Chapter 165: Pending (Patreon)

That's the last chapter of the batch. Still got one more; I'll sit on it, though. The latest Patreon chapter ends at a natural stopping point before we move into the next part.---

The folio went into his inventory between the inks, and his attention went straight back after it.

Seam by seam.

It was the weakest phrase in the poem. He had known that before the fair copy and written it regardless. It was serviceable. A glovemaker might say it. A critic definitely would. Lyra wouldn't, and the gloves were the most finished thing she had ever painted.

He opened the inventory. His finger found the folio's icon and rested on it.

Stitch by stitch was worse. Every seam lost the slowness. He could try to the seam, which would make the panel picture a painter putting her eye against the canvas, which was close to the truth. He would have to read it aloud 12 times to know.

He could still change it. That was going to remain true until 4.

He closed the inventory.

His right hand had kept the shape of the pen. When he opened it, the fingers came out slowly, and there was a groove across the middle finger where the barrel had rested for 3 hours. Scrivener's Black had dried in the creases of his thumb and first 2 fingers, cheap grey-black that would probably come off with a bucket and wouldn't come off with anything less. He flexed the hand. It ached the way his wrists had ached after a long tournament day, deep in the tendons, nowhere he could rub.

Through the wall, the conjugations went on. Down in the courtyard, someone had taken in half the laundry.

He had nothing else to write. The moment his attention had nowhere to be, the auction walked back into it.

He pulled the listing up with a gesture that was a little too quick.

[Lot: The Stifled Toll - Complete Set (3/3)]

[Current Bid: 7,920 Gold]

[Total Bids: 214]

[Watchers: 4,871]

[Time Remaining: 04:38:12]

He saw the number, and his interface gave it the weight it gave everything heavy.

He opened the bid history and scrolled.

The bids had kept coming all night. A cluster just after 1 in the morning, small increments, 20 and 30 gold at a time, 2 or 3 bidders feeling each other out. A gap. A single bid of 6,800 at 04:12, from someone who had either set an alarm or never gone to bed. Then a long, flat stretch where nothing moved for nearly four and a half hours, and he could picture exactly what that stretch had been: asleep. Treasurers waiting for sponsors to wake up on the other side of the planet. At 08:40, a jump to 7,500. At 09:31, while he'd been sitting here crossing out invent, somebody else had answered with 7,920.

He had been cutting a door covered in handprints out of a poem while the most expensive object he had ever owned was being fought over. The fight hadn't needed him. It had gone right on without anyone holding its hand.

He opened the Gateway.

INPUT Crown of Destiny Standard Gold (CoDSG): 7920

> CURRENT MARKET RATE: $106.31 USD / 1 CoDSG

> ESTIMATED PAYOUT (PRE-TAX & FEES): $841,975.20

The rate had slipped 3 dollars overnight. He noted that first, because it was the bad news and the bad news was easier to look at. The gold was still rotting under him, about as fast as he'd expected.

Then he looked at the payout.

He cleared the field and typed it again, slower, watching each digit land. 7. 9. 2. 0. He checked that he hadn't typed a 5th digit. He checked that the field was for gold and not silver, which was a stupid thing to check, since the field said Standard Gold in letters that took up a 3rd of the pane. He checked the rate against the ticker in the corner of his vision.

> ESTIMATED PAYOUT (PRE-TAX & FEES): $841,975.20

The same number came back. It would, every time.

He was looking for the mistake. He caught himself doing it the 3rd time he checked the decimal, and kept checking it because finding a mistake would at least be familiar. He had years of practice at finding the thing that turned a good number into a bad one: the fee nobody mentioned, the bill that arrived the same week as the payout. He had no practice at all at this, where he went looking for the flaw and it wasn't there.

Okay. Do the deductions properly, then.

The listing fee first. 1 percent of the sale price: 79 gold, which left 7,840 and change. He would keep 200 in the game. Inks ran out, repairs. Necessities, really. The money he'd pay out, he could flip back when the rate was much lower after a week. That left 7,640 to convert.

He knocked the rate down to 100 flat, in case the gold kept sliding through the afternoon. 764,000.

He allowed 30 percent for the Gateway’s fees and whatever the tax office would want. Better to leave too much aside.

534,800.

Then the number that had organized his entire life for longer than he cared to count: 350,000 for NRT-7. He subtracted it.

184,800.

A year of care at the hospital’s current rate. 8000 a month. 96,000.

Except he had already paid for nearly six months. 48,000 deposited into the hospital account, less whatever they had used since. Round down. Call it 45,000 still available.

51,000 still to fund. Then a reserve, a real one, 30,000 for whatever came next.

103,800.

He sat looking at that for a while. Then he went back to the top.

He increased the allowance for fees and taxes to 35 percent. Extended the care budget from a year to eighteen months. 144,000 in total, less the 45,000 already sitting in the hospital account. 99,000 still to fund.

He kept the rate at 100. He kept the reserve. He rounded everything against himself.

17,600 dollars.

There was still money left.

He sat with it.

That figure was the floor of a floor. It assumed the gold kept falling, fees and taxes took more than a third, and his mother needed another eighteen months of care at the current price, despite the treatment that was supposed to make her need less of it. Every assumption had been built to make him lose, and he hadn't lost. If even half of them turned out wrong, the real remainder was large enough that he declined to calculate it, the same way he'd refused to run 5,000 gold through the Gateway on the night he listed the set.

He knew what the first 350,000 was for. He had no idea what money was for once it had already done that job. In his experience, money arrived and something ate it. He had built his whole idea of the future around that. Every plan he'd ever made had a hungry thing at the end of it, waiting.

The number in his head had no hungry thing at the end of it.

It isn't settled, he told himself. Four and a half hours. Anything can happen in four and a half hours.

That wasn’t quite true. Accepted bids were binding. He’d checked. Someone could drop something stupid onto the exchange at two in the afternoon and split the room, but that would cost him the next bid, not the one already sitting there.

Or it could go the other way.

Best-in-slot items almost never closed on the price they held at breakfast. Somebody always waited, sitting on a reserve of gold and a refresh key, and came in during the final minute to take the thing from people who had been fighting over it all night.

He looked at 7,920 and tried to imagine somebody deciding it wasn't enough.

It couldn't go higher. The number was already absurd.

It would probably go higher.

He didn't put that into any calculation. That money would arrive or it wouldn't.

One practical thing remained. He checked the closing time to the minute: 14:41.

Lily's meeting was at 14:00. The Salon was at 4. The Greenlanders were holding the stair down in the Reach until evening, and Erthrix needed a confirmed return time by the end of the day. Mirethiel wanted her departure time before she closed the shutters. That gave him around 40 minutes of Zara and Jax arguing about guild charters, then the hammer falling while he was presumably still listening to them, then an hour and a bit before he stood in front of the Gilded Brush.

He looked through the settlement terms. He didn't need to be standing at a terminal when it happened. He didn't need to be logged in at all.

So that was done.

He opened the listing again.

[Current Bid: 7,920 Gold]

[Time Remaining: 04:36:50]

It had been 90 seconds. He closed it.

He opened the Gateway. The rate was the same, which was the most that could be hoped from it. He closed that too.

He opened the quest log, because it was there. He looked at his messages with Lily. The hour didn't change. There was nothing to answer.

His hand went back toward the listing before he'd decided to move it.

He stopped with his fingers in the air and looked at them, ink-stained, the groove still across the middle finger.

Refreshing a pane would not make it 14:41. He knew that the way he knew that pressing a door button repeatedly would not bring the lift faster. He had pressed the button anyway, a few 100 times in his life, in hospital lifts mostly.

He put the hand down on the table.

His mother was in an hour and a half.

The thought was simple enough to be surprising. All morning she had been at the bottom of the calculations, the 350,000, the eighteen months of care, a total he could move around and round down. At half past 11 she would be a woman in a bed by a window, and he would be sitting next to her.

Somewhere under the avatar's calm, his real stomach had been complaining for hours and he had tuned it out the same way he tuned out the conjugations through the wall. He hadn’t eaten since the rice and eggs last night. He was going to the hospital, and he needed a shower first. The water would be lukewarm because the woman on the 3rd floor always got there first. He had to find a shirt that didn't look slept in, which meant finding a shirt.

These had been interruptions for so long. Shower, food, sleep, the commute: maintenance on a body that had to be kept running so it could go back into the pod. They had always led back to the pod, and this morning they led somewhere else.

So what was he going to tell them?

He knew what the old version of him would say. Nothing. Not until the gold had gone through the Gateway, the money had landed in a real account, the hospital had confirmed the treatment slot, and the whole thing was so finished that hope was no longer involved.

He'd be walking in with a rescue that wasn't finished. If he waited until it was, he'd walk in today with nothing and say nothing. Elara would watch him the whole visit with that look she had, the one that found everything he wasn't saying and counted it. And she'd go home tonight still believing what she'd believed every night for years: that the money was a wall, and her brother was somewhere on the other side of it, too busy to visit.

She was at the hospital every day. She had been carrying the whole of it, the part he couldn't do with virtual reality, without knowing that the other part had changed.

He could tell her what was actually happening.

There was an auction. It closed this afternoon. The bid right now was enough. Something could still go wrong.

All of it was true. He didn't need to fake certainty, and he didn't need to hold everything back until he had it. He could stand in a hospital corridor and say something unfinished out loud to his sister, and she could decide for herself what to do with it.

He imagined her face when he said it. He couldn't picture it. That was new too, and he left it alone.

The pod would pull him out soon. He didn't need soon.

He gathered nothing, because there was nothing left on the table except the corked bottle of Scrivener's Black. He checked the folio was in the inventory. He checked it again, which didn't count as opening it.

Downstairs the taproom had filled with the late-morning trade, clerks in ink-stained cuffs drinking something thick out of bowls. The keeper was behind the counter. He put the key on the wood.

She looked at the key, then at his hand. "Finished?"

"Yeah."

She took the key and hung it on its nail without comment, and he decided that was the best review he was going to get before 4.

Outside, the Artisan's Quarter was going about its morning. Next door, the bookbinder’s press was still going. He stood on the corner by the string-seller's window and opened the system menu.

[Log Out?]

He looked at the auction icon in the corner of his vision, still lit. 4 hours and 31 minutes. Still climbing or holding, without him.

He confirmed.

The pod lid unsealed with a hiss, and cold air came in across his face.

For a few seconds he lay still and let the room arrive in pieces. First the slow blue pulse of the LEDs along the lid. Then the neural nodes, cold against his skull, and the crick in his neck where the memory foam had stopped remembering him around the 3rd hour. His right hand was curled on his chest. He opened it. The fingers were clean, of course, no ink in the creases, no groove.

Then the hunger, all at once, with 16 hours of being awake behind it.

He climbed out carefully. His legs had opinions. The apartment was dark behind the blackout curtains, and the 3 monitors on the desk were black. He woke the middle one, logged onto Crown's official site, and went straight to the auction page. He found it.

7,920.

He had known it would say that. Then he left the screen on and went to the kitchenette.

The fridge had 2 eggs, half a carton of milk he sniffed and poured down the sink, and a container of rice old enough that he didn't ask it any questions. He ate the eggs standing up, fried in the 1 pan, out of the pan, while the kettle took its time. It was the best thing he had eaten in days, and he was aware that this said more about the last few days than about the eggs.

His phone was on the desk, face-down beside the photograph, which was also face-down. There were 2 messages from Elara.

[09:12] Main entrance 11:15. Not 11:29.

He looked at that for longer than the message deserved.

He typed: Leaving early.

He looked at it, deleted it, typed it again, and sent it before he could start editing.

The reply came almost immediately.

[10:24] Who is this

He snorted, alone in a room 6 feet by 4, and put the phone down.

The shower ran lukewarm. He stood under it longer than he needed to, with his forehead against the tile, letting the water work on the knot in his neck. When he closed his eyes he could still see the fair copy line by line. Seam by seam was still there in the middle of it. And it would stay there.

Clothes were a harder problem. The good shirt, the grey one with a collar, was on the back of the chair, where it had been since the last time he'd been anywhere that required a collar. He shook it out and found it was mostly fine. He found his other shoes under the bed, beneath the water stain, which had grown another island since he'd last looked up at it. He found his keys on the 3rd try, in the jacket he had been wearing a week ago, before the launch.

On his way to the door, he passed the desk. The monitor was still on, the number still sitting there in the browser, the timer counting down in a small grey font that didn't care whether he watched it.

He reached over and switched the screen off.

The room went dark except for the pod's slow blue pulse in the corner. Somewhere out there, 4,800 people were watching his auction, and in 4 hours one of them would win it or lose it to someone faster.

He locked the door behind him and went to see his mother.