She found the child on the fourth night, in the middle of the market, holding a kite string with no kite on it.

The night market of the old quarter ran along the lower terrace above the river, a long double row of stalls that opened at dusk and closed at the stroke of midnight, when the living packed up their crates and the dead came out to wander the leftover lanes. At the stroke of the thirteenth hour it was a different place entirely. The paper lamps hung dark. The awnings sagged over empty tables. The smell of grilled squid and spilled tea lingered in the cold air like a memory, and a thin ghost-light lay along the cobbles, grey and silver, like the shine of wet slate.

Nahee came down the central aisle alone, because Doyun had stopped at the top of the stair to speak with a woman who wished to have her ribbon admired. The thread on her wrist stretched behind her, loose and humming. She had learned the length of it by now. Forty paces was comfortable. Sixty began to tug. At ninety she felt it in her teeth, so she kept to sixty, and from sixty she could see the small shape standing under the dead lamp of the third stall from the end.

She slowed.

It was a girl, perhaps six years old, in a faded quilted jacket and one shoe. Her hair was tied in two stiff little bunches. She was not crying. She was holding a length of kite string in both fists, wound tight around her knuckles, and she was looking up into the dark above the stalls with the fixed, patient expression of a child who has been told to wait and does not intend to be caught disobeying.

Nahee crouched in front of her.

"Hello," she said. She used the voice she kept for the very young, low and unhurried, a voice that left room. "I'm Nahee. I'm a Tracker. I help people find things. Do you have a name?"

The child's eyes came down slowly. They were enormous, brown and unblinking, and in them there was a flicker of something that Nahee could not immediately place. It was not fear. It was assessment.

"Bori," the girl said.

"Bori. That's a good name." Nahee glanced at the string. "You've got a kite."

"No."

"No?"

Bori looked up again, at the dark roof of the market, at the place where the paper lamps ought to be burning. "It went away," she said, quite calmly. "I was holding it very tight. Then it went away."

Nahee reached for the thread.

It was her gift, and her trade, and the thing she did best. A child's longing rose from the small chest in a single clear line, as simple as a spider's silk, and she took hold of it with the lightest touch of her fingertips. It ought to have been the easiest sending of her year. Children were always the easiest. They wanted one thing, plainly, and they told you with their whole bodies.

But Bori's thread was not a line.

It was a knot. It came out of her chest and split into six strands, then twelve, then more, all of them fraying and doubling back and tangling over each other, and where they ought to have run toward a single fixed point they scattered in every direction at once. A kite. A hand. A voice shouting across a field. A door closing. A warm kitchen. A long dark street at dusk. The strands crossed each other and cut each other and pulled apart again, and Nahee felt them snarl against her fingers like a net full of terrified fish.

"Oh, no," she murmured.

She tried the Weighted Name. It slipped. She tried the Long Loop, and the tangle swallowed it. She sat back on her heels and thought, with a flare of professional irritation, that any Tracker with a decade of experience could have unpicked a thread this knotted in a quarter of an hour, and that she did not have a quarter of an hour. She had one hour in the open air and forty-seven nights, and the last two nights had been squandered, and the girl in front of her was waiting.

"Can you tell me what you want, Bori?" she asked, more gently than she felt. "Just the one thing. What would make it better?"

Bori's lip trembled. "I don't know."

"Think. If you could have anything at all."

"I want to go home," Bori said, and then, in the same small steady voice, "but I don't know where it is."

The tangle pulled tight. Nahee felt it as a physical pain in her palm and made herself breathe.

A shadow fell across the cobbles.

"May I?" said Doyun.

He had come down the aisle so quietly that she had not heard him. He stood a respectful two paces back with his hands loose at his sides, looking not at her but at the child. His coat was dusted with the pale ash that hung in the lower lanes, and there was a smear of something dark on his cuff, as if he had been kneeling in the dirt.

"I've got it," Nahee said.

"Of course."

"I just need a minute."

"Of course," he said again, so mildly that she felt her ears go hot.

She turned back to the thread. She picked at one loose end, and then another, and the snarl closed over her fingertips like a fist. Her jaw tightened. She tried to approach it from the other side, through the kite, through the string, and the strands bunched and spat. Behind her she heard the soft scuff of Doyun's shoes as he crouched, and then, very quietly, his voice.

"Bori. That is a very fine string."

The child's head turned.

"May I see how you've wound it?" he asked. "I have never seen it done that way. It is very neat."

Bori looked at him for a long, suspicious moment. Then, slowly, she held out her fists.

He did not take the string. He bent his head over her knuckles as if the thing were a work of art, and he said, "Ah. I see. You've tied it off at the end so that it can't slip. That is clever. Who taught you?"

"My brother."

"He must be a careful person."

"He's *loud*," Bori said, with sudden indignation. "He's so loud. But he showed me how to do the knot. He said if you do it right, you never lose it."

"And did you lose it?"

The child's face crumpled. "He let go," she whispered. "He was holding the other end. And then the wind came and he *let go*."

The tangle of the thread shivered. A single strand lifted out of the snarl, bright and distinct, and pointed straight and unmistakable toward the dark north corner of the market.

Nahee went still.

It had been the question. It had never been *what do you want.* It had been *what happened.* She had asked for a wish and he had asked for a story, and the story had untied itself in the time it took to say it. She had spent nine years teaching herself to read the end of a thread. He had spent, what, two hundred years learning to read the beginning.

She felt her face heat. She also felt something she did not want to examine, a small hard bright ache at the base of her ribs, because she had watched a man kneel in the dust beside a dead child and ask the right question, and he had done it without a trace of vanity, and he had not looked at her once to see whether she had noticed.

"The north corner," she said, to nobody.

"Mm," said Doyun, still looking at Bori. "But she isn't ready yet. She needs to be heard first."

"We don't have the time."

"We have all the hour," he said, quietly, and finally looked at her, and she saw that his eyes were perfectly steady. "She has been standing here since the spring, Nahee. Another hour will not hurt her. A rushed sending would."

He had said her name. He had used it without the title, and it had slipped out the way a breath slips out, unplanned. He did not seem to notice. She did, and she looked away.

"Fine," she said. "You do the talking."

He did. For an hour and a quarter, in the dark of an empty market, on a pile of folded awnings that smelled of salt and old canvas, Doyun Rennar listened to a dead child describe the last afternoon of her life.

She told it in pieces. There had been a field behind the school, and a hill, and a day with a brisk white wind. Her brother Jun, who was eleven and louder than a rooster, had taken her to fly the kite he had built from newspaper and bamboo. He had held the string while she ran. It had gone up so high it was a speck. She remembered the string humming in her hands, and the pull, and her brother laughing, and then the wind had turned.

She did not say what happened after. She said, "And then I was here." She said it three times. Each time the same, a little flatter, as if the sentence had been worn smooth by repetition.

Nahee sat on the other end of the awning with her chin on her knees. She had meant to keep her distance. She had meant to stay professional, to take notes, to keep half a mind on the north corner and the clock. But somewhere in the second quarter of the hour she had forgotten to take notes, and she was listening instead, with her arms around her shins, to the way the man across from her sat very quietly and said nothing at all.

He did not hurry the child. He did not fill the gaps. When Bori ran out of words, he waited, and the silence was warm, and eventually she found some more. When she began to cry, soundlessly, with her fists still wound in the string, he did not reach for her. He drew a pencil from his pocket, found a scrap of paper in the folds of his coat, and began to draw.

He was not a particularly good artist. She could tell that at a glance. But the thing he drew was clear enough. A kite, a diamond of newsprint with a long tail of knotted rags. A boy at the end of a string, small and square, with his mouth open in a shout. A smaller figure with two stiff bunches of hair, running, arms outstretched toward a sky as big as the whole page.

He passed it to Bori.

She looked at it for a long time. Then she took the pencil from his fingers and, with great solemnity, added a sun.

The thread on Nahee's wrist hummed.

She looked down. The tangle in the child's chest had loosened while her attention was elsewhere. The strands that had been snarled and scattered were drawing slowly together, one by one, as the child drew, into a single faint line that ran north across the market like a chalk mark on slate.

Nahee had seen a thousand knots untie themselves. It never failed to move her. She did not usually let it show. She sat with her hand pressed against her mouth, watching a drawing of a kite, and thought about how much of her working life she had spent trying to make people hurry.

"Bori," she said at last. Her voice came out rougher than she expected. "I know where to go now. If you want to, I'll take you. But I don't think it's the field."

Bori looked up from the paper. "Why not?"

"Because your thread doesn't want the field. It wants someone to let go of."

The child's face went very still.

"It wasn't his fault," she whispered. "The wind came. He didn't mean to."

"I know."

"But he thinks it was."

"Yes," said Doyun, very gently. "I expect he does."

"That is why I'm still here." Bori stared down at the string. "I wanted to tell him. He's been sad for a really long time. I wanted to tell him it was only the wind."

Nahee's throat closed.

She did something then that she would not afterward be able to explain. She had a rule. She had kept it for nine years, in every sending, without a single exception, and it was the first thing Barun had ever taught her, standing in the doorway of his workshop with a spool of grey thread in his hand. *A soul does not stay a night longer than it has to. The longer they linger, the harder they hold. You do the work and you let them go.*

She looked at the north corner of the market. She looked at the clock she did not need to consult, ticking in the bone of her wrist. She looked at the child with the string and the one shoe.

"Bori," she said. "Tomorrow night, we're going to find your brother."

Bori blinked. "Tomorrow?"

"Tomorrow. We'll go together. I'll be here at midnight, and I'll bring a proper kite. You'll have to help me carry it."

"A real one?"

"A real one."

The child's face opened like a flower. It was the first smile Nahee had seen on her, brief and astonished and gap-toothed, and it hit her squarely in the chest. She heard Doyun make a small sound beside her, not quite a laugh, and she did not look at him.

It was half past one in the morning before they had walked Bori to the edge of the market and settled her on a bench under the awning of the tea stall, with the drawing in her lap and a lamp that only she could see. She had gone quiet, then drowsy, in the odd gentle way the dead had of resting. She would be there tomorrow. She had promised.

Nahee climbed the stair to the upper terrace with the thread slack on her wrist and Doyun a few steps behind her. The wind had come up off the river. It smelled of wet stone and distant smoke. She leaned on the railing and looked down over the dark roofs of the old quarter, with their thin ladders of chimney smoke and their rain-bright tiles, and for a while neither of them spoke.

"You're good at this," she said finally. "I told you that already. I think I did."

"Last night. You did." He stood a pace away, hands in his coat pockets, the collar turned up against the wind. "I wrote it down."

"I meant it. I mean it now." She watched the lights along the river. "I've spent nine years finding the thing that people want. I never learned to ask them how they got there."

"It is not a small difference."

"No." She was silent for a moment. "How many?"

"How many what?"

"How many have you sat with. Like that."

He seemed to consider it. "I stopped counting at the third thousand," he said. "There was a time I tried to tell myself that I was helping. I would sit with them, and they would speak, and in the morning another Tracker would send them, and I would think, that was my doing. That is a pleasant thing to believe." His voice was calm and unhurried. "The truth is that most of them cannot be sent. Their wishes are not the kind a Tracker can reach. They need only to be heard, and then they drift away on their own. I have been listening to people who cannot be sent for a very long time."

"That is the sort of job nobody ever thanks you for."

"I have been thanked," he said, and she heard the faint smile in it. "Some of them forget why, but it is quite warm all the same."

She laughed, and was startled, and stopped.

Below them, at the end of the market, a small figure in a quilted jacket was waving, with both arms, at nothing in particular. Nahee watched her for a time.

"What did she say to you?" she asked. "At the end. When I was settling her. She said something, and you turned away."

He was quiet. "She said I was the only grown-up who stayed until the end."

The words dropped into the night like a stone into a well.

It was a small thing for a child to say. It was what children said. But Doyun had turned away from it, quick as a hand flinching from a flame, and Nahee, who had spent nine years learning the shape of what people did not say, felt the hair rise along her arms.

*The only grown-up who stayed.*

She did not know why the phrase hurt. She had no memory of staying, or of being stayed with. She had a bench in a cold hall and the dim impression of a lantern swinging on a hook. She had a silver ring. She had a hole in the middle of her childhood the shape of a single night.

She glanced at him.

He was looking out over the roofs with a smooth, composed, thoroughly unreadable face. His left hand was resting on the railing beside hers. It was a hand's width away, with the pale scar of the pact at the wrist, and for no reason she could name, she thought it looked less like a stranger's hand than like something that had been missing from her for a very long time.

She put the thought away.

"We should go back," she said. "The sky's going."

"Yes."

"I'm choosing something this time. I'm choosing early."

"I know."

She took out the pencil and the torn paper and, leaning on the cold rail, wrote one line, in her own square hand, with the wind tugging at the edge of the sheet.

*He asked the child what happened. I only asked what she wanted.*

She looked at it a moment longer.

Then, below it, smaller, she added: *I promised her a kite.*

She folded the paper in half and put it against her heart, and the sky above the river began to turn to pearl, and the shape of the man beside her started to go soft at the edges, and she did not look away this time until he was gone.