In the narrow room above the street Corin measured the night by what Jun did not say. The child slept with a folded fist under the chin as if holding back a sound, and the house had settled into the shape of that missing thing, furniture arranged around silence. Before the bargain Jun's voice had filled rooms like wind filling a sail; after it, the sound had been a wound that refused scab. Corin rose early and moved with the small mercies of ritual: water heated on an iron plate, bread broken into neat pieces, a pot set for tea that would cool untouched. Around them, small objects kept scores. A wooden horse with an edge smoothed almost to nothing, a coin black with use, a carved bead whose center was chipped—each item carried a pale seam where something had been taken. People in this quarter marked those seams on the skin as if they were badges, thin lines of light under the wrist or at the temple, places where memory or taste had been excised and catalogued. Corin had seen those marks when she worked below, when the Exchange's halls counted things into and out of people's lives. She had been one of the clerks who set the weights, who wrote the slips that said who lost what and who gained the small solace. She left that life with blanks in her head and a steady ache in the place where promises used to sit. Those blanks had the shape of a missing page in a book you still kept reading; you could feel the gap at the fingers. Jun did not speak. The child used neat scrap-paper to answer questions, leaving little folded squares on the table like coins of communication. Corin learned to read the tilt of a letter, the way a loop pressed harder when Jun wanted to insist, the tiny smudge that meant the child had been trying to remember a word. It was precise, the rhythm of trade that now ran humbly in their home: gestures for speech, drawing for tone. Corin's mouth worked alongside the paper, shaping syllables into air; it felt like an imitation of reunion, a deception that nonetheless collected small smiles. Outside the window the street sold things that glittered in the rain—fresh fruit, patched gloves, a woman with a pannier of boiled greens—but no bustle could push back the weight of the absence. Corin kept a token in the hollow of a palm, an outline of metal that she pressed with a thumb when the old guilt bit. It had once hung at her belt when she walked corridors below; she could not claim to remember all of the hours she had counted there because some of them sat like erased lines. There were nights she tried to name the hour she had agreed to the bargain that took Jun's voice and she found nothing to answer. She had a sense of a fever, a stairwell crowded with breath, the rubbing of bodies who wanted a thing quickly and could not wait. She thought sometimes that the bargain had been a thing she had made herself, out of fatigue and hunger and the bright, blunt need to fix a child's fever. Sometimes she suspected other hands. What she knew with the cold precision the market demands was this: Jun's voice was gone, and whatever had been returned in its place had been exact, like weight put on a scale and balanced with care. There are rules to these halls, and the rule called Equivalence is taught to every clerk as if it were the law of nature. For every thing taken the Exchange requires a thing of equal import. It is not mercy, only balance; it names its cruelty plainly and keeps faith with that naming. Corin had trusted the fairness of weight once and had found it insufficient to keep a conscience. She had watched a man leave the halls with the map of his past held in the stead of a returned lover, but the man could no longer find his way to his front gate. She had watched a mother return to her child cured of a sickness but unable to taste bread. People called such returns miracles or curses according to the shape of their gratitude. The registry in the municipal hall kept records with a careful dryness. Clerks there slid sheets with columns like teeth and used euphemisms in the margins: 'gaps' for what was missing, 'compensations' for what had been given. Corin would sometimes go and stand by the outer windows just to breathe the inkless air of the place, and the clerks would lower their eyes as if they could not bear the look of someone who had a history with the counters. Her life had become a catalogue of what she would not let herself remember and what she would not let go of. In the third week of rainfall that smelled faintly of iron and old cloth, there was a parcel left at the threshold. It was small, damp on one corner where it had lain on the cobbles, and wrapped in brown paper without any name. Corin hesitated, hands hovering as if around a wound. The paper crackled and a single scrap slid free and lay upon the step: a palm-sized slit of parchment sealed with wax and bearing an impression she had not seen in years. The mark printed in the seal was the same as the faint groove on her hip from the token she had worn when she walked the lower counters. Corin's breath caught as if someone tightened a band around the throat of the night.