Chapter 3 Terminal Value

Harper's POV

Half a mile from the house, Tyler slapped the dash and told me to pull over. He was back before the car settled, both arms around a bundle in one of his old wrestling socks that he set in my lap, a brick of cash inside, the bills gone soft at the corners.

"Thirty-two thousand, one hundred sixty-eight dollars and eighty cents," he said to the windshield. "Shoveling. Lawns. Reffing the rec league. Sundays at the hub, hauling freight for Mom. Birthday envelopes since I was eleven." He wiped his nose. "I was saving for a car."

Six years of money that had never been inside a bank and never once mentioned in that house. "It goes into supplies," I said. "All of it." The last time around I found it in an inventory two winters from now, and he was not in it.

"How much do you have?"

"Five hundred thousand on the card, plus six eighty-one against lines in my own name." Eighty-nine days. "That buys a nice car and a place to park it. Not a fortress."

The Overdraft Act lets a citizen with income on file draw six figures unsecured on a thumbprint and a promise, because the city cannot afford a citizen who stops spending. I had used it once, for tuition. This time nothing was coming home.

Tyler had no credit file of his own, which sent him to the lenders who price for students. He worked the pad like a game he had already read the guide for: ninety thousand in limits, seventy after the fees. Four minutes.

"You want my fees," he said. "I want your principal. Nobody's getting paid."

"Nobody," I said, and he let it sit.

By the time I stopped him we had raised one million, two hundred eighty-three thousand, five hundred sixty-eight dollars and eighty cents, and not a dollar of it was coming back. He laughed when I said the number aloud, and it wasn't a good laugh.

"There's a man in a suit somewhere who's going to come to this house."

"In eighty-nine days there's no house."

The warehouse came first, because nothing I ordered that day could be delivered anywhere else. The unit sat off the Route 66 spur: forty thousand square feet of flat concrete, a sump in the corner, a pump Renner swore had never let groundwater in. A legal facility with cameras ran five times the money for half the space, which was why I was standing in a hole.

He opened at forty-five a month. I told him the unit next door was bigger and listed cheaper, and that his board hadn't moved in two years. He didn't argue. We settled at thirty-two, three months up front — ninety-six thousand, paid that morning so nobody would come looking for a payment in June — and eight hundred more for the dead tenant's racking.

The lease had to close that morning, because the order needed an address before it could move. The consignee was a shell name with a post office box. The delivery address was the one Renner wrote on the contract: Bay Fourteen, off the spur road. One load a day between six and eight, never two on the same street in a week, everything off the pallets and into the fold space before dark.

Tyler did two laps of the racks with his hands jammed in his pockets. "No cameras. No signal." Then, because he has never left a thing alone: "So where does a hundred tons of flour go?"

"Not out loud," I said. He grinned, and his hand wasn't steady when he handed back the pad.

By noon we were in the wholesale club lot, eating fried chicken off the hood while the dry order went through on Mom's account. She carried the restaurant tier, and a daughter ordering for her raised nobody's eyebrows. Flour first, a thousand bags by the pallet, because flour is what everyone forgets until there is none. Rice and oats behind it, a thousand cases of sauce, then tuna and corned beef wherever the price was soft. A can does not care what the sky is doing.

The invoice came to six hundred twenty thousand. Tyler read the line items, went pale, read the unit prices, and went pale the other way. "Fifty pounds of flour for seventeen dollars. A case of tuna for thirty. That's half what it costs in town."

"Eggs are six a dozen, and the credit has lost ground every week since January, and the wholesalers haven't repriced yet." I signed and handed back the pad. "In three months they won't have to. A sack of flour will be worth more than an ounce of gold, and whoever holds the grain sets the price."

The second stop cost nearly as much, because it was the stop nobody thinks about: oil by the drum, salt by the pallet, coffee by the case, two hundred cases of coffee alone. Coffee is the last taste of the old world and the first thing a man will trade a working gun for. Five hundred fifty-seven thousand dollars, signed without reading the list twice, which is a thing I have never done in either life.

Tyler had stopped taking pictures of the shelves. "We're at nine thousand," he said, in the same voice he uses for scores.

By four the asphalt had gone soft under the tires, which in March meant something overhead was running hot, so I ordered ice cream by the pallet and we ate two bars standing at the car. Then the garden aisle: seeds at three dollars a packet, tools at fifteen. Four thousand dollars, and then I stopped. Everything else we bought that day would be gone inside a year. Seeds would not.

The commerce dome was the last stop. Every handset in the city has to be certified to speak to the lattice, and the certification is most of what you pay for, which is how a phone comes to cost what a used truck does. Tyler went straight for the flagship at four thousand eight ninety-nine. I bought him the certified model a tier down at three thousand two ninety-nine, because his own phone was a brick with a cracked corner, and because in eighty-nine days neither one was going to call anybody.

"Historical," he said. "My own sister."

"Sixteen hundred dollars is ninety-four bags of flour." He did that in his head and stopped arguing.

"Two thousand four hundred sixty-nine dollars and eighty cents," he said, reading the pad over my shoulder. "That's what's left of us."

Halfway to the doors, the back of my neck went cold the way it does when somebody has been looking at you long enough to decide something. I turned. He was twenty feet off in a coat that cost more than my car, and he wasn't pretending not to stare. I put a hand on Tyler's shoulder and steered him out the east doors.

"Who was that?" Tyler said. "Nobody," I told him, and he let it go.

Coming up out of the lower garage, I had my mouth open to say we were going home when a panel slid across the dash. Aegis climate lattice. Scheduled maintenance. Orbital node Sector 7. Data synchronization at twenty-three hundred hours. Tyler asked what the big deal was, since it did that every day.

My hand closed on the wheel and the leather creaked. Same font, same cheerful blue, the node numbers running along the bottom edge. I had scrolled past that panel a thousand times and never once looked at it. Not until the year the sky stopped being the sky.

"Ninety days," I said to the windshield. That was the number anybody would have said out loud. I didn't believe a word of it.

Charles's POV

Same afternoon, same dome. I came out of the lift bank on my way to a meeting I had already decided not to enjoy, and she looked straight up at me — one full second — before the east doors took her, the boy half a step behind.

I don't know her.

That is the part I keep turning over on the way up. I have never forgotten a face in my life, and hers was not one I had misplaced, because there was nothing to misplace. Which leaves the thing I can't answer: why I stopped walking.

"Charles." Julian had come up beside me with his hands loose. "Who was that?"

"Thought I knew her."

"You knew her how?"

"Wrong, probably," I said, and that was all he got. He asks because he always asks, and there was nothing on the table, so he went on up to the meeting without me.

I have gone back over it more times than I want to admit, and it comes out the same. I have never seen her. Of that I am certain. What I can't account for is why I looked up.