Chapter 60: My System Read Me Forty Seven Invoices and Every One Had a Wife’s Name on It

[HERO.]

[Wake up.]

[She was right.]

The window was open before my eyes were. Three in the morning, the lamp burned down to the metal, and the blue letters sitting over my chest in the dark.

"Which part?"

[The receipt.]

[I have spent four hours doing something I have not done in twelve years.]

[I audited myself.]

I sat up.

[HERO, I want to show you a screen, and I want you to sit down before I do, and I would like it if somebody were in the room with you.]

"You’ve never asked for that."

[I have never had a reason.]

I got Zelina out of her rooms because she was awake, which she always is, and Saoirse out of the borrowed hall because she had never gone to bed. Lunara heard three sets of feet in a corridor at that hour and came out with her sword and her hair down, which is the closest thing to undressed anyone has ever seen her.

By the time the window opened properly, all five of them were in the study.

Calista came in last, still in the plain grey the Church makes excommunicates wear, carrying the lamp she had walked with.

Miralys did not sit. She stood by the window with her arms folded and her back to the glass, which is where she has stood in every room since the day she married me.

[Opening ledger.]

[HERO SYSTEM v0.7. HOST: VAELION IRONVEIL.]

[UNDELIVERED REWARDS: 47.]

[STATUS OF ALL 47: DISPENSED. DIVERTED. RECEIVED.]

Nobody said anything for a while.

"Received by whom?" Lunara asked.

[Not by this host.]

"Show him," Saoirse said. "Show him the lines. All of them."

[Line 1. 11 January. Act: host smiled at Saoirse Wynne in the east corridor. Evaluation: SSS. Value: withheld. Status: diverted.]

Saoirse put her hand flat on the table.

[Line 2. 12 January. Act: host gave an apple to a candle boy, twelve years old, without witnesses. Evaluation: A. Status: diverted.]

[Line 3. 14 January. Act: host returned Lunara Marr’s oath sword hilt first. Evaluation: SS. Status: diverted.]

"Stop," Lunara said.

[Line 4. 19 January. Act: host ate the food Zelina Flintstone prepared, knowing what was in it, in front of her. Evaluation: SSS. Status: diverted.]

"I said stop."

[Line 11. 2 March. Act: host left a honey jar on a windowsill for Calista Bloom and did not tell her it was from him. Evaluation: S. Status: diverted.]

[Line 19. 28 May. Act: host carried soup to Saoirse Wynne and told no one. Evaluation: S. Status: diverted.]

[Line 31. 12 June. Act: host stood between Miralys Fae and a papal legate. Evaluation: SS. Status: diverted.]

Miralys turned around at the window.

She has said perhaps nine hundred words to me in eighty days and I have counted most of them.

"Read that one again," she said.

[Line 31. 12 June. Act: host stood between Miralys Fae and a papal legate.]

"That’s all it says?"

[That is what the act was.]

"No." Miralys came off the window and put both hands on the back of a chair. "That is what you saw. What it was is that he did it before anybody spoke, so nobody in that room got to see me be afraid."

Nobody corrected her. Nobody in my house corrects Miralys Fae when she decides to use her words.

[Line 47. Yesterday morning. Act: host declined to calculate in front of forty one men. Evaluation: unrated. Value: unrated. Status: diverted forty seconds after generation.]

"That was yesterday morning," Zelina said.

[Yes.]

"So it’s still running."

[It has never stopped.]

I stood and went around the table to where I could see the whole list at once, all forty seven lines stacked in the air over my own study.

Forty five of them had a name in them. Five names, over and over, in no order at all.

"It’s been paying somebody for eighty days," I said.

[Twelve years.]

The number landed in the room and sat there.

[HERO, the previous host signed for ten years. Every act generated a reward. Every reward was diverted. The host never received one, so the host never knew there was anything to receive, so the host never looked.]

"That’s why he drank," Lunara said.

Everyone turned.

"Say that again," Calista said.

"He signed things for ten years and nothing ever came back." Lunara had not moved from the door. "I watched him do it. I thought he was a monster who slept badly. He was a man putting coins in a box with a hole in the bottom."

"That does not make him less of a monster," Calista said.

"No." Lunara looked at her. "It makes the hole worse."

Saoirse had the glove open on the table and the coin sitting on it, and she had been drawing the same shape on the same page for the last four minutes.

"Forty seven," she said. "It’s not a number. It’s an index."

"Of what?"

"Of the last entry." She turned the page around. "He minted a receipt for the forty seventh diversion and paid a runner with it, on the same morning, because he wanted you to open a ledger you didn’t know you had."

"Why would he want that?"

Zelina answered before Saoirse could.

"Because a man who has been stealing from you for twelve years only tells you when he’s about to stop," she said. "Nobody announces a theft they intend to continue."

I looked at the coin.

"Saoirse. Can you cut it?"

"The tap? Yes." She did not hesitate, which is how I knew the rest of the sentence was going to be bad. "I found the address in the matrix at midnight. It’s four points of overhead sitting on the line, which is your four points, which is why the sum has run at a hundred and four since the dock. Cut the overhead and the line closes."

"How long?"

"Nine hours to etch. Two minutes to cut."

"Then do it."

"Vaelion." She put her hand over the coin. "You need to hear the other half before you say that again."

"Say it."

"If I close the line, everything on the wrong side of it comes home." She looked at the stack of blue lines hanging over my study. "Forty seven rewards of yours. Ten years of the last man’s on top of them. All of it arriving in one host, in one body, in about four minutes."

[HERO.]

[She is correct, and I want to add the part she is being kind about.]

[Nobody has ever taken delivery of twelve years at once.]

[Not because it went badly.]

[Because it has never been tried.]

Zelina moved first. She got between me and the table, which she has never done, and she is not a woman who puts herself between things.

"No," she said.

"Zelina."

"I have read what happens to a body that takes a dose meant for a decade." She did not raise her voice. "I have read it in four languages and it ends the same way in all four."

"This isn’t a dose."

"It’s a quantity of something arriving faster than a body can file it." She held my eyes. "That’s the definition. Give me a different one."

I could not give her a different one.

Calista set her lamp down on the corner of the table, and in the light I could see she had been holding it with both hands for a quarter of an hour.

"Ask it the other question," she said.

"Which one?"

"You’ve all been asking what happens to him if he takes it." Calista Bloom looked at the forty seven lines. "Nobody has asked what happens to the man who has been living on it for twelve years when it stops arriving."