, the dark green roof of the station spread out below her in the dusk. She was facing it. She was walking toward it. Her feet had turned her around somewhere on the second landing, quietly, without consulting her, and she had not noticed.

On her left wrist, under the cuff, the pale mark was beating. It beat slowly, in time with her pulse, and a little warmer than her skin.

She stood on the stair with the last light on her face. In the lanterns of the old quarter, one by one, the evening flames were being lit.

"I haven't decided anything," she told the mark.

It went on beating.

She went down the stairs.