Everyone took the System when it arrived. Almost nobody read the terms. It offered levels, skills, classes — power, right now, to anyone who said yes. What it also said, three screens down and past a confirmation that reads like a warning, is that it was extending a line of credit. That the credit accrues interest. And that it reserves the right to recover. Elias Vance recovers. When you stop making payments on the levels you borrowed, he comes to your home and takes them back. Highest first. Everything you built on top of them goes when they go — your skills, your work, the version of yourself you spent sixteen years becoming. He does it in your kitchen. He wipes his boots on the way in. He is good at it, and he has to be, because Collectors aren't paid in money. They're paid in deferral — days bought against their own balance, one job at a time. Elias has eleven days. He had fourteen in spring. Then a woman with four levels anchored in her spine asks him a question nobody has ever asked him, and it isn't please. It's this: What's your balance? He doesn't know. In sixteen years he has never once opened his own terms. He knows his days the way everyone knows their days — to the hour. He has never known the rate. He is about to find out that the rate goes up every time he gets stronger. That the job which buys him time is the same job sinking him. And that three Collectors who learned this before him walked away without filing the paperwork, because filing puts the conversation on a log — and then somebody has to answer it. The System is not a god. It is not an alien. It is an instrument. Instruments have holders.