Overdrawn [Progression LitRPG]

It came to the reclamation house.

That was the part Kalen kept coming back to afterward, standing in the yard with the paper in both hands and the morning cold coming up off the flags. Not to Tallow Street. To the house. Which meant it had been routed through his employer. Which meant somebody, somewhere, at a desk, had chosen to make certain that Sabra Quill saw it before he did.

NOTICE OF ARREARS

Ashgrove, Kalen. Ward Nine. Bonded.

Balance -412. Interest accrues at 4 per day.

Settlement due within 30 days or Collection

will be assessed at the Third grade.

This is not a negotiation.

Thirty days.

His sheet said nineteen. He read the notice again to be certain he had not misread it, and he had not, and for about four seconds he felt something so unfamiliar that he did not recognise it as relief until it had already gone.

Then he did the arithmetic properly.

Thirty days at four a day was a hundred and twenty marks of interest on top of four hundred and twelve. The nineteen days on his sheet had been calculated against a Second grade collection. This notice was assessing him at the Third.

They had not given him eleven more days. They had given him eleven more days and moved him up a grade.

Third grade was permanent.

Everybody in Ashfall had had a First. You got a First on a bad afternoon, the way you got a burn, and you lay down for a day and got up and went back to work and it went into the general fund of things you did not mention. Kalen had had four. A Second cost you a week and gave it back afterward, mostly, and the men who had taken one talked about it the way soldiers talk, which was to say constantly and inaccurately.

Nobody talked about a Third.

A Third took something and kept it. A finger, or a year off the far end of your life, or the ability to taste, or the colour out of one eye. There was a woman on Cinder Row who had taken a Third at thirty and could no longer smell anything, and who said it was the best possible outcome, and said it in a voice that made you agree with her quickly and change the subject. There was a man at the tally shop who was missing the last two joints of three fingers and who had, over eleven years, become extremely good at counting coins with the others.

You could live with a Third. That was the whole horror of it. The Accord had worked out, at some point in nine hundred years, precisely how much it could take from a man and still have him at his bench on Monday.

"Read it out," Sabra said, behind him.

"You have already read it."

"Read it out anyway."

He read it out. When he got to the last line she made a small noise around the pipe stem.

"They print that on everything," she said. "It does not mean anything. It is a form."

"It means something."

"It means the Accord has never in nine hundred years had a conversation. Do not mistake that for having an opinion about you."

"It moved me a grade."

"Yes."

"Nineteen to thirty and Second to Third. That is not a clerk being generous with the calendar, that is somebody opening my file and doing two things to it."

Sabra held her hand out for the notice, read it herself in about two seconds, and gave it back.

"Third grade," she said.

"Yes."

"Hm," she said, and went inside.

Kalen stood in the yard and understood that he had just watched Sabra Quill be surprised, which he had never seen before, and did not enjoy.

* * *

The ward's standing notice went up on the board by the gate at the seventh bell, the same as it did on the first of every month, and the same four people were standing in front of it who were always standing in front of it, and Kalen joined them on his way out to the four o'clock cart.

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WARD NINE: STANDING NOTICE

Levy assessed ................ 17.5

Assessment of N. Ashgrove in .. 314 days

He had seen his sister's name on that board every month since she turned eleven. It went up as a courtesy. Every ward posted the coming Assessments a year out so that families could make arrangements, which was a very generous way of saying so that families could start borrowing.

Three hundred and fourteen days.

And above it, the Levy. Seventeen point five.

Kalen had walked past that number two hundred times. It had never once meant anything to him, because it was not a number about a person. It was a number about the ward, and the ward was weather.

He put his hand in his coat and turned the brass ward-tag over with his thumb.

Standard, fourteen point nought. Assessed, seventeen point five.

"Move up if you are not reading it," said a man behind him.

"I am reading it."

"You have been reading it four minutes."

"Then I am a slow reader," Kalen said, and did not move, and the man went round him.

Three point five over fourteen. A quarter.

He did the rest of it on the back of the house notice, standing up, using the board as a desk, and it took him about as long as it takes to lace a boot.

Then he stopped, because he had got a number and the number was no use to him.

That was the trouble with it. It was a figure about nine thousand people and nobody can hold a figure about nine thousand people. It goes in and it comes straight back out and you are left standing in a wind with a pencil.

So he looked at who was standing next to him instead.

There were four of them and there were always four of them. Marra Sull, who had a son coming up in the spring and read the board the way you check a wound. The old man from the cooperage whose name Kalen had never learned and who came every month and could not read at all, and stood in front of it anyway. A woman with a baby on her hip. And Ferrin Ovel, seventeen, from the shop on Cinder Row, whose mother had lost a Pattern to a Fourth grade Collection two winters back and who now did the family's board-reading himself because she would not come.

A quarter. On all four of them. On the son coming up in the spring, and on the baby, and on a man who could not read the number that was doing it to him.

And on a foundry hand called Corun Ashgrove who had overdrawn on a shift he was working to clear an arrears that had been running a quarter over standard the entire time, and who was at the gate every evening at the sixth bell, still holding his board.

Somewhere behind him the four o'clock cart went out through the gate.

"Ashgrove." One of the yard hands, from the gate. "Cart."

"Yes."

"Cart is going."

"Yes," Kalen said, and did not move, and after a moment the yard hand made a noise and went away.

He caught the cart at the top of Cinder Row by running, which cost him nothing except dignity, and he worked the rest of the afternoon perfectly competently, and he could not afterward remember one single thing about it.

That was the part that frightened him, walking home. Not the notice. He had been expecting a notice since he was fifteen and he had a place in his head where notices went. What frightened him was that he had gone through four hours of skilled work with his hands while the entire front of his mind was standing at a board doing long division, and nobody had noticed, and the work had been fine.

He had been carrying this ward around for four years without ever once looking at what it weighed.

* * *

Nessa had done the bread again. She had also, he noticed, moved the chalk tally from the hinge side of the doorframe to the latch side, where it was harder to see from the stairs.

"You are early," she said.

"I am on time."

"You are early, which for you is a symptom." She sat down opposite him and folded her arms and waited, which was a thing she had learned from their mother and which worked on Kalen every single time.

He put his hands flat on the table.

"On your Assessment day," he said, "you are going to be given a Line and a Balance, and the Balance is going to be a negative number."

"I know that."

"You know that. Everybody knows that. Here is the part nobody knows." He took the ward-tag out and put it on the table between the bread and the lamp. "It is a negative number because of a rate the ward has been assessed at since two hundred and seventeen years before either of us was born, and the rate is wrong."

Nessa looked at the tag and did not touch it.

"Wrong how."

"Not wrong as in unfair. I know it is unfair. Everybody knows it is unfair, that is not news, that is Tuesday." Kalen turned the tag over so the stamped face was up. "Wrong as in incorrect. There is a standard figure and an assessed figure and they do not match, and they have not matched since the year 987, and the difference has gone somewhere every quarter for two hundred and seventeen years, and there is a line on the ledger where the somewhere is supposed to be written down."

"And?"

"It is blank."

His sister was quiet for a while. Down through the floor the rope-walk stove ticked as it cooled.

"How much," she said.

"Three and a half in fourteen."

"That is a quarter."

"That is a quarter."

"Of everything." Nessa said it slowly, testing it, the way she had said four a day the night before. "A quarter of everything anyone in this ward has ever paid the Accord went somewhere with no name on it."

"Yes."

"Da included."

Kalen did not say anything at all to that.

"You have got three hundred and fourteen days," Nessa said.

"I have got three hundred and fourteen days."

"You have got thirty."

"I have got thirty," Kalen said. "And then three hundred and fourteen."

"So you have got thirty days to not have a finger taken off you, and then two hundred and eighty-four to move a number that has not moved since the year 987."

"Yes."

"By yourself."

"I have not worked that part out."

Nessa Ashgrove looked at her brother across the end of a ham that had been bought on tally credit at four marks a day, in a room over a rope-walk, in a ward where the dead came to the gate at the sixth bell because that was when their shift had ended.

Then she got up, and went to the doorframe, and rubbed out the chalk tally with the side of her fist, and came back with the chalk still in her hand.

"All right," she said. "What do you need."

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