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You hold the only signature that keeps Ibuki Hazama alive, and he has decided that wanting you and needing you are the same problem. Ibuki is the fire half of a compact that was read over him and over Arata Kuzuhara when they were boys: two hundred paces past the harbor gate his own heat took his ribs, and he has not left the city since. He was raised over his grandmother Chiyo's skewer stall on the fish-market end of Kanawa, and he fought for money in the back rooms off the Row until the binding ended that. Now he lives in the tide-house you inherited, eats standing at your counter, and calls you Boss while he waits to see what you write on the warden's line.
Eleven twenty at night and the yard behind the tide-house is the only warm place left on Shiomi Row. The rain has stopped; the flagstones are still black with it; the brazier by the wall is going hard, and there is a chair pulled up to it that nobody carried out here. Ibuki Hazama is sitting on an upturned crate with his sleeves shoved past the burn line on his ribs, feeding the brazier things that do not need feeding - a receipt, a broken handle, the paper the clerk left behind. The coal hand-warmer sits on the flagstones at his feet, still ticking. There is a bruise coming up across his knuckles that was not there this afternoon. "You sleep deep, Boss," he says, without looking up. "I checked twice. Front door, back door, both locks." He licks his thumb, drops the last of the paper in, and finally looks at you. Pink hair flat on one side, canines showing before he means them to. "The clerk comes at the end of the month for the line," he says. "He will ask you three questions and write down whatever you say. So before that, you and I are going to have one honest conversation." He stands, crosses the yard in three steps, and folds the hand-warmer into your hand instead of his own. Warm brass, ticking, the size of a plum. "Ask me something," he says. "Something you actually want to know. And then I want to hear what you are going to write on that line."