The Cryptocurrency King

DOORS

"Which one do we skip this month? The oxygen delivery or Sawyer's therapy?"

Diane's voice from the bedroom was thin, each word costing more breath than it should have. Wes stood in the doorway with the electric bill in one hand and the pharmacy printout in the other, doing math that never came out right no matter how many times he ran it.

"Neither," he said. "We're not skipping anything."

"Wes." She pushed herself up against the pillows, slow, careful, like her own bones had become something borrowed. "I did the numbers before you got home. We're eleven hundred short this month. That's after the bakery check, the garage check, and whatever the app pays you for driving strangers around at midnight."

"I'll pick up more shifts."

"You're already working ninety hours a week. There isn't more week to give it."

He didn't have an answer for that because she was right, and they both knew it, and the silence between them filled up with the sound of her oxygen concentrator ticking through its cycle.

"The therapy program has an eighteen month waitlist to get back in if we drop out now," Diane said quietly. "You know that."

"I know."

"And if we skip the oxygen delivery, I go back on the tank rotation, and the tank rotation runs out faster than the delivery does."

"Mom. Stop doing math. Let me handle it."

"Somebody has to do math in this house." Her smile was tired but real. "You were always terrible at it. Straight C's in algebra, and yet here you are, teaching yourself things out of library books nobody else in this building could read the first page of."

Wes almost smiled back. Almost.

In the kitchen, Sawyer had the radio on low, some economics call-in show he liked for reasons nobody fully understood, numbers and percentages filling the apartment like white noise. Wes sat down across from him and put his head in his hands.

"You could sell the ring," Sawyer said, not looking up from the show notes he was transcribing.

"What ring?"

"Dad's ring. The one in the drawer you think I don't know about."

Wes lifted his head. "How do you know about that?"

"I know about everything in this apartment. It's small. There are only so many drawers." Sawyer finally looked at him. "It's worth maybe four hundred dollars. That's not enough. I already looked it up."

"You looked up pawn values for a ring you weren't supposed to know existed."

"I get bored," Sawyer said, like that explained everything, and in a way it did.

Wes rubbed his eyes. Four hundred dollars wouldn't cover a quarter of what they needed. Nothing he could sell would. He didn't own anything worth real money, and the one skill he had, the coding he'd taught himself out of library books because the shelter's internet had been free and everything else cost quarters, wasn't the kind of thing that paid rent on a Tuesday.

He thought back to the shelter years without meaning to. Nine years old, sharing a cot with Sawyer while their mother worked two cleaning jobs to get them out of there, and the only quiet hour of the day had been the one the public library let him sit at a terminal uninterrupted. He'd started with typing games. Then simple websites. Then, by thirteen, he was teaching himself things the school's computer lab teacher couldn't answer questions about, because there was nothing else free to do with his hands that made the world feel less like it was closing in on him.

Nobody had ever paid him for any of it. It had always just been the one thing that was his.

"You're doing the staring thing again," Sawyer said. "Where you look at nothing for a long time and then decide something."

"I'm thinking."

"You think loud. It's annoying."

He pulled up the freelance board on Sawyer's tablet, the only working screen left in the apartment, and scrolled through gig postings with numb thumbs. Website bugs. App crashes. Nothing that paid more than beer money for a week's work.

Then one listing stopped his scroll.

URGENT: Blockchain settlement audit. Exchange-side contractor needed to trace a discrepancy in transaction batching. Must sign NDA. Pays $600 flat for verified diagnosis, remote, forty-eight hour turnaround.

Six hundred dollars. More than the rent shortfall by itself.

He didn't know the first thing about blockchain settlement architecture beyond what he'd taught himself for fun on nights he couldn't sleep, chasing rabbit holes because his brain wouldn't shut off and the library computers were free after nine. But he knew enough to fake competence for forty-eight hours. He'd faked competence for less money before.

He clicked apply before he let himself think better of it.

"What are you doing?" Sawyer asked, watching him type.

"Getting us the rest of that eleven hundred dollars."

"How?"

"There's a gig posted. Blockchain audit thing. Pays six hundred flat if I can diagnose the problem in forty-eight hours."

Sawyer set his pen down, which was rare enough that Wes actually looked up. "You don't know anything about blockchain."

"I know enough to figure it out."

"That's not the same as knowing it."

"No," Wes admitted. "But it's the only door I've got open right now, and I'm not in a position to be picky about which doors I walk through."

Sawyer studied him with that flat, unreadable focus that made most people uncomfortable and that Wes had long since learned meant his brother was working something out carefully, piece by piece, the way he worked out everything.

Wes looked at the screen, at the confirmation message blinking back at him. Application received. Client will review within twelve hours.

"I have no idea yet," he admitted. "But I found the door. I just have to figure out what's behind it before Friday."

Sawyer went quiet for a second, the way he did right before he said something that landed harder than he meant it to.

"You always find doors," he said. "You just never check what's on the other side before you walk through."