Borrowed Levels

Volume 2: The Eastern Sea ,Chapter 11: Surplus

Ren woke before dawn, the way he had every morning for a year, and checked the corner of his vision out of habit.

Nothing. No number. No countdown.

He lay in the narrow bed above the Open Ledger's training hall and listened to the building creak. It still surprised him that nobody was owed anything in this house. His hands had a faint tremor in the cold, and he pressed them flat against the blanket until it passed.

Then the window opened, thin and silver, exactly where it had hung on the rooftop.

[ NEW ACCOUNT OPENED. ] [ HOLDER: UNKNOWN. ] [ LOCATION: BEYOND THE EASTERN SEA. ] [ YOUR BALANCE: 0 ]

He had stared at that message every night for a week. Tonight, a new line sat under it.

[ SURPLUS ENABLED. ]

"Surplus," Ren muttered. "What does that mean?"

The Ledger did not answer. It never did. But he had a guess, and at breakfast, Dara made him test it.

She dragged him to the practice yard behind the hall, where a straw-stuffed boar dummy stood on a post. She had pinned a rusty nail to its side. "Okay, that's a monster. Technically. Hit it."

"It's a dummy."

"It's a monster in spirit. Hit it."

He hit it. Nothing happened. Then a real boar crashed out of the hedge, a stray from the market, red-eyed and furious, and Ren cut it down in three strokes before he thought about it.

The Ledger flickered.

[ DEBT: 0. ] [ SURPLUS RECORDED: +0.02 YEARS. ]

Ren froze. Dara read his face and grabbed his sleeve. "What? What does it say?"

"I think," he said slowly, "it just gave me a few days."

"Gave you..."

"When I had debt, killing monsters paid it down. Now I don't owe anything, so it goes the other way." He stared at his own hands. "I'm earning my life back."

Dara sat down hard on the grass. For a long moment neither of them spoke.

"Then we're going," she said. "Across the sea. Whoever opened that account, they're sitting on a Ledger, and I'd rather you meet them before the Bank's old friends do."

"The Bank's gone."

"Banks never really go."

The goodbyes took a day.

Mira cried and pretended she wasn't. She was sixteen now, in a gray academy coat two sizes too big, and she'd packed him a satchel of bandages, willow bark, and a thick folded note on how to take his own pulse. "Check it every morning," she ordered. "If it's weird, don't be stubborn."

"I'm never stubborn."

"You're the most stubborn person I know."

His father waited on the steps of the hall with his tea. He had put on weight since the spring. He did not make a speech. He took a small brass coin from his pocket and pressed it into Ren's palm, the first silver-edged copper he had ever earned, worn smooth with age.

"For the road," Aldric said. "So you remember what a coin costs."

Kessin came last, in the plain brown coat he now wore every day, carrying a sealed letter. "Introduction to a trading house in Calloway," he said. "The Calloways owe my father a favor. Use it carefully."

"You hate favors."

"I hate owing them," said Kessin. "Other people owing me is fine."

Pip took the longest to say goodbye. She hugged Bram twice and the hall cat once, and then she hugged Ren so hard that something in his back cracked. Hesk loaded the crates with silent efficiency. Dara counted them three times.

They sailed on the next tide, aboard a battered merchant ship called the Gray Lantern, with a captain named Orrin Tave who chewed pipe stems and refused to say how many times he had made the crossing.

Ren stood at the stern, watching Veyra shrink behind them. The Gullet breathed its pale steam into the morning. The Bank's old tower was a pile of rubble with a flag over it, and the city looked, for the first time he could remember, like a place people could simply live in.

"Regrets?" Dara asked, leaning on the rail.

"Thirty years of them."

"That's not what I asked."

He watched the sunlight crawl over the water. In the corner of his eye, the Ledger flickered one last time.

[ DEPARTING KNOWN TERRITORY. ] [ UNKNOWN HOLDERS DETECTED: 1. ]

"Ask me when we land," he said.