Helga translates bureaucratic High Sturlandic for a living — endless permits, appeals, and regulatory nitpicking tedious enough to drive anyone mad. Her firm, BURTS, handles the impossible cases: four-page rebuttals, twenty-minute turnarounds, flawless legal Sturlandic that somehow always finds exactly the right word for exactly the right person.

Too flawless.

When Helga catches the same phrase reused years apart, adapted with inhuman precision for two completely different people, she can't let it go. Is BURTS run by geniuses? Machines? Someone she's never met?

Chasing an answer that keeps slipping further away, she drags in her coworkers, burns her vacation days, papers her office wall with a stranger's invented career, and ends up somewhere she never expected to look.

A standalone mystery from the world of Tortuga-on-the-Rocks — sharp, funny, and unsettlingly plausible.