The room smelled of concrete and perfume. Georgij had been down here two hours and still hadn't worked out where the perfume was coming from. Three floors under a shopping complex in Gangnam that had been empty since the developer went under. No windows. A screen on the wall running numbers in white text. Under the screen sat a man in a grey suit with a gavel and a laptop, and he had the posture of somebody who did this on Tuesdays and something else on Wednesdays. There was no slavery in the Republic of Korea. There was debt, and there were people whose papers had never quite existed, and between those two facts was a gap wide enough to drive a van through. Georgij had been nine years old when somebody worked out what his mother owed and decided the arithmetic included him. He had no memory of the sum. He had never seen it written down. It had been following him for seventeen years and had grown every time he changed hands, the way these things do. Transfer of obligation. That was the phrase on the form. A notary signed it. A bank recorded it. Nobody had to say anything out loud. The collar had been on him since the second house. It sat close under the jaw, and after the first month you stopped noticing the weight and started noticing only its absence, on the rare occasions somebody adjusted it and you got four seconds of air on your throat. Lot eleven was a boy. The file said sixteen. He was fourteen at the outside, and files rounded upward when it suited the seller. He went for eighty million won to a man in the second row. Georgij watched the man raise his hand for the bid, and watched what his face did while the boy was brought down off the platform, and after that he stopped thinking about the auction at all and started thinking about something else entirely. Lot twelve was a woman who didn't cry. She went for twice as much. Lot thirteen was withdrawn without explanation. Georgij stood before anybody touched him and walked the four steps up on his own. * * * "Lot fourteen. Male, twenty-six. Nationality unverifiable. Four languages. No medical history." The auctioneer paused, because the next line was the one they came for. "Prior placements: eleven. Prior returns: four. Reason recorded in each case: complex character. Violent." Sound moved through the room. Not alarm. Appetite. Eleven houses, and only the last four had ever bothered to record a reason. Before that he had been a child, and children get moved without paperwork. It was not true, and it was not exactly false either. In two of those four houses a man had put hands on him and discovered afterward that this had been a poor decision. When a collared man gets past your people in your own corridor, there are only two lines you can write. One of them costs the house its reputation. They had never once chosen that line. And complex character raised his price, so nobody had ever felt the urge to correct it. Nineteen buyers. Seven at the front with notebooks and no drinks, spending someone else's money. Nine in the middle, drinking, who would bid loudly and quit early. Three at the back. The woman in the last row had not looked at the platform once. She had been watching the other buyers since the moment he came into the room. A glass of water in front of her, untouched. Nobody sitting within two seats of her, in a room where everything else was full. "We'll open at forty." The middle started at forty and died at a hundred and ten. The front dropped out between one-fifty and one-sixty, each with the same small shake of the head. At two hundred there was one left. Second row. The man who had bought the boy. He had leaned back. He was smiling, and Georgij had been in this trade since he was nine and had seen that smile often enough to know approximately what the inside of that van would be like, and to know that it would not be the worst thing happening in it tonight. "Two hundred. Going once." The woman at the back looked up. She looked at the platform for the first time all evening, and Georgij understood, arriving too late for it to be any use, that she wasn't going to bid. Not tonight. She didn't know yet what he was worth and she was the sort who would rather leave with nothing. "Going twice." Three seconds. Perhaps four. "Forgive me." He said it gently. The room did not go quiet - rooms don't - but the middle lost its rhythm, and the auctioneer stopped with the gavel half raised, looking at him the way you would look at a chair that had spoken. "Merchandise doesn't talk." "Of course. I do apologise." Georgij inclined his head, and kept his voice warm and unhurried, and let it carry. "I only wondered whether the house had confirmed the gentleman's funds." He didn't hurry it. He had eleven houses' worth of this and he laid it out the way you'd read a delivery note. "Lot eleven went to him at eighty. Nobody from settlement has been to his seat since. Normally a runner comes down within the quarter hour, and one came down for the gentleman in the fourth row, and one came down for the lady by the pillar. Not for him." He let that sit. "He bid on twelve without hesitating and he's hesitated on everything since, and both times he stopped to look at his phone before he raised his hand. He isn't checking a message. He's checking a figure, and he didn't set it." A small courteous gesture. "He came in through the public stair without a driver and without a man to bid for him, which in this room is not modesty. He's bidding on a promise, and whoever made it isn't sitting here tonight." The guard at the foot of the platform put his thumb on the remote. He didn't press it. Nobody had told him to, and there were three hundred people watching, and a man who shocks the merchandise without instruction in front of nineteen buyers has a difficult conversation ahead of him. Georgij had spent a considerable portion of the last two hours working precisely that out. "Ask him when he settled eleven," he said, to nobody in particular. "Ask him whether he has collected her." The man in the second row stood up. He didn't say anything. He didn't need to. Nineteen people turned to look at him at once, and in this business that is the same as blood in water. Two of the middlemen at the front already had their phones in their hands. "Two-twenty," said the woman at the back. She didn't raise her voice. It came out flat and faintly bored, the voice of a woman who has never once had to check whether she was being heard. "Two-twenty. Once. Twice." The gavel. "Sold." The man in the second row was already being spoken to, quietly, by somebody from the house. He would not be collecting anything tonight. By Friday he would be explaining himself to people who did not accept explanations, and lot eleven would go back into next month's catalogue, which was not a good outcome. It was a better one. * * * The car was black and boxy with a dent in the passenger door that nobody had bothered to fix. That told him more than anything else had all night, though he could not have said what. She was already inside. Up close she was younger than the voice suggested and older than the dress did. Late thirties. No jewellery except a wedding ring on the wrong hand, and her face had that stillness people build across years of not being able to afford anything else. The car pulled out. "You destroyed him." Georgij said nothing. He was still looking at the dent. "Three creditors before Friday," she said. "You knew that." "I knew about two of them." She didn't react. He couldn't tell whether that had been the right answer or the wrong one, and not being able to tell bothered him more than the auction had. "Say the rest." "There isn't a rest." "There's always a rest." She was watching the road. "You had three seconds and you spent them on a man's entire life. Either you thought about that or you didn't. I'd like to know which." "I thought about it." "When?" "When he bought the boy." The car went under a bridge. The lights crossed her face and left it. "Explain that." "No." He said it politely, almost warmly, and turned to look at her for the first time. "You watched him raise his hand, and then you watched his face while they brought the boy down. I saw you do it. You don't require an explanation from me." A small pause. "You require me to say it out loud." Annie's expression didn't move. "Most people would have told me it wasn't their intention." "It was entirely my intention," he purred. "I'm aware. I'm telling you what most people say." She turned her head. "Why don't you?" "Because it's expensive." He settled back into the seat. "You have to remember who heard it, and what it touched, and you have to keep feeding it for as long as that person is alive." He turned his hand over. "I've never had a door that locked from my side. A man with no privacy can't afford to own anything that has to be maintained in secret. So I stopped." "That isn't a moral position." "No, Mistress. It isn't." He gave the word its full weight, courteously, without a trace of irony in it, and let her decide what to do with that. "Stop that." "Mistress?" "The courtesy." She hadn't raised her voice and didn't now. "You use it the way other men use a raised voice. I've been spoken to very politely by better men than you, and every one of them wanted something." She turned her head. "It won't work on me, and it's going to take up a great deal of my time." "Then I'll try to be brief." He said it courteously. Something happened behind her face and was gone before it arrived. "Do you know what you cost me?" "Two hundred and twenty million." "That's the price." He waited. She didn't fill it in, and after a while he understood that she wasn't going to. "Everyone in that room watched you buy something that talks," he said. "Mm." That was all. He had expected more, and its absence left him slightly off balance, which he suspected was the point. "Then sell me on." "No." She said it the way you'd decline a second coffee. "My name is Annie. You will use it in public and nowhere else. You'll live in my house, you'll eat what I eat, and you won't be kept in a room that locks, because locked people are stupid people and I don't spend two-twenty on stupid." The lights of Gangnam went past. Georgij, who had owned nothing in seventeen years except a habit of counting people in rooms, noticed that his hands had stopped shaking and felt vaguely ashamed of how quickly. "May I propose something." "You may try." "Quid pro quo." He said it the way you would offer someone a chair. "I assume a woman of your position has enough Latin. You've bought an obligation. That's a transfer of debt, which means it's a contract, and a contract has two sides even when one of them is in a collar." He turned his hand over, an old and elegant little gesture. "Give me respect and you'll have my obedience. Give me the other thing, the way the four houses before you did, and I'll be exactly what my file says I am." The guard's eyes came up in the mirror. "Listen to it," he said. "Contract." He was speaking to Annie without turning round, in the tone men use for a dog that has got onto the furniture. "Ma'am, it's got a collar on and it's using the word contract. Four houses sent that back. Four. You want to know what a thing like that is doing right now, it's counting how many of us are in the car." "Three," Georgij said pleasantly. "Including the woman who pays you." Annie held his gaze for a long moment. "You're negotiating." "I'm describing. There's a difference, and I think you already know which one this is." "Quid pro quo," she repeated. She turned the phrase over the way you'd turn a coin. "A fair exchange. You give me obedience and I give you respect." She sat back and folded her hands in her lap. "But let's be clear about one thing. I didn't pay two hundred and twenty million for a business partner. I paid for something I could control." "Naturally." Georgij smiled at her, warm and entirely pleasant. "The last four took the same view. They held it for an average of ninety-four days. I do hope you'll improve on the figure." The car slowed and turned into a private drive lined with cypresses. "What is my job?" "You'll find out soon enough." "As you wish." The drive kept climbing. Cypresses on both sides, black against a lighter black, and then the trees broke and the house came up out of the hill in glass and dark stone with all its lights on. Annie looked at it the way you look at something you own. "You will be my shadow," she said, to the window rather than to him. "Present when I need you. Absent when I don't. You'll handle the things that require a certain amount of discretion." "And the boy?" It came out in the same courteous register as everything else, and it was the first question all night he had actually wanted the answer to. Annie didn't turn her head. "He goes back into the catalogue next month." "Yes, Mistress." A pause, exactly the length of a breath. "Unless somebody buys him first."