Overdrawn [Progression LitRPG]

She was on the turn between the third landing and the second, and she was coming down, and there were eleven households in that building who had been going round her for three weeks.

They had a system for it. That was the thing, standing at the bottom with his hip strapped and his hand on the rail: nobody had called a meeting and there was a system. The Marden boy had chalked the flights so you could tell from the hall which floor she was on by the sound of it. The old man on four had stopped going out. Somebody had wedged the second landing window open so the stairwell was too cold to stand about in, which was either practical or a kindness and was almost certainly both, and not one household in the building had reported any of it to anybody, because reporting it to anybody is how you get a designation on your own stairs.

The designation had come anyway. It had come nine days ago, from a clerk who had never been in the building, on a complaint with no box for whose.

Kalen sat on the bottom step and watched her come down.

She had the housecoat on with the good buttons, and her hair was done. That is the thing about the Rendered that nobody puts in the notices. They are maintained. Somebody on landing two had been doing that woman's hair every morning for three weeks before going out to work, and had told nobody, and was going to go on doing it.

She came down to the street door, and stopped, and turned round, and went back up.

He watched her do it four times.

* * *

Nessa came at the second bell with her sleeves rolled and rope-walk ash to the elbow, and did not ask a single question about why he had sent for her, which was worse than being asked.

"How long have you been sitting there?"

"Two hours."

"What have you got?"

"Up and down. Top landing, stops at the door, back down to the street door, stops, turns, up again. Nineteen minutes. Three weeks of it."

"And the instruction?"

"Get home," Kalen said. "Which is wrong. If it was get home she would go through the door at the top and stop, and the door at the top is not locked. I checked it at the first bell."

Nessa sat down on the step below him and put her chin on her fists and watched.

She watched one whole loop without saying anything, which for Nessa is an act of physical self-control, and then she said, "She stops on two."

"She stops at the top and the bottom."

"She stops on two as well. Going down. Not going up." Nessa did not take her eyes off the stairwell. "Three seconds. Same board, by the window. Do it again and count."

He counted. Three seconds, on the second landing, on the way down and not on the way up, and it had gone past him four times because he had been watching the two ends of a thing and not the middle of it.

"Bad hip," Kalen said. "She rested on two."

"Everybody in this building knows she rested on two." Nessa stood up. "Not carrying anything."

"No."

"She is holding her hands like she is carrying something."

Mrs Ovin's hands were out in front of her at the height of a person's waist, six inches apart, fingers curled, and they had been in that position for every one of the eleven times he had watched her come down that morning, and he had looked at them, and had seen a woman's hands.

"The ash pail," he said.

"Top floor, bad hip, and the ash goes to the yard bin." Nessa was already moving. "She took it down every morning of her life. She rested on two. And then somebody bolted the yard door."

The yard door had been bolted since the winter, because the winter before that a man had come in off the yard and taken a copper off the landing. The bolt had gone on, the ward had approved it, and the whole building went round the front now and grumbled about it twice a year.

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The instruction was not get home. It was take the ash down. It had one step left in it and it had had one step left in it for three weeks, and she went back up every time to fetch a pail she could not fetch from a flat she could not enter carrying, because you cannot come down with a pail you have not gone up and got.

* * *

It took eleven minutes.

Nessa got the bolt back out of the keeper, which took four of them, because it had rusted in and she would not let him do it. Kalen went up to landing two and found the pail where it had stood on the boards outside the door for three weeks with three weeks of nothing in it, and carried it down, and put it into Mrs Ovin's hands on the turn as she came past, and let go, and got out of the way.

She stopped three seconds at the second landing, by the window.

Then she went down the rest of the flights and along the hall and out through the yard door and across to the bin at the far wall, and tipped the empty pail into it, and stood the pail against the wall the way she had stood it against that wall for thirty years.

And stopped.

There was no sound. There never is. There was a woman standing in a yard with her hair done and her good buttons on, and then there was a woman standing in a yard, and the difference between those two things was not anything a person watching could have put a name to, except that every person watching knew.

No Collection. No notice. Nothing came up at all, because nothing was owed by anybody, and the Accord does not comment on work that costs it nothing.

It was the first thing Kalen had ever done that the Accord had no field for.

Nessa put her hand flat on the yard wall and left it there.

At the sixth bell Mrs Ovin walked out of the yard gate and up Cinder Row toward the ward gate, at a walk, in no hurry whatever. Kalen made himself watch the whole of it rather than half of it, and did not say to his sister the thing he was thinking, which was that they had not fixed anything. They had finished it.

* * *

Eleven households came down into that stairwell over the next hour, which is not a thing anybody arranges.

"Sixty marks," said the man from four.

"Yes."

"It was on the board this morning. My boy read it out to me off the docket."

"There is no docket now. There is a designation with nothing left to settle."

"So you had sixty marks on the stairs and you walked it up to the gate."

"Yes."

"And tomorrow there is another one, and you will do it again."

"I do not know," Kalen said, which was the true answer, and it went down about as well as true answers usually do.

The stairwell got loud the way stairwells do, eleven people at once and not one of them wrong. The woman on three said the thing about her own mother. The man on four said the thing about what sixty marks is in a month when the rent falls on a Friday. Somebody at the back said that the boy had always thought a great deal of himself, which stung more than the rest of it put together and was the only part that was actually untrue. Kalen stood on the second landing with his hip going and did not raise his voice, because he never does, and got precisely nowhere.

Mata Ovel had come over from Tallow Street with her coat on over the apron and had been standing in the hall doorway for ten minutes without a word.

"You would all have taken it," she said.

The stairwell stopped.

"So would I," said Mata Ovel, and went back to open her shop.

It did not settle anything. Eleven households went back up eleven flights thinking eleven different things, and four of them were still angry on the Friday, and one of them did not speak to him again for a year. What Kalen carried home was the anger, because anger is the loud part and he was nineteen.

What that building had watched was a man take a bolt out of a door and put a pail into a woman's hands. Nobody on those stairs forgot it. Nobody said one word about it to him for three years.

* * *

Tam Oduya came up the street at the seventh bell with four bottles under his arm and his good coat on. He had heard about it at the Counting House before Kalen had got down the stairs, because Tam heard everything about four minutes after it happened and had never in eleven years used any of it against anybody.

"Kalen. Kalen Ashgrove." He put a bottle in his hand without being asked. "That is the worst thing you could possibly have done and I would have done the same and hated every minute of it. Hello, Nessa."

"Hello, Tam."

"This is dreadful beer."

"You bought it."

"I bought it with my own money, which makes it heroic beer, Kalen." Tam sat down on the step. "Somebody else takes it tomorrow, you know. The designation stands until the quarter and there are men in this ward who would walk from Fetter Street for sixty marks and be glad of the walk, Kalen."

"There is nothing left to take."

"There will be another one." He said it gently and did not soften it, which was the thing about him. "That's not me on their side. It's sixty marks and it's going to be sixty marks for somebody, and the somebody isn't going to be you, and I'd like you to say that out loud once where I can hear it."

Kalen got the dock receipt out of his shirt and put it on the step between them.

"What is the serial on that?"

Tam held it up to the lamp, cheerfully, the way a man does a thing he is good at and does not get asked about often.

"Seven digits and a ward letter. Running series, one to a docket, per ward, per year, from the first of the quarter, Kalen." He turned it over. "Fourth digit gives you the month if you know the offset, and I know the offset, because I get shouted at about it. That's a fortnight ago. Where did you get it?"

"Off a coat."

"You keep the strangest things."

"I keep everything," Kalen said, and put it back in his shirt, and looked up the road toward the gate, where the lamps were going on and the watch were locking up.

"I want a route that does not come off these stairs."

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