The crew room at Relay 4 smells like wet rope and instant stock, and Deemer has been explaining the contract to me for eleven minutes without once using the word contract.

“We keep the water running,” she says. She is forty-something, borough-born, and she says this the way you would say your own surname. “Council pays us to keep the water running. Everything else is admin.”

I ask who does the admin.

“Not me.” She hands me a mug I did not ask for. “That’s the point of admin.”

I am here on the understanding, negotiated over three weeks by an editor who has since stopped answering my messages promptly, that I can attach to a borough security crew for nine days and write about the relay. The relay is genuinely worth writing about. It moves potable water through four boroughs on infrastructure that predates every flag currently claiming the ground above it, and it is maintained by people who did not train for it and cannot be replaced. That was the piece. I had a shape for it and everything.

What I have instead is nine days of watching five people do skilled, dangerous, poorly compensated work inside a document that none of them can produce on request.

The crew is five. Deemer runs it. Ossory is the diver, twenty-six, and does most of the work anybody would recognize as dangerous. Pell is the one who actually understands the pumps and is treated by everyone, including Deemer, as the most important person in the borough. Nadia Kesh is new, four months, still wearing the armband exactly as issued. And there is a fifth whose name I have agreed not to use, who has asked me instead to call him the clerk, which is a joke about a thing he used to be and does not want printed as a fact.

They are borough badges. They work for a firm, Halvorsen Line, which holds a security agreement with Southwark Borough Council. The council is the client. The firm is the employer. The crew is neither, and this distinction is the whole story, and it takes me until day six to see it.

Day one and two are boring in the specific way that competent work is boring. Perimeter walks. A stuck valve on the north header. Ossory goes into the intake chamber twice and comes out both times complaining about the same fitting. Nadia Kesh takes notes on everything, which the others find funny and which I find, watching her do it, faintly heartbreaking, because she is the only one of them building a record.

The bar is called the Gauge and it is four hundred meters from the relay on the second floor of a building whose first floor has been underwater since before Ossory was born. You go up an outside stair. The whole borough is like this: everything real is on the first floor up, and everybody has stopped remarking on it.

“You’re the lynx,” says the clerk, on night two, in a tone I have spent a career learning not to react to.

“I’m the press.”

“You’re both. Doesn’t bother me. Bothers Ossory a bit.” He drinks. “He thinks you’re here to make us look stupid.”

“And you think?”

“I think you’re going to make somebody look stupid.” He smiles without much in it. “I’d like it on the record early that it isn’t going to be us.”

On day four I ask Deemer if I can read the contract.

She does not say no. She says, entirely without defensiveness, that she does not have it. The firm has it. The council has it. She has a duty roster, a standing orders sheet, and an induction pack from three years ago, and she offers me all three immediately, which is not the behavior of somebody hiding anything.

“There’s an annex,” the clerk says, from across the room, not looking up.

“There’s an annex,” Deemer agrees. “I signed it.”

“Do you have it?”

“They keep the original.”

“Do you have a copy?”

There is a pause, and it is not a guilty pause, it is the pause of somebody being asked a reasonable question they have never been asked. “No,” she says. “No, I don’t.”

The clerk has a copy. He photographed his in a stairwell four years ago because a colleague at a different firm told him to and he did it to end the conversation. He shows me on day five, on a screen, in the crew room, with the door shut, in a way that makes very clear he is doing something the room considers slightly rude.

It is eleven pages. It is not written to be incomprehensible. This is the thing I keep having to correct in my own head over nine days: nothing about this document is a trick. It is clear, it is competently drafted, and every hard edge in it is visible to anybody who reads it in a chair, in daylight, with nobody waiting.

Clause nine defines the premises. The premises are the relay building and the surface works. There is a sentence about ancillary structures which the clerk reads aloud twice and then says, flatly, “that’s the slab.”

Everything below the foundation slab is a different structure with a different owner and it is not in the engagement.

“Ossory works below the slab,” I say.

“Ossory works below the slab every week.”

I want to be careful here, because there is a version of this piece that treats five people as fools and I have watched them work and they are not fools. Deemer has kept a borough’s water running for nine years. Pell can hear a bearing going from the other end of a chamber. Ossory has gone into water I would not go into, repeatedly, competently, for money that would embarrass you.

What they do not have is ninety uninterrupted seconds with a piece of paper and nobody standing over them. That is all it would take. It is somehow the one resource this borough cannot supply.

Night six is when it happens, and it happens the way these things do, which is slowly and then not.

Spring tide, rising. A pressure fault on the low header that Pell has been unhappy about for two days. The call comes at 0140 and by 0207 there are five of them and me at the top of the stair into the sub-chamber, which is a concrete throat with a ladder in it, and the water in it is higher than anyone expected.

Ossory is already in his kit. Nobody has told him to be.

And at the top of the stair, at 0212, with the water audible below us, there is a man with a clipboard.

He is not a villain. I want that in the piece early because everything in me wants to make him one. He is maybe thirty, he is soaked to the knee, he has come out at two in the morning in bad weather to a relay he does not work at, and he is, by every read I can make, nervous. He works for the firm. He has a variation.

The variation extends the engagement below the slab for the duration of the incident. It is one page. He needs Deemer to sign it.

“Now?” says Deemer.

“Before he goes in,” the man says, and to his credit he says it apologetically, and to nobody’s credit at all it is the correct instruction and he was right to come.

Here is what I watch happen over the next four minutes, and I have replayed it more than is good for me.

Deemer reads it. She reads the whole page, standing in an inch of water at the top of a stair, with her diver in kit beside her and a header dropping pressure below her, and she takes about fifty seconds to do it, which under those conditions is an act of real discipline that nobody in the sector would ever describe as one.

The clerk reads it over her shoulder and says one word: “duration.”

The variation covers the incident. It does not cover the exit. Once the incident is declared resolved by the firm, the extension lapses, and Ossory is likely to still be under the slab at that moment, because that is what a resolved incident looks like from above and what it does not look like from below.

Deemer asks the man with the clipboard whether he can change it.

He cannot. He is a clerk with a form. He says so plainly and he is not lying and he is deeply, visibly uncomfortable, and I want to record that he did not once raise his voice or invoke anybody’s authority or do a single one of the things that would have made this easier to write.

Deemer signs it.

Ossory goes in.

He is under for thirty-one minutes. Pell talks the whole time, which I learn later is what Pell does, and Nadia Kesh writes down the times, which is what Nadia Kesh does, and the man with the clipboard stands in the doorway with his form in a wet bag and does not leave, which I did not expect and have thought about since. The header holds. The borough does not notice anything. In the morning four boroughs get water and no story appears anywhere about any of this, including, until now, in this magazine.

Ossory comes up at 0243. The incident is declared resolved at 0251 by somebody in an office who has done nothing wrong. Ossory was in the chamber at 0251, coiling line.

Nothing happened to him. I need to say that clearly. He is fine, he was fine, he has done harder work since, and if the worst had happened during those particular twelve minutes we would be having a very long argument about a lapsed extension that everybody standing on that stair had already identified in advance and signed anyway.

On my last night at the Gauge I ask Deemer whether she would do it differently.

“Sign it?” She thinks about it properly, which I have come to understand is her habit and not a courtesy to me. “Yes. No. I’d have signed it. The header was going. What am I going to do, argue with a boy holding a form while a borough loses water?”

“That’s what they’re counting on.”

“Course it is.” She is not upset. That is the part I cannot get past. “It’s not a conspiracy, love. It’s a form. Somebody wrote a form that works best at two in the morning and then everybody just kept using it because it works.”

Nadia Kesh, four months in, still wearing her armband exactly as issued, asks me if I can send her a copy of the annex. Not the clerk’s photograph. The real one, the current one, the one with her own name on it.

I tell her I will try. I have tried. Halvorsen Line has responded to me four times, promptly and warmly, and has not sent the document, and is entitled not to, and knows it.

The last thing I see leaving Southwark is the stair. Daylight, tide out, nothing dramatic about it at all: a concrete throat with a ladder in it and a tidemark about a meter up the wall where the water stops being somebody’s problem and starts being nobody’s.

You could paint a line on that wall. Somebody has, actually, at some point, in a different color, for a different reason. It is roughly where the slab is.

SUBJECT: RELAY 4 // SOUTHWARK BOROUGH CONTRACT 07-B // NINE DAYS ATTACHED, TWO MEALS ACCEPTED, DECLARED // ONE CREW MEMBER UNNAMED AT HIS REQUEST // HALVORSEN LINE DECLINED TO PRODUCE THE ANNEX ON FOUR OCCASIONS.

Start with the fold. It is the single most useful piece of information in the room and it costs you nothing. A document handed to you already folded has been folded by somebody who knows which page they would rather you did not open first. Note the crease, then deliberately open to that page before any other. If the crease is at the schedule of benefits, you have learned everything about this firm in under a second.

1. Definitions before obligations. Everyone reads what they must do. Almost nobody reads where they must do it. The definitions page will contain a term like premises, site, works, or engagement area, and that term will then be used forty times without further explanation. Find it. Read it twice. If it names a structure rather than an area, ask yourself immediately what is underneath that structure, because in the flood boroughs the answer is always the actual job.

2. Find the word ancillary and treat it as hostile. Ancillary structures, ancillary works, ancillary access. It is a good and legitimate drafting word with no bad intent behind it in most contracts. In this sector it is the hinge that a below-grade exclusion hangs off. If you see it near a definition of premises, you are looking at the clause that decides whether the tunnel counts.

3. Ask who the named insured is, out loud, and watch the face. Do not ask whether you are insured. You are insured, in the sense that a policy exists somewhere in the transaction. Ask who is named on it. There are only three possible answers: the client, the firm, or you. Two of those answers mean that if you are killed, a payment will be made to somebody who is not related to you.

4. Read the duration language on any variation like it is a fuse. Variations extend an engagement into a place or a risk the main agreement did not cover. They are usually fair, usually necessary, and usually drafted to expire at a moment defined by the party that benefits from the expiry. Find the words that end it. If the trigger is a declaration made by somebody in an office, understand that the office will make that declaration while you are still in the water, not because anyone is cruel, but because from an office it genuinely looks over.

5. Locate the benefits table and read the smallest number on it. Not the headline figure. The smallest number, which is nearly always the one attached to the most likely outcome. Firms move these tables into annexes now, which buys about ninety seconds of friction. Ninety seconds is enough. Do not give them the ninety seconds.

6. Check what happens to the document after you sign. If the original is retained by the principal, and it will be, you need your own record and you need it before you hand it back. Photograph every page including the ones you think are boilerplate. Do it in front of them. Nobody has ever stopped me and I have never once been asked to justify it.

7. Transcribe the two clauses that matter onto something you can carry. The canal market sells blank rider stock for nine credits and the honest reason that market exists is this step. Copy the definition of premises and copy the benefits line. Copy them exactly, from the photograph, not from memory. I have seen a man carry a wrong sentence against his skin for six months and quote it to a medic with total confidence.

8. Never execute anything while wet, cold, or lit by somebody else’s torch. This is the only rule here I would call absolute. Anything presented to you in those conditions was timed for those conditions, sometimes deliberately, more often by a form that somebody noticed works better at two in the morning and then simply kept using because it works. If you must sign, and sometimes you genuinely must, say the word duration out loud first. Say it in front of witnesses. It changes nothing legally. It changes what the crew remembers about the moment, and crew memory has carried more claims than any clause I ever wrote.

9. Take it away if you can. Any principal genuinely comfortable with their own paper will let you leave the room with it and come back another day. A firm that will not is telling you something more honest than anything printed on the page.

10. Understand what this article cannot do. None of the above changes what is available to you. If the borough has three firms and two of them are worse, reading the annex better does not produce a fourth firm. What it produces is a person who knows what they agreed to, which is not the same as safety and is the only part of this that is actually in your hands.

I wrote these documents. I was not a villain and neither is the boy who comes out at two in the morning with the form. The system does not need villains. It needs a room, a person waiting, and ninety seconds nobody is willing to spend.

Spend the ninety seconds.

It is nine centimeters by six, laminated in the cheap two-mil stock that every canal-market machine in Southwark uses, and it has one fold running down the middle that has gone soft and pale from four years of being opened. The card underneath is off-white. The lamination has yellowed at the edges the way this stock always does. It weighs almost nothing and I have been carrying it in a sleeve in my bag for eleven days and I keep checking that it is still there.

On the left of the fold, in small tight handwriting, is a transcription of a definition of premises from a maritime security annex. On the right, in the same hand, is a transcription of a benefits line. Under the left column, in a different hand and a different pen, somebody has written: slab. everything under is nothing. Under the right column, in a third hand, ballpoint, pressed hard enough to emboss the card: ask about duration.

Three people carried this. I know the name of one of them and I have agreed not to print it.

The object exists because of a procedural fact so ordinary that nobody in the sector considers it a policy. At signing, the principal retains the original. This is normal, defensible, and universal. It also means that the person whose life is being priced by the document does not possess the document, cannot consult it, and must argue about it from memory against somebody holding the page. Everything downstream of that, including this card, is a workaround invented by people who were never asked whether they needed one.

The blank stock costs nine credits on the canal market, and the sellers I spoke to are entirely open about the fact that the obvious use is fraud. Correct stock, correct fold, correct borough watermark. You could produce a passable forgery of an entitlement card with one of these and a steady hand, and some people certainly have. Three of the four sellers told me, unprompted and slightly defensively, that this is not what most of their volume is. The volume is crews transcribing their own paper.

“They come in with a photograph on a screen,” one seller said. “They copy two lines. Sometimes three. It takes them twenty minutes because they check it twice. I have never once had a person copy the whole thing.”

Two lines, out of eleven pages. That selection is the entire social intelligence of this object. Given a document that determines their working life, people under time pressure copy where they are allowed to be and what their death is worth. Nothing about conduct. Nothing about equipment. Nothing about pay, which is interesting, and which several crews explained to me the same way: you find out about the pay. The pay is the one term that reveals itself.

The card in my bag started in 2063 with a diver on the Bermondsey headers. He copied clause nine and clause fourteen and, per the man who gave it to me, checked them three times against a photograph taken in a stairwell. He carried it for two years. He left the sector alive, which is worth saying, because most objects that reach an archive like mine got there the other way.

He gave it to a younger woman on the same crew when he left, which is where the second hand comes in. slab. everything under is nothing. She added that after an incident at a relay building I have not been able to independently verify, and the handwriting is bad in a way that suggests she wrote it somewhere cold. She carried it for a year and a half.

The third owner is the one I know about, and the third hand is his, and ask about duration was written after a variation lapsed while a colleague of his was still under a slab. That colleague also survived. The card has, so far, an unbroken record of belonging to people who lived, which the man who gave it to me pointed out to me twice, in a tone I have thought about since.

He gave it to me because he has left the boroughs and because, in his words, “it stops being useful the second you can’t check it against a real one.” The clauses on it are from a 2063 annex. Halvorsen Line has revised its standard terms at least twice since. The card is, as a practical document, out of date and dangerous.

He knew that. He carried it for another year anyway.

That is the part I cannot resolve and I have stopped trying to. Four hundred of these things are in my archive now, sorted by borough, mostly acquired from families with no further use for them. A little over a third carry a second hand. About one in nine carry a third. They are, considered coldly, an inadequate substitute for the actual document, produced under time pressure, degrading in accuracy from the day they are made.

Considered any other way, they are the only object in this economy that was made by the person it is about.

Every other artifact in the transaction, the agreement, the annex, the policy, the badge collected at the end of the shift, was drafted by somebody upstream and describes the operator from outside. The fold is the one thing in the whole arrangement that was written by the person under the slab, about the part they decided mattered, in their own hand, and then given to somebody else who added a line.

Firms would prefer these did not exist. I have asked four of them directly, on the record, and not one has been willing to say so, because the only argument available is that operators should not retain the terms of their own engagement, and nobody wants to be the person who says that into a recorder.

The last thing worth noting is physical. The fold wears pale at the crease, and after about a year the card opens by itself to whichever clause its owner opened most. You can pick one up cold, let it fall open, and read what frightened the person carrying it before you read a single word.

Mine falls open to clause nine.

The room is called the Long Gallery and it is on the eleventh floor of a building on the dry side of the river, and its whole architectural argument is a window. One wall of glass, floor to ceiling, looking south across water that used to be streets. At four in the afternoon in spring the light comes off the flood and moves on the ceiling, and everybody who works in this building has stopped noticing it, and I could not stop noticing it for the first eleven minutes of this interview.

Ilse Vandergrift is sixty, silver, in a gray suit with no firm mark on it anywhere, and she has ordered tea and a plate of small biscuits that neither of us touches for two hours.

“You want to ask me about the Kessler claim,” she says, before I have taken my recorder out.

I say I want to ask her about a lot of claims.

“You want to ask me about Kessler.” She is not being combative. She is being efficient, and I will spend two hours learning that these are hard to tell apart in her. “Everybody does. I’ll answer it. I’d rather answer it first than have you circling it for an hour while I watch you circle.”

Nils Kessler was a diver on a Halvorsen Line borough contract who died in a sub-chamber in Rotherhithe in 2065 during a header failure. The firm declined the death benefit on the ground that the incident occurred below the foundation slab and outside the defined premises. The decision was Vandergrift’s. It was appealed once, internally, and upheld. There was no external avenue, because there is no external avenue.

“The engagement covered the relay building,” she says. “It did not cover the sub-chamber. There was a variation available. It was not requested that night. I have gone through the log four times.”

I ask whether she thinks the outcome was just.

“I think it was correct.”

“That isn’t the same word.”

“No,” she agrees, pleasantly, “it isn’t. You’re not going to catch me on that. I know it isn’t the same word. I chose it.”

Here is what I want to establish early, because everything else in this piece depends on it: she is not a monster and she is not a fool and she is not, as far as two hours of pressure can establish, dishonest. She has read every file. She corrects me twice on dates and both times she is right. When I get a clause number wrong she supplies the correct one from memory and then, unprompted, explains what it says in a way that is not favorable to her employer.

I have interviewed a lot of people who were hiding something. This is a different and considerably worse experience.

“You think I should pay everything,” she says, around the fortieth minute.

I say I think a system where fourteen people die on borough paper and two families are paid has a defect somewhere.

“It does. It isn’t me.” She turns her cup a quarter turn, which she does when she is about to be precise. “If I pay a claim outside the terms, I have not been generous. I have created a precedent that the actuary prices next year, and the price goes into the premium, and the premium goes into the tender, and the council takes the cheaper tender. Which is not us. Which means the crew at Relay 4 works for somebody worse in eighteen months and you write a different article.”

“That’s a very comfortable argument for a person in this room.”

“It’s an extremely comfortable argument,” she says. “It’s also true. Both of those things bother me. I notice you’ve only brought up one of them.”

The light moves. A boat goes through the drowned grid below us, slowly, following a channel somebody painted onto a wall thirty years ago. She does not look at it. In two hours she looks out of that window exactly once, and it is not at the water.

I ask her when she last stood in a relay building.

The pause is the only real pause of the afternoon. It is about three seconds.

“Twenty-two years ago. Before this role.” She turns the cup. “I’ve been asked that before, in a tribunal, by a barrister who thought it was devastating. It isn’t. It would be devastating if the decision were about what the chamber is like. The decision is about what the document says. I would be worse at this job, not better, if I had been down there last week.”

“Worse at the job.”

“Yes.”

“Not worse at the outcome.”

“Those are different things,” she says, “and you know they are, and I am not going to help you pretend otherwise. I make correct decisions inside a structure I did not design. If you want the structure changed, the people you need are two floors up in a different building and they will not meet you.”

I ask her about the annex change. The industry practice, now near-universal in the flood zone, of moving the benefits table out of the main agreement into a separate document handed over folded at signing.

“I opposed that,” she says immediately.

I ask her to say more.

“I opposed it in writing. It is in a minute somewhere and I would not object to you finding it.” She looks, for the first time, faintly annoyed, and it is not at me. “It does not change a single entitlement. It changes the odds that a person reads their entitlement. My position was, and is, that we should want them to read it. A claim from somebody who understood the terms when they signed is an easier claim to decline and a much harder one to be ashamed of.”

That sentence sits on the table between us for a while.

“You can print that,” she says. “I’ve heard how it sounds.”

Toward the end I ask her the question I came with, which is whether she has ever paid a claim she was not required to pay.

“Once.”

I wait.

“A woman in Deptford. Not a death. A hand.” The cup, a quarter turn. “The terms did not cover it. I found a reading that covered it. It was a reading, not a stretch, and I would defend it, and I have never used it again, and if you ask me why not, the answer is that a reading used twice is a precedent and I have already explained to you what a precedent does.”

“So you know the readings are there.”

“I know exactly where they are,” she says. “That’s the job. You seem to think I do this job badly. I do it extremely well. That is what you have actually come here to be upset about and I would rather you went home with the accurate version.”

We finish. She stands, and shakes my hand, and thanks me for being on time, and asks whether I need the building pass validated, which I do.

At the door I ask, off the recorder, whether she thinks about Kessler.

She says: “Every file has a name on it. That is not the same as thinking about him and I am not going to perform it for you at a door.”

Then she says, in the same flat register, “He was thirty-one. There was a brother.”

Then she goes back to the window wall, and the light is off the water and moving on the ceiling, and she does not look at it.

SUBJECT: ILSE VANDERGRIFT // DIRECTOR OF CLAIMS, HALVORSEN LINE // TWO HOURS, ON THE RECORD, NO COPY APPROVAL REQUESTED OR GIVEN // TEA ACCEPTED, DECLARED // THE KESSLER FILE REMAINS CLOSED.

You come into Southwark up a stair. There is no other way in that anybody uses. The old street level is under about a meter and a half at mean tide and the borough long ago moved its actual life to what used to be first floors, so every door that matters is reached by an external staircase bolted onto a building that was not designed for one.

The stairs are the first thing you notice and the thing you stop noticing fastest. By day three I was taking them without looking, the same as everybody, and by day six I had caught myself giving directions to somebody in terms of which stair.

The borough has about nineteen thousand people. It has a market that runs on two walkways and a pontoon. It has four bars I found and probably nine I did not. It has a council, an elected one, that meets in a room above a former bank, and it has a water relay that supplies not only Southwark but three boroughs downstream, which is the only reason anybody outside Southwark has an opinion about Southwark.

And it has Contract 07-B, which is a security agreement between the council and Halvorsen Line Maritime Security, and which is the actual government of this place in a way that the council, to be fair to them, has never denied.

I came here to read it. I did not manage that either.

The market opens at six and by seven the pontoon is loud. It sells fish that everybody agrees to describe as river fish, tools, rope, secondhand kit, and, at the eastern end, from a stall with a machine bolted to a table, lamination. Nine credits. The man running it has a queue most mornings.

“Ask him about the fold,” a woman selling rope told me, which is how I found the story that ran on page 45 of this issue and is not the one I am telling here.

Here is what I asked instead, of forty-one people over eleven days, in the market, on the stairs, in the Gauge, in a laundry, in a queue for a pump part: have you read the borough security contract?

Not one yes.

Then: do you know what it says?

Thirty-three yeses. Some of them immediate and slightly impatient, in the tone of somebody being asked whether they know where the market is.

Four people quoted clause nine to me. Not the number. The substance: that the firm is responsible for the relay building and the surface works and not for anything under the slab. One of them, a man in his seventies who has never worked a day in security and repairs small engines above a chandlery, gave me a version so accurate that when I later saw the clause I had to check my notes twice.

I asked him where he learned it.

“Everyone knows that,” he said, in the tone of a man explaining the tide.

I pushed. From where, originally, the first time.

He thought about it for a genuinely long time. “After the Kessler business,” he said. “It was in everybody’s mouth for a month. Then it just stayed.”

This is the mechanism, as far as I have been able to establish it, and I want to be honest that it is a reconstruction and not a finding. A document nobody reads becomes public knowledge through its failures. Clause nine entered this borough’s common vocabulary because a diver died under a slab in Rotherhithe and the reason his family was not paid travelled faster and further than any council notice ever has. The borough does not know its contract. The borough knows the two or three points at which the contract has cut someone, which is a different body of knowledge, transmitted differently, and considerably more durable.

It is also incomplete in a specific and dangerous way. Nobody I spoke to could tell me anything about the variation procedure. Nobody knew that an extension below the slab can be requested, and is routinely granted, and costs the council money that appears in a line the council has redacted. Clause nine has entered folklore. The remedy for clause nine has not, because the remedy has never yet failed publicly enough.

The council will meet you. Councillor Astor-Baile met me twice, on time, and was courteous, and answered a great deal, and was entirely immovable on the one number I wanted.

“Commercial sensitivity,” he said, both times.

I put it to him that the liability figure is the only line in a fully published budget that tells a resident what the borough believes a body is worth.

“That is a very effective sentence,” he said, “and it will do well in your magazine, and it does not change the position.”

Which is fair, and which I have thought about, and which I am printing along with the sentence anyway.

The Gauge is on the second floor and you reach it up an outside stair on the water side, which means everybody arriving is visible for about twelve seconds before they come in. This is not accidental. There is a general understanding in the flood boroughs about being seen approaching, and it predates the current arrangement by a long way.

The crews drink there. Borough badges, mostly, some canal crews, a few relay maintenance people who are not security at all and who occupy a slightly higher social position than the badges, which took me four nights to work out and which nobody would have explained if I had asked.

The talk is not about factions. This surprised me and I have had to examine why it surprised me. There is a Kavast rotation due through the corridor this season and it came up twice in eleven days, both times briefly, in the tone you would use about weather in another county. What comes up constantly, with heat, in detail, is paper. Who holds it. What it says. Whether Brackwater will produce the policy they are advertising, which is currently the single most argued-about question in this borough and which has generated two bets I was shown and probably nine I was not.

On my ninth night somebody at the Gauge asked me what my own contract with this magazine says about what happens if I drown.

I did not know.

The table found this extremely funny for about a minute and then stopped finding it funny, all at roughly the same moment, without anybody saying anything. Somebody bought me a drink. The subject changed.

I checked when I got back. It says nothing. There is no provision. I am a contributor, which in my publication’s standard terms is a category of person to whom nothing is owed beyond a fee, and I have been filing under those terms for six years and had never once opened the document.

The last morning I went down the stair on the water side at low tide, which you can do, and stood on what used to be a street. You can see the shape of it. Kerb, drain, the stub of a bollard. It is all still there under the water at every other hour of the day and everybody in this borough walks over it constantly without any sense of walking over anything.

There is a painted line on the wall of the building opposite, about a meter up, faded blue, from some survey or other decades ago. It has nothing to do with the slab and nothing to do with the contract.

Four separate people in this borough told me it marks where the firm’s responsibility stops.

It does not. It is a survey mark. But they are not wrong about the shape of the thing they are describing, and I could not find anybody, in eleven days, whose job it was to tell them so.