I Won the Lottery and Went Back in Time!?!

Nayra had gone down to Nethvar on the morning of the harvest for a birth she had promised eleven days earlier, and there was no version of the day in which anybody could have known.

Two down, two back, and a birth in the middle of it that could take an hour or could take two days. She had left before the sun was properly up, with Selora, and had taken the good needle.

Kel’s thigh turned on the third morning.

Vethra had marked the edge of it at first light the way Nayra taught it — a line in charcoal on the skin exactly where the red stopped, because red on a person is a colour and red against a line you drew yourself is a measurement.

By midday the line was a hand’s width inside the red.

She marked it again. By the middle of the afternoon it had moved again, at about the same rate, and the leg was hot to the back of the hand from the knee to the hip, and Kel had stopped talking except to answer, and his pulse under Vethra’s fingers was going at a speed she counted twice and did not tell anybody.

She sent a runner for Nayra at the second marking and did the arithmetic out loud while he was still tying his sandals, because Doran was standing there and she wanted a witness to it.

Two days down if he ran. Nayra might be at the birth. Two days back on a boat against nothing, so call it four and a half if everything went right.

Then she looked at the leg.

"He does not have four."

***

She came and found Leon at the works and did not sit down.

He had been at the works since the harvest because there was nothing else to be at, and he had assumed for three days that when she came it would be to ask him for the box, and he had spent those three days building an answer, and had built the wrong one.

"How many days is one?"

Leon stopped.

"The thing in the box. One of them. How many days does a person take it?"

"Seven." He held up the fingers. "Seven days. Two in a day. Sometimes ten days."

"And if you stop at three?"

He opened his mouth and shut it and got Luma, because this was not a thing to get wrong in a hundred and forty words.

Then he told her, carefully, in the order it mattered.

You cannot stop at three. You cannot give three days to one person and four to another. A course that is not finished does not do half the work — it does something worse than nothing, because the things it is meant to kill are not all the same, and the ones that survive a short dose are the ones that are hardest to kill, and they are the ones left behind in the person and in everybody they touch afterwards.

He had to say it three times before it went across, and Luma had to reach for a comparison and found one: it is like burning a field and stopping in the middle. What is left standing is not half a field. It is the part that would not burn.

Vethra went quiet.

"Then there was never eight."

"Ei."

"There were eight whole things and nobody could ever have made them into sixteen small ones."

"Ei."

She stood in the doorway of the works for a moment with that.

"Nayra does not know this."

"Na." Leon’s throat was tight and he did not entirely know why. "Nobody asked me."

***

She opened the box at the fourth hour of the afternoon on the healing platform with as many people watching as could get near it, and she did that on purpose, and it took her about four times longer than it needed to.

The box came out. The key was Nayra’s and lived with Veya, which was a rule from a season Leon had not been present for, and Veya brought it up herself and stood there while it turned.

Vethra took everything out and put it on the mat and counted it in front of them.

"Eight."

She let it sit. Twenty-odd people on a platform and nobody said anything.

"One is for Kel."

She took one. She held it up so the back of the platform could see it, which was theatre and was the correct theatre, and then she said the part that Leon did not expect and that he wrote down that night word for word.

"Nobody else on this terrace is dying today."

She looked round while she said it.

"Nayra’s ward has four people in it. A burn, a hand, a woman near her time, and a boy with a cough that is going the right way. I have looked at all four this morning and not one of them needs this and I am saying so out loud, now, in front of you, so that it is a thing that was said."

Then she put the rest back and counted again.

"Seven."

And Veya turned the key.

***

Doran asked her afterwards, on the path, and Leon was two paces behind them and heard the whole of it.

"Make the rule."

"Na."

"You are the one who used it." Doran was not being aggressive. He had the flat voice on. "You have the standing today that you will not have in a season. Make the rule now while everybody is looking at you and it will hold."

"That is why not."

Vethra stopped on the path.

"I have been in a camp that had this. One man and a rule that was not a rule, and two summers of arguing and nothing at the end of it. I have thought about almost nothing else since I was twenty-eight years old and I am not going to write it down on the afternoon I took one out of the box."

"Somebody has to."

"Ei. Somebody who did not just use one." She started walking again. "A rule made by the person who has just spent something is a rule made to explain the spending. I would build it to fit what I did today. Everybody would be able to see me doing it and nobody would say so, because I would be right about Kel, and being right about Kel is exactly what makes it the wrong afternoon."

Doran did not answer for about ten paces.

"Then when."

"When it is nobody’s turn," Vethra said. "When there is nobody on a mat and nothing to decide and everybody is bored. That is when you make a rule about who dies. Not now."

***

Nayra came up the landing on the sixth day with Selora behind her and a fish somebody at Nethvar had insisted on, and got the whole of it before she reached the top of the path, because eleven people told her.

She went to Kel first and was in there a long time.

The line in charcoal had stopped moving on the second evening. It had not gone back — Vethra had not expected it to and had said so — but it had stopped, and by the sixth day the leg was the leg of a man who was going to keep it and would be four months getting there.

Then Nayra came out and asked for the record and sat down with it on her knees for most of an hour without writing anything.

What she eventually wrote was not an entry. It was a column.

She ruled a line down the last page with a straight edge, and put four things at the top of it in Luma’s letters, badly, because she was learning them from Doran who was learning them from Luma: who decided · when · why · who was not here.

Then she filled in the first row and it took her a while, and she did not soften any part of it, and under who was not here she wrote her own name.

And at the bottom of the row, in the space that was going to be a column of its own before the year was out, she wrote the thing Vethra had made a point of saying out loud on the platform, because it was a fact and because one day an entry in this column would not be able to say it.

Nobody else was dying that day.

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