On the third night she went down the hill without letting herself stop.

She had made a bargain with her own feet at sundown. They could take her anywhere they liked as long as they kept moving, and her mind would not be consulted until she was standing in front of the doors. It was a childish trick, the kind she used on herself when a sending frightened her, and it worked. The lamps came on one by one along the lane. The river breathed out its cold. At the foot of the last stair the station rose before her, long and dark, with its green tiles and its rows of unlit lanterns, and she did not turn aside.

In her coat pocket lay three things. A notebook of faded blue cloth that she had read twice and could remember almost none of. A tea house receipt, folded in four, covered on both sides with her own square handwriting. And the contract, because she was a professional and professionals carried their papers.

She took out the receipt under the lamp at the foot of the stair and read it once more.

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

*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.*

That last line was hers and hers alone, and she remembered writing it. She remembered the river, and the deck of the Willow Step, and the light going amber. The rest of the night before, the night she had spent standing at the gate with her hand on the latch, she remembered perfectly, because nothing had happened in it. She had walked away. She had lain awake. She had listened to the bell of the hour roll across the city and had felt the mark on her wrist beat once against her pillow, hard, like a knock, and then go still.

She had not gone.

She was not proud of it. But she had read, in a stranger's careful pencil, that a man had sat on a bench for an entire night with his hands folded, waiting for a woman who did not come, and the knowledge sat in her stomach now like a stone she had swallowed.

The doors of the station were open.

Midnight had come as she walked, thin and sudden, the way it always did. The thirteenth hour unfolded around her. The lamps lost their weight. The air tasted of copper and rain. And for the first time since the night of the knot, she did not feel the click of her gift settling into place, because the click was already there, and under it there was something warmer, a steady pulse at her left wrist that matched the beat of the pale mark under her cuff.

She went in.

The hall was exactly as the notebook had said it would be, which was somehow worse than if it had not been.

The long timber room. The shuttered ticket windows. The paper lanterns hanging still from their hooks, and under the great clock, whose hands stood at one minute past twelve, the dead of the old quarter gathered along the benches in their quiet circles. The bride with the veil. The little boy sitting on the floor. They turned their faces toward her as she came in, and she saw something move over them, a ripple of relief, like wind going over a field of grass.

At the north end of the farthest bench, a man stood up.

He did it slowly, as if he had not been sure until that moment that she was real. He wore the long dark coat she had seen in the portrait. His hair was a little disordered at the nape. He was exactly as the portrait had made him, only more tired, and with something in his face that had not been drawn, a kind of careful quiet, the look of a man who has trained himself to receive a visitor without leaning toward her.

He came to meet her halfway down the hall. He stopped at a polite distance, a little more than an arm's length, and bowed his head.

"Good evening," he said. "My name is Doyun Rennar. I understand I am your contract."

She stared at him.

It was not the words. It was the tone. There was no bitterness in it, no reproach. He said it with the mildness of a man making an introduction at a dinner party, and his eyes were clear and courteous, and if he had been anyone else she would have believed that this was the first time they had ever met.

But she had read the notebook. She knew that he had been here last night, and the night before, and the night before that. She knew that he remembered everything. And she understood, with a lurch under her ribs, that he was giving her the introduction he had given eight Trackers, and the same introduction he had given her, and that he had done it so many times that it came out perfectly, without a seam.

He had practiced being forgotten until it looked like good manners.

"Nahee Vael," she said, because it was all she could think to say. "Of the Seoryeon Trackers."

"I know," he said, and then, quickly, with a flicker of what might have been embarrassment, "That is, I was told. I make a point of learning the names of whoever Hall sends. You will forgive me."

"You don't have to do that."

"Do what?"

"Pretend."

He was silent a moment. Then his face softened, very slightly, and she saw that she had surprised him, and that he was deciding whether to be glad.

"I did not want you to feel observed," he said quietly. "It is a great deal, to be told by a stranger that he has already spent a night with you. It makes some people afraid."

"I read your book."

"Ah."

"I can't tell you what was in it. I can't hold on to any of it." She drew out the receipt and held it up between two fingers like evidence. "But I wrote some things down myself. In my own words. And those stayed."

His eyes went to the paper, and she saw the exact moment he understood. His hand lifted a few inches from his side and fell again. He breathed out slowly.

"You worked that out," he said, "in a single day."

"I had a lot of time." She looked away, because she could not hold his gaze and say the next thing. "I'm sorry about last night. I didn't come."

"You are not required to come."

"That isn't what I said."

He looked at her for a long moment. "No," he said. "It is not."

He did not say it was all right. He did not say it was nothing. He only inclined his head, as a man does when he has been handed a small thing very carefully, and said, "Thank you for telling me."

Then, because he was who he was, he said, "Shall we walk? The hall is cold, and the dead like to be asked first."

They went out together into the old quarter, at a distance she measured without meaning to. Four feet. Close enough for the thread between their wrists to hang slack. Far enough that she could pretend it was an accident.

The lanes were thick with presences. She worked, because she knew how to work and it was a relief to have something to do with her hands. A man in a fisherman's hat who wished to return a borrowed net. A girl on a stoop who was learning a song and could not get past the second verse. She read their threads, and they were warm and amber and obvious, and each time she found the end of one, Doyun was already there, a half step to the side, saying the right thing in the right voice at the right moment.

"Mr. Baek," he said to the fisherman, with a courtesy so simple she nearly missed it. "Your net is in the boathouse under the blue tarp. Your brother thought you wanted it kept."

He did not touch their shoulders. He did not take their hands. He stood where they could see him and let them come to him in their own time, and when they did he gave them all of his attention. She noticed it the way she noticed the weather, without choosing to. There was no technique in it. It was only that when he looked at a ghost, he looked at the ghost, entirely, as if nothing else in the world might ask him for a thing.

"You're good at this," she said, after the fisherman was gone.

"I have had a great deal of practice."

"No. I mean you're good at it. There's a difference."

He glanced at her and away. "Then thank you."

At the top of the stair that led down toward the river, the cobbles were worn into hollows by centuries of feet, and tonight a mist had risen from the water and lay in the hollows like milk. She went down first, as she always did. A Tracker did not follow. A Tracker found the way. The step was wet. Her boot caught the edge of it, and the world tilted.

A hand closed on her elbow.

It was warm, and it held her upright, and it was gone almost before she had registered it. When she caught her balance and turned, Doyun was a full step back, hands folded behind him, looking at a point somewhere past her shoulder.

"I do not need help," she said, sharper than she meant.

"No," he agreed. "I'm sorry."

"Don't apologize."

"All right."

"And don't say all right like that."

"Like what?"

"Like you're used to being told to go away."

He was quiet. In the mist, his face was pale and very still. "I have been told to go away," he said at last, with a kind of gentle honesty that made her chest ache. "By a good many people. It is rarely unkind. Most of them are frightened. I would rather they be frightened of me from a distance than comfortable with me close, so I step back first. It saves everyone the effort."

She did not know what to answer. She had expected to be annoyed by him. She had been prepared for evasions and flattery and strange old-world manners. She had not been prepared for him to tell her the truth in a voice that did not ask for anything, and then simply wait, as if the matter had been settled long ago and he had made his peace.

It made her want to shake him.

"Doesn't it make you angry?" she demanded.

"What?"

"That they all leave. That I will. That I'm standing here walking around with you for an hour and tomorrow I won't be able to say your name."

"Anger is a luxury," he said. "It requires the hope of changing something."

"That is the saddest thing I have ever heard."

"It is not meant to be sad." He gave a small, rueful smile. "It is meant to be practical."

She walked on in silence. The mist swirled around her boots, and under the sound of the river she could hear his steps, light and measured, keeping the precise distance she had set. Every few minutes the thread between their wrists drew taut, and he adjusted, without comment, as a man will adjust his pace for a child or an invalid or a stranger he does not want to frighten.

In the lower lane she tried to tell him about her grandmother's tea.

She was not sure why. She was talking about Granny Okja, about the brown leaves in the tin on the second shelf, and about the way she made it every night after a sending, because it was the one thing that always tasted like home. "It's a loose leaf," she said. "Roasted. She buys it from a stall near the, from the, it's called..."

She stopped.

The name had been right there. She knew the name of the tea. She had said it ten thousand times, at ten thousand kitchen tables, with a cup in each hand. She could taste it. She could smell the roasted bitterness rising from the pot. And where the word should have been, there was only a smooth, polished absence, like a river stone with the carving worn off.

"The name of it," she said, and laughed, and it came out wrong. "I've lost the name of the tea."

"It's a small thing," Doyun said gently.

"Yes. It's very small. I've been tired." She waved it away. "People forget things when they're tired. I'll remember it in the morning."

He did not answer. She glanced at him, and for the length of a breath she caught his face before he arranged it. It was not pity. It was something worse, a kind of grave attention, the look of a man who knew precisely what a lost word meant and was choosing, for her sake, not to say.

She turned away.

*A Tracker pays,* she thought. *Every sending costs something. It's only the tiredness.*

She did not write it on the receipt.

They sat on the river steps in the last hour before the sky changed, on the stone worn smooth by generations of waiting, with the water lapping a yard below their boots. She had stopped keeping to four feet some time ago. It had happened the way the tide comes in, without a single moment when she could have said it began. Now there was a hand's width between his sleeve and hers, and the thread hung loose and silent in the space.

She asked him what he wanted.

It was a plain question. She had meant it plainly. She had thought, in her professional way, that the subject of a sending ought to be asked what he wanted, if only to determine what could be given. He looked out at the river for a long time, at the mist and the slow black current, before he answered.

"I have been asked that by a number of people," he said. "I have never found a good answer."

"Try."

"I used to want to be remembered. It seemed to me the most reasonable thing in the world. Then I wanted to be forgiven for wanting it. Then I wanted nothing, and that was easier." He turned a pencil over in his fingers. She had not seen him take it out. "I have been wanting nothing for a long while. It is a kind of peace, I think. A very narrow one."

"That isn't peace," Nahee said.

"What is it, then?"

"It's what you do when you've stopped expecting to get anything." She heard how harsh it sounded and could not stop. "I know. I'm the same."

He looked at her.

She had not meant to say it. It had come up from the place where she kept things she did not examine, and now it hung in the cold between them, bare as a stripped branch. She did not look at him. She stared at her own hands, and found that she was turning the silver ring on her thumb round and round and round.

He did not ask what she meant. He did not say *tell me.* He only sat there, a hand's width away, with the river going past, and let the silence be whatever she needed it to be.

That was what undid her, in the end. Not the kindness. The room he left.

The sky began to change. The grey crept up from the east, and the edges of the hall behind them softened, and she saw it start along his shoulder, the faint blur of light through cloth. She stood. She had decided before she stood, and her hand was already in her pocket, closing around the pencil stub.

"Wait," she said. "Don't go yet."

"I do not choose it," he said, with a thin ghost of a smile.

"I know. I'm not asking you to." She crouched on the step, tore the corner off the receipt, and pressed it flat against her knee. "I'm choosing something. You said I could choose one thing. So give me a minute."

She wrote.

She wrote it fast, in her square hand, with the pencil pressing hard enough to dent the paper. She did not choose the most important thing. She chose the one that had hurt her most, because it was the one she was least likely to let go.

*He stepped back before I told him to.*

She looked at it. It was not a good sentence. It said nothing about the pact or the contract or the name she had lost. But it was true, and it was hers, and she held it against her chest, and she knew with a certainty that was almost physical that it would be there in the morning.

"Now," she said. "Go on."

He was nearly transparent. The grey light shone through his coat and the stone steps shone through his hands, and still he was smiling, gently, at the edge of the water.

"Tomorrow," he said, "you will meet me as if for the first time. Try to be kind to that person, Ninth. He will not have earned it. But he will be very glad to see you."

The bell rang. The sun touched the river.

She was alone on the steps with a torn piece of paper in her hand and the taste of tea she could not name in her mouth. She read the line once, slowly, and put it in her pocket, and sat for a long time watching the morning arrive without her.