The Taren household was on the third floor of a narrow building at the quieter edge of the port district, up a staircase that was wide at the bottom and narrow at the top, in the way of older construction in coastal cities that had been built to fit the gradual shrinking of available land as the town pressed toward the waterline.

Dara Sein had flagged the case in the notes she had prepared the evening before. Both Bonds had faded on the same night, within what the household believed to be the same hour, though they had been asleep and could not be certain. It was the third case of simultaneous Fading in the Varath coastal district, and the first Naia had been able to visit in person. Dara Sein had warned her, in a low voice, over the morning tea, that it was not an easy house to enter.

"They are not angry," she had said. "That is the difficulty. People who are angry will tell you everything."

The woman who opened the door was in her middle thirties, upright and composed, with a long plait over one shoulder and the particular calm of someone who had been spoken to about her grief often enough in the past week to have developed a practiced way of managing the conversation. She wore a plain grey dress with the sleeves pushed up to the elbow. Her left wrist was bare. She had made no effort to cover it.

"Scholar Solven," she said. "Commander. Please come in. My husband is expecting you."

She showed them into a sitting room that was very tidy, with the tidiness of a space prepared for visitors, which is different from the tidiness of a space that is normally that way. There was a low table with a tray of small cups. There was a window that gave onto the harbor, the curtains tied back with plain cord. There was a shelf with a clay horse and three books and a framed paper, and Naia, whose eyes went to such things, saw that the framed paper was a Bond certificate, the formal Registry document recording the sealing of a pair, and that it had been turned to face the wall.

The husband was already seated. He rose when they came in, which was a formality, and Naia saw in the small adjustments of their arrangement the thousand habits of a long partnership: the way he moved his chair so that she could take the one nearer the window, the way she rested a hand on the back of his chair as she passed it before sitting. They did it without looking. It was as if their bodies had not yet been told.

Naia opened her notebook. Daven took the seat by the wall, a little behind and to the side of the interview circle, where she had asked him to sit. His uniform had a way of making people measure their words, and she needed these two to say as much as they were able.

"I would like to begin by thanking you for agreeing to speak with us," she said. It was the voice she used for investigative interviews: not clinical, because clinical made people protect the very information she needed, and not warm in a way that implied more personal investment than the work allowed. Somewhere between the two. She had calibrated it across years of Misprint cases. "I will ask some specific questions. I would like your answers to be as exact as you can make them. Please tell me if you are unsure, or if a question does not fit."

The husband, whose name was Ren, nodded. He was a large man with large hands that lay very still on his knees, a ship's carpenter by trade, she had been told, and gentle in the way of men who spent their lives making delicate cuts in heavy wood. "We will do our best."

"When did you first notice the change?"

"Wol found it in the morning," he said. He did not look at the woman beside him when he spoke her name. He looked at his own left wrist. "I was still asleep. She came to wake me, and I knew from her face before she showed me."

"It was complete when you found it? Not partial?"

"Complete." The woman, Wol, spoke for the first time. She had a low, precise voice that suggested a person who chose her words and did not waste them. "Both of us. The same morning. I have seen partials, in the neighbors. This was not that."

Naia wrote. "Had there been any earlier change? Any fading in the weeks before, in the clarity or the color of the ink? Anything either of you noticed?"

Husband and wife looked at one another. It was a brief exchange, less than two seconds, the compressed communication of two people who had shared enough time to develop a vocabulary beneath words.

"There had been some discussion," Wol said. "Between us. About some things. Not about the Bond itself. But about some things."

Naia noted: interpersonal conflict preceding event. "You need not tell me what the discussion concerned. I am interested chiefly in the timeline and the observable changes."

"The timeline was about three weeks," Ren said. "From when we began to talk about it to when it faded."

She wrote this down. Then she did what she had told Daven in the carriage she would do. She finished the notation, laid down her pen, and said nothing. She let the silence stand.

It was an unnatural thing to do in a formal interview, and she felt the instinct to fill it, the habit of eight years pressing at the back of her throat. She did not fill it. The harbor sounds drifted up through the window, the knock of a hull against a pier, a gull, a child's voice on the quay. Ren looked at his hands. Wol looked at the curtain.

It lasted perhaps fifteen seconds. Then Wol said, in a different voice, not the practiced one, "He wanted to move to the north coast. His brother has a yard there. I did not want to go. We said things."

"Wol," said her husband.

"It is all right." She did not look at him. "I want her to know. It was not a large thing. I thought it was a large thing. It was a conversation about which house we would live in." She stopped. "I have been trying all week to find the thing that was worth losing it over, and there is no such thing."

Naia felt, at the edge of her attention, a sense of something turning over. It was the thing she had known, in the pauses of other interviews, and had never until this moment been able to prove: that the true statement lives in the silence after the formal answer. It lives there only if the silence is left empty.

She wrote it down. She underlined it.

"Did you notice it happening?" The voice was not hers. It came from behind her, from the seat by the wall. It was lower than his professional voice, and it was not softer exactly, but it lacked the economy that professional speech had, as though a layer of processing had been removed between the question and the asking of it. "Before the morning. Did you feel it going?"

Ren looked past her at Daven. Something in his expression changed, the practiced composure opening briefly at the edges. "No," he said. "We were arguing about something small. I do not even remember what it was, now. We argued and then we went to sleep, and in the morning it was gone."

"You do not remember," Daven said.

"I have tried." Ren's voice cracked, very slightly, on the last word, and he stopped and cleared his throat. "Eleven years. I have tried to remember what I said. I think it was about the roof."

Wol was looking at her left wrist. Not with the checking gesture Naia had seen in the market, the anxious monitoring of something that might change. With the expression of a woman looking at a place where something had been and had left no trace of its leaving. A smooth, ordinary patch of skin. A little pale where the sleeve had always been. She did not look up during the silence that followed.

Naia looked at her bandage.

The fabric lay where it had always lain. The name beneath it was the same name it had always been. She became aware, after what could not have been more than a second or two, that she was looking at her own wrist rather than at the two people she had come to interview, and she returned her attention to the notebook and continued writing as though the deviation had not occurred.

Her pen did not stop. But her mind had gone somewhere else, for one clear beat, to a room in a different city and a boy with a face she had not let herself picture in a long time, saying: I am sorry. I think it must be a mistake.

She finished the sentence. She closed her eyes for a count of two.

"Thank you," she said, to the room. "I know it is not easy to say these things aloud."

They stayed another half hour. She asked the structured questions. Wol and Ren answered each in full. Toward the end, the husband described how, the morning after, he had gone out to the yard and found that he could not use his hands. Not hurt, not numb. They had simply declined to take up the plane. He had stood at the bench for an hour and had not touched the wood. A boy had asked him if he was ill. He had said he was thinking.

"What about?" Daven asked.

"Whether there was anything in the house worth going back to," Ren said, and then he looked up, startled at his own answer, and the colour came and went in his face. "That is an unkind thing to say."

"It is an honest one," Daven said. "I would not call it unkind."

Wol put her hand on her husband's arm. She did it without looking, as she had touched the chair, as though her hand had a long memory of its own.

They thanked the Tarens at the door. Wol did not say goodbye. She stood in the frame with her arms at her sides and watched them down the stairs, and when Naia looked back from the landing she was still there, very straight, a woman of thirty-five in a grey dress with the sleeves pushed up.

On the second-floor landing, an elderly woman in a quilted jacket was sweeping the same square yard of boards she had probably swept every morning for fifty years. She stopped when she saw them. She leaned on the broom and looked at the Scholar's robe and the Commander's uniform with the frank, unembarrassed curiosity of the very old.

"You have been to see Wol," she said.

"We have," said Naia.

"She will not tell you anything useful." The old woman nodded toward the ceiling. "She and Ren used to sing. In the evenings. They had a duet, the one about the two kites, and you could hear it on the street through the open window. Eleven years. Everyone on the stair knew it." She resumed her sweeping. "Nobody has heard it since the week before last. I keep waiting. It is quiet in a way that I do not like."

"I am sorry," Daven said.

"What for? You did not do it." She swept a little dust into a corner. "I only thought that someone from the Registry might want to know that it was a nice song."

Naia took out her notebook and wrote it down. She did not know whether it was data. She wrote, The duet about the two kites, and underlined it twice, and put the notebook away.

They went out into the late afternoon.

Neither of them spoke on the walk back through the port district. It was not the silence of the carriage, which had been workable and task-adjacent. This silence had weight in it. It had the gravity of shared witness, of two people who had seen the same thing and knew the other had seen it too, and who were not yet ready to make anything of that knowledge. The streets sloped down toward the sea. The shop signs creaked in the wind. A fishmonger was packing away his trestles with a care that looked a little like ceremony, and a girl on a doorstep was shelling peas with great concentration and did not look up as they passed.

At the edge of the promenade there was a low stone wall, weathered pale, that looked out over the inner harbor. The fishing boats were coming in. Their lamps were lit already against the coming dark, small and yellow in the greying light, and their reflections broke and rejoined in the swells. Naia stopped at the wall. She set her notebook down on it and put both hands flat on the cold stone. She had not decided to stop. She had simply stopped.

Daven stopped beside her.

They looked at the harbor. The boats made their slow way through the dimming water. The sea was continuous and patient against the wall below them, the way it was in all the places she had heard it.

"It was a real Bond," she said.

She had not intended to say this. She noted that she had said it, as she noted most things she had not intended, as a fact requiring classification at a later hour.

"Yes," said Daven.

"Whatever the mechanism of the Fading. Whatever the cause of the acceleration. That was a real Bond. Eleven years."

"Yes."

"The data does not capture it." She spoke slowly. She was looking for the exact word, and she knew that when she found it, it would be less than the thing itself. "What I saw in that room does not appear in any table I have built in six weeks. The tables are still accurate. The method is still correct. But they do not," she paused, "carry the weight of what they represent."

"Data rarely does," he said.

She turned her head and looked at him, because he had said it without any quality of correction or condescension. He had said it as one says a thing that is simply true and requires no additional support. The harbor light caught the side of his face. He looked, for the length of an inhaled breath, very tired, and very young, and very much a man who had stood at a window in a different house and watched someone go.

She did not ask. She looked back at the sea.

"You asked him if he felt it going," she said. "I would not have thought to ask that."

"I do not know why I did."

"I think you do."

"Perhaps." He was quiet. "It seemed the only question worth asking. If it goes without being felt, then there is no warning. No time to say anything." He paused, and then, very quietly, as if he were reading a line in a report that he did not like, "No one gets the chance to choose."

She turned this over. It was an odd word to use, choose, in a conversation about a system that assigned its matches at the age of twelve. She had been studying the idea for six weeks in the form of a footnote. He had arrived at it on a harbor wall at dusk, from a different direction, with no data at all.

The last light went from the western sky and the first stars came out over the sea, the same stars that came out over every city, indifferent to the particular weight of what happened beneath them.

"Did you get enough from the interview?" he asked after a while.

"For the analysis. Yes."

Neither of them moved.

She thought of Wol Taren in the doorway, with her arms at her sides. She thought of the Bond certificate turned to face the wall. It was a small gesture, almost invisible, and it told her more than any column of figures could about the way grief was housed in a person: not in the large dramatic motions, but in the turning of a frame, the setting out of cups, the careful straightening of a table that did not need it.

She picked up her notebook.

"We should return before dark," she said.

"Yes."

But for a few seconds longer, neither of them left the wall. Below them the sea moved in and out against the stone. The boats finished their slow arrival. Along the quay, the lamplighters began their round, one flame, then another, then another, extending toward them down the long curve of the harbor, and the dark came up behind them like water filling a basin.

She thought, as they walked, of the way Ren Taren had said, I think it was about the roof. It was such a small thing. A thousand households in Auren had arguments about roofs. If the mechanism she suspected was correct, the threshold between a quarrel and a loss might be nothing more than whether either person, on the night in question, turned toward the other and said a single sentence. She did not know what the sentence would be. She suspected the Tarens did not either, and that this was exactly why they could not sleep.

They walked back through the port district in the evening, side by side, not speaking, the sound of the sea receding as they moved inland and the city's other sounds taking its place. The harbor lamps were visible for a long time behind them before the streets turned and hid them.