Borrowed Levels

Chapter 10: No Interest

The chains broke first.

They snapped one after another, with a sound like a thousand bells, and every ledger in the glass pillars burst into silver flame. The god let out a long, shuddering sigh, the sigh of something that had been holding its breath for a hundred years. Mira slumped forward into Ren's arms, light and warm, her eyes her own again.

"Ren?" she mumbled. "Why is your hair white?"

He laughed until it hurt.

Above them, the Bank was coming apart. Beneath Veyra, loans dissolved. Every contract, every lien, every stamped form in every vault in the city turned to ash and drifted away. The levels people had bought went with them, and nobody who had worked for their strength lost any of it. In every street, in every shop, a million quiet voices said the same surprised word.

Gone.

Director Voss fell to his knees at the foot of the throne. The blue veins faded from his throat. For a moment he looked ancient, and very small, and utterly lost.

"I kept them alive," he said. "I kept them all alive."

"No," Ren said gently. "You kept them in debt."

The guards took him away.

The god sank back into the stone, slow and heavy and sleepy, and the hum faded from the world. Where it had been, there was only a cold cavern and the sound of people breathing.

Ren survived. He wasn't sure how. The Ledger had taken everything it could, forty-four years' worth, and then it had simply stopped, like a clock out of weight. But something had remained. When the physicians examined him, they found that his lifespan was not zero. It was thirty.

Thirty years. He would be fifty-one.

He looked like a man of forty already. His hair was white as chalk and his hands had a tremor. Mira sat beside his bed every day for two weeks, doing her homework and refusing to leave.

"You're an idiot," she told him.

"I know."

"I'm going to be a doctor. I'm going to fix you."

"You do that," Ren said, and closed his eyes.

Six months later, Veyra looked like a city that had woken up from a long sleep.

The Guild Bank was gone. In its place, citizens from every district had raised a plain stone hall, and over the door hung a new sign in Pip's loopy handwriting: THE OPEN LEDGER. Anyone could walk in. Anyone could train. The levels people earned were theirs, and no one could take them back.

Kessin ran the new hall's accounts, and was surprisingly good at it, and spent most evenings muttering about interest rates that no longer existed. Dara had taken over the quest board. Hesk had grown a small, mysterious garden behind the building. Bram had retired, delighted, and refused to explain what he was doing in the garden with Hesk.

Mira had been accepted into the new medical academy, the first student on the roll.

Aldric Calder sat on the front steps most days, watching the street with a mug of tea. He was thin and gray and slow, but he was alive, and every morning he said the same thing when Ren walked by.

"You look terrible."

"Thanks, Dad."

"You look happy, though."

"That too," said Ren.

On the first anniversary of the Bank's fall, Ren climbed to the roof of the Open Ledger and sat with his legs hanging over the edge, watching the sun slide down behind the Gullet. He was twenty now. He felt a hundred.

He felt free.

He had no debt. No Collector. No grace period counting down in the corner of his sight. For the first time in his life, the numbers in his head had stopped.

He was almost ready to close his eyes when a faint silver glimmer flickered at the edge of his vision.

He had thought the Ledger was gone. It had burned with everything else. But there, hanging in the air, a single thin window drifted into view, written in a handwriting he had never seen before.

[ NEW ACCOUNT OPENED. ] [ HOLDER: UNKNOWN. ] [ LOCATION: BEYOND THE EASTERN SEA. ]

Ren stared at it for a long, long time.

Below him, the street was full of laughing people. Somewhere, a child was learning to swing a wooden sword. The porch light of the little house on the corner came on, warm and steady, against the dark.

He took a breath.

Then he stood, brushed off his coat, and went downstairs to tell Dara they were going on a trip.