Borrowed Levels

Chapter 2: Grace Period

Ren did not run. His body wanted to, but his legs had only just started working again and he didn't trust them.

The tall figure crossed the ruined room without making a sound. Its coat dragged through the dust and left no mark. When it reached him, it stopped an arm's length away and looked down with that smooth, blank face.

Up close, Ren could see the book more clearly. The cover was cracked leather, and the edges of the pages glowed faintly silver. The figure turned it so Ren could read.

[ ACCOUNT: CALDER, REN ] [ PRINCIPAL: 6 LEVELS ] [ INTEREST DUE: 1 YEAR ] [ GRACE PERIOD: 30 DAYS ]

He read it twice. His mouth was dry.

"Thirty days to do what?"

A new line wrote itself across the page, in handwriting that was oddly neat.

[ REPAY OR BE COLLECTED. ]

"And if I don't?"

The figure did not answer. It closed the book, bowed its head, a small, almost polite gesture, and stepped backward into the shadow. The dark folded over it. The room was just a room again.

Ren sat very still for a full minute. Then he started to shake.

It took him a long time to get out. The passage behind the boss room was half buried, and he had to dig through it with his hands, which no longer felt like his own. The skinny porter was dead. Ren checked twice. He closed the boy's eyes and put a lantern beside him, which felt like a stupid thing to do, and then left, because he couldn't carry him.

On the way back through the boss room, he stopped at the Warden's body. The orange glow in its chest had gone dim. A fist-sized stone lay in the cracked rock where its heart should have been, still faintly warm.

He took it.

The Ledger flickered at the corner of his vision.

[ COLLATERAL ITEM RECOVERED: STONE WARDEN CORE ] [ NOTE: DEFEATING MONSTERS REDUCES INTEREST. ]

So that was how it worked. He didn't pay in silver. He paid in kills.

He climbed out of the Gullet at dawn, covered in dust and blood, and found Tarn Ostler's party waiting by the gate, drinking something hot and looking pleased with themselves.

Tarn saw him and went pale.

"You're alive."

"So I am."

"We thought the ceiling..." Tarn stopped. His eyes dropped to the core in Ren's hand, then lifted to the gray streak at Ren's temple. "We looked for you. We did."

Ren almost laughed. "No, you didn't."

He walked past them. Nobody stopped him.

The core sold for eight hundred and twenty silver at the Guild exchange. Ren had never held that much money. The clerk counted it out in careful stacks, glancing up now and then as though waiting for the catch.

There wasn't one. For once, the Bank had nothing to do with it.

He sent four hundred to the Bank's debt office, because that was the law, and kept the rest. At the apothecary, he bought the first real dose of Mira's medicine in three months, and the apothecary told him, kindly, that it would only slow things down.

"What would fix it?" Ren asked.

The old man turned a bottle in his hands. "Moonvein root. Grows only in the deep vaults. The Hollow Vaults, if you want the truth."

The Hollow Vaults were a place nobody went below floor five. Ren thanked him and carried the medicine home through the gray morning.

Mira was awake, propped on pillows in the one-room flat they shared. She had her mother's dark eyes and her father's stubborn mouth, and she took one look at his face and said, "You look terrible."

"Rough shift."

"Your hair."

He touched it. "Stress."

She didn't believe him, but she took the medicine without arguing. He sat on the floor beside her bed until she slept, and then he opened the Ledger, because he could not stop thinking about it.

[ DEBT: 1 YEAR. 29 DAYS REMAINING. ]

A year of his life, written in glowing letters, counting down.

He had twenty-nine days to kill something worth a year.