Overdrawn [Progression LitRPG]

She was at the table with nothing on it when he came in, which was worse than the table being set.

Nessa set the table when she had worked something out. An empty table meant she had finished working it out some time ago and had been sitting with it since.

"Ninth bell," Nessa said.

"About that."

"It was the ninth bell an hour ago."

Kalen hung his coat on the nail and got the bread out of the crock.

She watched him do it without moving. He ate standing up, because he had learned in the last four years that sitting down was a commitment.

The rope-walk stove was still going under the floor. It goes until the ninth bell. It was the one thing you could say for the rooms and he had said it to himself about four thousand times.

"Say it," he said.

"I am working out where to start."

"Start at the money."

"Not the money."

"Then start at the slip. Nessa, I have got the slip. I know what it says and I know what it is worth and I am going to have the whole of it in front of the hearing on the eleventh, and if it goes the right way that figure comes off her before she ever sits down at that table."

"You are doing it again."

"Doing what?"

"You are answering me," Nessa said, "and I have not asked you anything."

He put the bread down.

"All right."

"No, it is not all right, because you have gone and stood by the door, which is what you do, and you are going to be reasonable at me for about a quarter of an hour and then I am going to be twelve again and it will be finished." She had both hands flat on the table. "Sit down."

He sat down.

"Now," she said. "How long does it take to walk from Quill's yard to this door?"

"Nessa."

"How long."

"Eleven minutes."

"Eleven minutes. I timed it on a Sunday in the spring, twice, once each way, and I walked it slowly on purpose because your legs are longer than mine." She did not raise her voice and she did not stop. "You have never once done it in eleven minutes. Not once. Not in four years."

"That is because I do not leave at the sixth bell."

"You leave at the sixth bell." Nessa turned her head toward the doorframe. "Look at the door."

He looked at the door.

The tally was on the latch side, where she had moved it in the spring. It was longer than he had ever seen it.

It went down the frame in fives. Chalk over chalk, where she had gone back over an old mark to keep it. It turned the corner of the architrave at the bottom and went on down the last four inches to the floor.

He had walked past it twice a day for four years. He had looked at it about eleven times, the way you look at a mark on your own doorframe, and had put a number on it once, in the spring, and had been pleased with himself about the number.

"Count it," she said.

"I do not need to count it."

She took the end of the sentence off him.

"You have already counted it. You counted it while you were putting your coat on the nail, because you count everything, and you have been pretending for four years that you do not."

Kalen looked at the doorframe.

"Ninety-one," he said.

You could be reading stolen content. Head to the original site for the genuine story.

"Ninety-one," said Nessa.

The rope-walk stove ticked underneath them.

"I thought it was your birthday."

"I know you did."

"You let me think it."

"I let you think it for a month and then you stopped asking, which is not the same as me letting you," she said. "Not a countdown. It does not go anywhere. It goes up."

"Up to what?"

"Up," Nessa said. "The point of it. One for every night you have come in after the sixth bell."

He had it then.

He had it the way you have a figure you have already added twice. All at once, and with no pleasure in it at all.

The sixth bell is when the gate shuts. The gate stays shut between the sixth bell and the seventh. The Rendered stand at it, and the ward goes about its business and does not look, and everybody in Ward Nine has known that since they could walk.

So the mark was not a mark about being late.

Ninety-one nights of a twelve year old in a room over a rope-walk with the stove ticking, between the sixth bell and whenever he came up the stairs. Ninety-one nights of not knowing which side of the gate he was on.

He had eaten bread on about eighty of them and talked about a hoist.

"Nessa."

"Do not."

"I am not at the gate. I am at the house. I am under the house, most of it, and I have Doss with me now, and I have not been over on my own since the spring."

"I know where you are." Her voice went for the first time and she took it back inside about a second, which he found he could not watch. "That is not it either. You are still doing it. You are answering the question you have decided I asked."

"Then ask me the one you did."

"I am not going to ask you. I am going to tell you and you are going to sit there." She wiped her face with the heel of her hand, once, and did not do it again. "You go to the gate."

Kalen did not say anything.

"Every evening. You come up Cinder Row on the far side and you go along the front of them once, right to left, because that is the way you read, and you look at every face, and then you come here and you eat the bread and you tell me about a hoist."

"How long have you known that?"

"Since I was ten," Nessa said. "Mata Ovel's window is on that corner and I have been running her errands since I was nine, and the first time I saw you do it I stood in the doorway of the shop with a bag of flour and watched my brother look for our father."

He put his hands on the table because there was nothing else to do with them.

Mata Ovel's window is on that corner. He had walked past it four hundred times with his head turned the other way, going along the rank once, right to left, because that is the way you read.

Ten years old. A bag of flour.

"You have never said."

"Neither have you." She let that sit exactly as long as it needed to sit. "Four years. Every night. And you have never once come up those stairs and said, I went and looked, and he was there, or he was not there, or he has still got the board. You have decided, on your own, every single evening for four years, that I should not have that."

"You were eight."

"I am twelve."

"You were eight when it started and I did not know how to say it to an eight year old."

"Then say it to a twelve year old," Nessa said. "The whole of it. All I am asking you and I have been sitting here since the sixth bell working out how to say it without shouting at you."

The lamp did what lamps do.

He thought about the four o'clock cart, and the far side of Cinder Row, and the way you can look at forty people in about eleven seconds if you have taught yourself to read a rank the way you read a line.

Four years of that. Not once had he come up these stairs and said the sentence.

"He is there," Kalen said.

"I know."

"Second rank, mostly, and he has moved up to the front twice this year, and he still has the tally-board. He carries it in his left hand and he does not put it down."

He heard his own voice going flat and could not do anything about that. It went flat on its own, the way it did in front of a hearing officer or a man with a list, and there was no version of him available tonight that was going to say any of this any other way.

"He looks at the gate," he said. "Not at the road. At the gate. They all do."

Nessa nodded, once, and did not cry.

He understood it slowly, the way he understood most things about people, which is to say four beats after it would have been useful. She had known all of that except the tally-board. She had known it for two years.

She had wanted to be told it by him.

That was the whole of the thing she had been sitting at an empty table working out how to say, and it had taken her the better part of an evening to get it into a shape that would not let him escape sideways into being reasonable.

"What I wanted," she said.

"Nessa."

"You never asked me what I wanted. Not once. You worked out what I could carry and you gave me that much and you have been doing the sums on your own in a shed." She got up and went to the doorframe and put her thumb on the last mark, and did not rub it out. "I do your arithmetic faster than you do. I have kept a rate sheet since the winter before last. I knew about the three and a half before you did, because you told me at this table in the spring with a brass tag in your hand and you have been managing me ever since."

"That is not what it is."

"It is exactly what it is, and you think it is kindness, and that is why it is going to go on happening unless I stand here and say it."

Kalen sat at his own table and looked at his sister's back.

There was nothing to put on the other side of it. He went and looked anyway, the way you check a column you have already added, and there was nothing on the other side of it.

He had been keeping a ledger of what she could carry, in his own head, in his own hand, with no heading on it, for four years.

"All right," he said.

"Say what you are agreeing to. You are quick and I am not going to let you be quick about this."

"I am agreeing that I have been deciding what you get told."

"And?"

"And it is going to stop."

"When?"

"Now."

Nessa turned round with the chalk still in her hand, which he had seen her do once before, in this room, on the second of the month.

"Then start now," she said. "Everything. The petition, the fee, who signed it, what Sabra said, the woman with the satchel, the thing you found under the foundry that you have not told me about because you have decided it is dangerous. All of it, tonight, before I go to bed, and I will sit here and you will talk."

"Some of it is dangerous."

"Then I want to know which parts."

He opened his mouth and shut it again.

"Tell me first," Nessa said. "Every time. Before you decide."

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