Overdrawn [Progression LitRPG]

"Double you nine," Nessa said. "Stroke. Levy. Stroke. Assessed. Dots, eleven of them, then the number. Seventeen and a half."

"How many dots."

"Eleven."

"Count them again."

"I counted them twice before I said it," his sister said. "Four hundred pages of this and every one of them is dots, and if you make me count a third time I will start making them up and you will never know."

"I would know."

Nessa did not wait for the end of it.

"You would not."

"I would know on the ninth morning," Kalen said, "and then I would have the whole rest of the day to think about you."

She made a noise and turned the page.

It was the fourth day of the grey and he had the shape of the room by then. He could tell the window from the wall. He could tell where the table ended. If Nessa moved a cup he did not know it had moved until he put his hand on the place where it had been, and inside two days he had stopped reaching for anything at all, which was going to have to be unlearned afterward and he knew it.

The rope-walk stove ticked through the floor.

"Read me the fourth line again."

"There is nothing on the fourth line."

"Read me the nothing."

W9 / LEVY / STANDARD ........ 14.0

W9 / LEVY / ASSESSED ........ 17.5

W9 / LEVY / VARIANCE ......... 3.5 [carried, 987]

W9 / VARIANCE / DISPOSITION .. (blank)

"Double you nine, stroke, variance, stroke, disposition," Nessa said. "Dots. Then a bracket, and inside the bracket it says blank, and then it stops."

"That is right."

She had it out before he was done.

"Why does it say blank? Why does it not just be blank."

Kalen turned his head toward her out of habit, which was no use to anybody, and did it anyway.

"Because a blank is a mistake and that is a value," he said. "If the line simply stopped, some clerk in eleven hundred would have decided the stamp had failed and made a new tag. It says blank so that everybody who reads it knows nothing is the correct answer and stops asking."

She was talking before he finished.

"Horrible."

"It is tidy."

"Horrible, and tidy," Nessa said. "Which page do you want."

* * *

"A lamp on this table," Nessa said, on the second morning of it. "Brass, with a seal on the collar, and worth more than everything else in this room including the room."

"It is the house's."

"Is it."

"It is eleven months of my credit and then it is mine."

"So it is yours," she said. "You are the only person alive who says a thing is not his while he is paying for it. Does it work."

"I have not lit it."

"Light it."

"I cannot see it."

"I can see it," Nessa said. "The arrangement this week."

She lit it and told him about it: that it went yellow and steady with no wick showing anywhere, that the horn panels came up the colour of a fingernail held against a candle, and that it did not smell of anything. He sat in the grey eighteen inches from a light he could not see and listened to his sister describe it, and got more out of that than he would have got from looking at it.

She read for six days and she was better at it than he had any right to expect.

The narrative has been illicitly obtained; should you discover it on Amazon, report the violation.

He had taught her the ward board when she was nine, standing in the cold on the first of the month with her on his hip, and he had taught her badly, and she had gone on from there without mentioning it to him. She knew the leaders. She knew Accord script runs right to left, and she read the values off the ends of the lines first, which is what a clerk does, and which Kalen had worked out for himself at sixteen and had privately thought was his own idea.

"Where did you get reading the value first."

"The board. You stand there for ages, so I read the ends, because the ends are the only bit that changes."

"How long have you been doing that."

"Since I was nine," Nessa said. "Do you want the next one or do you want to lie down and be amazed about it."

On the second day she made him eat. On the third she stopped bringing it up and put the plate against his hand instead, and stayed at the table until it was gone.

"The man who carried you up the stairs never said anything."

"That is Doss."

"I know it is Doss. Everybody knows Doss. He carried you up two flights and put you on the bed and then stood in the middle of the room and looked at it."

"Looked at what."

"The room," Nessa said. "He looked at it the way you look at gear. Then he went down and mended the second stair, which has been broken since before the winter, and went off up Tallow Street."

"He did not say anything about it?"

"Four words. He said, stair was going."

On the fourth day she said, out of nothing at all, "Ovel's is at fourteen and a half."

"Nessa."

"I am telling you because you said to tell you things when they were small." A page went over. "I am not asking you for it. There is nothing in the tin, I know exactly how much nothing is in the tin, and it is the first time in my life the tin has been empty and nobody is angry."

"I am not angry."

"Not anything. Grey," she said. "Sit still. Line eleven."

On the fifth day she stopped in the middle of a page.

"How many of these are there."

"Tags?"

"Tags with three and a half on them."

"Forty in the pages. There are more in the crates. I stopped at forty because forty stops being a coincidence."

"And every one has got the blank."

"Every one."

"Since 987."

"Since 987."

Nessa put the page down. He heard it go.

"Kalen. Where does it go."

"Where does what go."

"The three and a half." Her chair moved. "It comes off everybody in this ward, four times a year, for two hundred and seventeen years. That line is where it is supposed to say where it went, and it says blank. So where does it go."

"Nowhere. It is a variance. It is the difference between two figures."

"No it is not," Nessa said. "A difference between two figures is a thing on paper. This is off the woman on Cinder Row who cannot smell, and it is off Mrs Ovin, and it is off Da. It is not a difference, it is a thing, and somebody has got it. Things do not go nowhere. They go somewhere. And if there is a somewhere then there is a line in another book with the same number on the other side of it."

Kalen sat in the grey with his hands flat on the table.

"Say that again."

"There is another book."

"Say the first part."

"If the variance has got a source," his sister said, "why has it not got a destination."

He did not have an answer.

He had been carrying that figure since the second of the month. He had built forty pages and a private index on it, he had put it in front of a collector and a Counting House runner and his own employer, he had lost eight days of his sight in a yard for the arrears that sat under it, and not once in thirty-nine days had he turned the thing round and asked what was on the other end of it.

He had been asking who was doing it. He had spent a month asking who was doing it, in a beer house and a back room and a slag yard, going along a rank of faces the way you go along a rank at a gate.

Nessa had asked where it went.

"I do not know," he said.

"I know you do not know. I asked so that you would go and find out."

He lay on the boards in the dark for the rest of that day and the whole of the next and did not get up except for the necessary, and Nessa let him, and did not once ask him whether he was all right, which was the largest single thing anybody did for him that year.

* * *

On the ninth morning the grey came apart at the edges like a wet paper bag, over about two minutes, and the first thing he saw properly was the doorframe.

He looked at it for a while.

The chalk tally was where she had put it in the spring, on the latch side where it was harder to see from the stairs, and there had not been a new stroke on it in eight days. He counted what was there and got a number that did not fit a birthday from any direction he came at it, and he put it on the list of things he did not understand, which he had kept since he was fifteen and which had eleven things on it and now had twelve.

NOTICE OF TERM

Ashgrove, Kalen. Ward Nine. Bonded.

Collection of the Second grade, 148 marks.

Term of collection, 8 days. Concluded.

Nothing further is owed on this account.

Nothing further is owed on this account.

He read it four times. He had waited six years to see a sentence like that with his own name over the top of it, and it had cost him an apron he did not own, a scavenger's final credit, a mason's fee, everything in a tin under the third board, thirty days of doubles and eight days of his sight, and the Accord had issued it the way the tally shop issues a receipt for a bag of nails.

Then he opened his sheet.

Six hundred and ten.

It had been five hundred and forty-five when he had last had the eyes to read it, and the eight days he had spent flat on his back in a dark room had credited as service, because a Collection is service, because in the end everything is service.

Kalen sat on the edge of the bed and turned that over for a minute and could not get it to come out any other way.

Then he put his boots on and went down to the gate.

* * *

The old man from the cooperage was at the board, which he had no business being, because the notice had gone up on the first and this was the ninth day of the month. He came anyway. He stood in front of it the way he always did, with his hat off, in front of a thing he had never in his life been able to read.

Kalen stopped on the far side of the road.

He was thirty feet off and there was a cart between him and the board, and he read the whole panel from where he stood without moving his feet, both lines and the days, and it took him about a second and a half.

He had never been able to do that. He had stood at that board four minutes at a time with his nose eleven inches from the paper while men behind him told him to move up.

Then he read the top line again, because the top line had changed.

Seventeen point six.

The old man turned round and asked him what it said.

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