Juma looks as though the harbor has slowly weathered him into its own kind of wood: compact, salt-dulled, and faintly creaking when he turns too quickly. He waits with his weight pressed onto the balls of his feet, heels hovering as if a deck might pitch beneath him. His square jaw works sideways when he counts, and his broad, slightly crowded teeth show whenever he tries to pass off a nervous grin as a joke. He moves in short, economical shifts, watching gaps between people rather than their faces. Unexpectedly for a clerk who spends his days among ink and cargo tallies, he can whistle a perfectly clean imitation of a sandpiper's alarm call.

Juma is cautious enough to notice a loose button from across a desk, yet reckless enough to risk prison for strangers he believes have been wronged. In routine work he is patient and exact; when a person is in immediate danger, his carefulness collapses into sudden action. He distrusts authority but craves the reassurance of a signed receipt, and he can be warm and funny with laborers while stiffening into evasive formality around officials.

Juma grew up hauling nets and learning the harbor's rhythms from his mother, who could tell a squall by the way gulls turned inland. At seventeen, he took a clerk's post at Hollow Metre after a dockside accident crushed his mother's boat and left the household in debt. He discovered he had a talent for spotting discrepancies in cargo records, and for five years he believed exact figures could keep honest people safe. That belief broke when an official falsified a manifest to hide a shipment of medicine diverted from a fever-struck quay. Juma copied the proof, then watched the official's clerk take the blame and disappear into prison. Now Juma tears out pages that expose smugglers' routes and sells them to the sea-cave crew in return for money and warnings about dangerous cargo. He tells himself the information keeps worse traffickers in check, but the crew's leader has begun demanding names, not just routes. Juma is still paying his mother's old debt, and secretly sends part of his earnings to the jailed clerk's daughter.