Overdrawn [Progression LitRPG]

She had been in the yard forty minutes and had not once looked at his arm, and that was worse.

Kalen had washed the charcoal off at the pump before the fourth bell, which was shutting a door on an empty room. She had read it. She had written down that she had read it. And she was now sitting on an upturned crate at the end of the strip shed with the file closed on her knee, watching him take a hand-barrow to pieces, and the subject was not going to come up again, because to her it had never been a subject. She had come about four hundred and fifty-two marks. What was on his arm belonged to some other department, and Hesper Vane did not work in that department, and appeared to have no curiosity about it whatsoever.

Ward Nine had a picture of a collector and everybody in it carried the same one. Two men in the evening. A cart. A grade of politeness that comes off in the first minute. The tally shop had a story about a collector in Ward Six who had taken a man's shop door off its hinges and put it on the cart, and the story was told about four times a year, and Kalen had never once heard anybody ask what the man in Ward Six had actually owed.

What had come to Sabra Quill's yard was a woman of about thirty in a plain grey coat with one band of brass at the cuff, sitting on a crate at the end of a shed, in no hurry at all, doing paperwork.

The band was the tell. One band was Freehand. A Bonded man does not get brass and a Warranted gets two, and there was not a person in Ashfall who could not read that off a cuff at forty feet, which is the entire purpose of putting brass on a cuff.

Kalen worked, because standing still cost him four marks a day the same as lying down did.

The barrow was a bound frame with a Common Carry in the bed of it and two collar irons that had been on since before the closure, and the whole of the skill in taking one apart is knowing that the frame is holding the Pattern and the Pattern is holding the frame, and if you go at the collars in the wrong order the Carry goes with them and the house has bought scrap. He got the near collar off, and put it in the tin. He got the second one off in about eleven seconds, because the second is always faster once a frame has given up on the idea.

"Half a shift, the house allows for that," he said.

"How long will it take you?"

"A third of it. Less, if you let me stop answering."

"I am not going to let you stop answering. Go on working."

She had a printed form out and was filling it in against her knee, in a small square hand, with a pencil she kept in the seam of the file.

"Taking it in order, you are being certified," Hesper said. "Form eleven. If you take the rebind route I have to enter a figure for competence, and a wrong figure disallows the contract."

"What is the figure?"

"A time and a grade. It is not a compliment."

"Enter it high, then."

"I am entering what I am looking at."

She said it the way you would say a street name. It was not modesty and it was not warning. Nobody in any part of this had ever had an opinion about him, which was the piece the ward could never get hold of, because an opinion is a thing you can argue with.

She wrote a time in a box, and a grade in the box after it, and Kalen, who could read a form upside down at four feet because he could not stop, read the time and found that it was the true one.

* * *

The house went quiet at the seventh bell the way it always did, and she moved into the office, and Sabra put a lamp on the desk and went out into the yard and did not come back, which was as much comment as Sabra was going to make about any of it.

The folding stool was already there against the wall, where somebody had put it on Tuesday.

"Sit down," Hesper said. "I have to take you through the grade, and I am obliged to do it slowly enough that you could repeat it back."

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She was going to be slow and he was going to want her to be quicker, and she had told him so in advance, which he understood later to have been a kindness.

"I know what a Third takes."

"You know what four men in a tally shop have told you it takes."

She put the file down on the desk and folded her hands on top of it.

"A First is heat and a day flat on your back. A Second takes a week and gives most of it back. A Third takes a thing and keeps it, and it decides what the thing is, and you do not."

"I know that."

"I took one at twenty-four."

Kalen stopped with his hand halfway to the stool.

"It took the taste. All of it, in about four minutes, the way you would take a coat off a hook." She said it in precisely the voice she had used about form eleven. "I can eat. Bread and mutton are the same object at different weights."

"I am sorry."

"You do not need to be sorry. You need the shape of it." She turned the file round to face him, squared it, and did not open it. "I would have given it a finger. It did not want a finger."

There was a rule in Ashfall about not asking, and it was not written anywhere and it did not need to be, and Kalen kept it. One of her eyes was the colour of dishwater and would be for the rest of her life, and nobody was going to say anything about it in that office or in any other, and that was not tact. It was the ward's whole method of getting through the week.

"If you will have it plainly, the people who tell you a Third is survivable are correct," Hesper said. "Before it is written down, that is not a comfort. That is the design. Now."

She opened the file.

"You stand at four hundred and fifty-two this evening. The Notice runs to the thirty-second day and the figure at the thirty-second day is five hundred and thirty-two. There are three lawful routes open to a Bonded man in Ward Nine. I am required to offer all three, in order, whether or not I think you can walk any of them."

ROUTES OFFERED, WARD NINE

Ashgrove, Kalen. Bonded.

Designation. Rebind. Bond.

Offer recorded. Non-acceptance is not a defence.

"One. Designation. The ward has two Rendered under designation and pays sixty a head on production of the collar tag. It is lawful and it is quick."

Every man who had ever done it, she said, had told her afterwards that it was the easiest sixty marks he had ever earned. She reported that the way a surveyor reports the depth of a footing.

"That is a hundred and twenty."

"Two. Rebind. There is a mason on Cinder Row with a Sound-grade Steady half out of a plumb. Forty marks on delivery of a true plumb. Registered work, and one attempt."

"One attempt."

"For the record, you have got a Bind draw of twenty-two at nought point seven," she said. "You were always going to get one attempt. The contract only says it out loud."

"Three."

"A bond against next year's service, through the Sedge Counting House. Three hundred advanced against twelve months. It wants a co-signer at Freehand or above."

Kalen did the sum on the desk with his finger, because there was nothing to write with, and got the same answer twice the way he always did, and then sat and looked at it for a while, because it was not the answer he had spent twenty-two days bracing for. He had been braced for impossible. What he had got was a set of three doors, all of them real, all of them open, arranged by somebody who had gone to the trouble of measuring the room.

"Four hundred and sixty," he said.

"Yes."

"Against five hundred and thirty-two."

"Yes."

"So if I settle two Rendered, and I do a rebind I have got one draw for, and I find a Freehand who will put a name against three hundred marks of a Bonded man's next year, and not one of the three goes wrong, I am seventy-two short."

"Seventy-two is a Second," Hesper said. "A week of something. You would keep your fingers and your Standing would not move a hair."

"That is the best available outcome."

"That is the best available outcome, and I am not going to dress it, because you would price the dressing and hold it against me."

He sat with it. The lamp on Sabra's desk was turned down to nothing the way she always left it and the second column was shut in the drawer, and somewhere out in the yard a sorting rack went over and somebody swore at it.

Without the co-signer it was a hundred and sixty. Which made the shortfall three hundred and seventy-two. Which was a Third.

He did not say that part out loud, and she did not say it either, and the two of them sat in a small office with a lamp between them and the number on the table in front of them like a third person who had been in the room the whole time.

"Why tell me any of it," he said.

"Because it is my work to offer and yours to refuse or fail and the ward's to watch." She put the pencil away in the seam. "And because on about the nineteenth day somebody who likes you will tell you there is a fourth route. There is not."

* * *

She packed up at the eighth bell, in order: form, file, pencil, lamp. She did it without looking at any of it, and Kalen watched her hands and thought about how much of a life you can read off four movements.

The satchel had two compartments. She opened the near one to put the file away, and he was on the wrong side of the desk and could not stop reading things, and he read the tabs upside down and right to left in the time it took her to fold the flap over.

Four dockets. Three were names off Cinder Row that he half knew.

He did not say anything. She did up the strap and then looked at him and made it easier and worse.

"Taking it in order, every child in this ward with an Assessment inside twelve months has a docket in somebody's satchel," Hesper said. "It is not about your sister. It is about the date."

"I know."

"You do not, yet. It is standard practice." She got the strap over her shoulder. "Think about what standard means."

The fourth tab went out of the door on her shoulder with the other three.

It had read ASHGROVE, N., and under it, in pencil: pending.

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