Compound Interest: I Repossess the System's Debtors

Eleven days. That was what the woman on the fourth floor was worth to him, and Elias had worked out the number on the stairs before he ever knocked. Three thousand one hundred in recovery value. Two hundred eighty-two of that bought a day of deferral. Eleven days, rounded down, because the System always rounded down. He had eleven now. It would give him twenty-two, and twenty-two was the thirtieth, and the thirtieth was far enough away to be a word instead of a date. He stood on the landing with his hand not quite on the door and let himself want it, which was a thing he'd stopped apologizing for around year three. Somewhere behind that door was a forty-one-year-old woman with four levels anchored into her spine, and he wanted them out, and the wanting sat in him quiet and enormous and did not feel like anything at all. He knocked. Already on, the kettle — he heard it before he saw her — that low building whine — which told him she'd known he was coming and had decided to be hospitable about it. "Mr. Vance." Marguerite Okonjo stepped back to let him in. "You're early." "Window opens at nine." "It's eight-forty." "Then I'm early." He wiped his boots on the mat, because there was a mat. Nine years of this and he still wiped his boots. Her apartment had been nice once, the way everything had been nice once. Photographs down the length of the hall, a lot of them, hung with the kind of care that meant somebody had once stood there with a level and a pencil and taken an afternoon over it. At the end of the row: three empty hooks, evenly spaced, waiting. He pulled the order into the corner of his vision and let it sit there, gray and patient. > Recovery authorized. Subject: M. Okonjo. Instrument: Tier-2 Warden, levels 14–17. > Estimated recovery value: 3,100. Absorption at grade: 155. Please confirm. He didn't confirm yet. You never confirmed in the doorway. You confirmed in the doorway and they ran, and then you were chasing a Warden down a stairwell, and Wardens were built for stairwells. "You've missed four service payments." "Five." She was doing something with a mug and a spoon. "The fifth was Tuesday." "File says four." "Then the file is behind." She turned around. She had the softness Tier-2s got when they quit training — frame still there underneath, shoulders still too wide for the cardigan, padded over now. Warden build gone domestic. "I'm not going to lie to you about the number. I know what the number is." Unusual. He put it where he put all the unusual things, which was a list he never looked at. "Then you know why I'm here." "I know why you're here." She poured the water. "I'd like to appeal." "There's no appeal." "There's a form." "There's a form," Elias agreed. "It goes to an address that doesn't receive mail. I've watched people fill it out. I've never seen one come back." She stirred her tea. Six times around, and then the spoon went down on a folded square of paper towel, and he noticed the paper towel, the small deliberate courtesy of it, in a kitchen where a stranger had come to take her legs out from under her. "Nine days," she said. "Ms. Okonjo—" "Nine days and you can have all four and I won't make a sound. I'll sign whatever you want. I'll sign it now." She hadn't raised her voice. That was the part that got him, later. "Nine days, Mr. Vance." "What happens in nine days?" "That's not what I asked you." He almost smiled. He'd said that same sentence to three people this month. "Recovery isn't scheduled by me. It's scheduled by the balance. Four payments behind, the order generates. Order generates, somebody comes." He watched her hands. "If I walk down those stairs it doesn't cancel. It reassigns. And the next one isn't going to stand here while you make tea. Grade IIs work the hall. They don't wait for you to sit down." "I understand." "I don't think you do." "I said I understand." She picked up the mug and held it without drinking. "I'm asking anyway. I know it doesn't — " She stopped. Started lower. "I'm asking anyway." Outside and four floors down a truck was backing up, and the beeping came in through the glass, steady and stupid and completely indifferent. The nineteenth, he thought. That's what you've got. Eleven days, and on the nineteenth the deferral lapses and the arrangement runs the other direction and somebody with a mat outside their own door comes up a staircase for you. Eleven days was the most he'd carried since spring. It had been fourteen once. It got shorter every time he leveled and he had never let himself sit with why, and the arithmetic in this kitchen was the first arithmetic in eleven weeks that came out in his favor. "Sit down," she said. "I'd rather stand." "You've been standing since you got here. There's a chair. I'm forty-one and I haven't trained in four years and you'd have me on the landing before I made the second flight." She pushed the chair out with her foot. "Sit down, drink the tea I made you, and then do your job." He sat. The tea he didn't touch. Off the surface of it, steam came up and went nowhere. Her hands closed around her own mug — old Warden knuckles, thick, hands that had held a line somewhere back when the city still had lines and paid people to hold them. "Can I ask you something." "You can ask." "When you took yours. Did you read it?" Elias didn't move. "Because I didn't," she said. "I'm not building to anything. I'm not going to tell you it's unfair. I signed. There was a screen and I went through it because my girl was on the other side of it and I'd have gone through anything. She was six." She turned the mug a quarter turn. "But I've been sitting here all week waiting for whoever they'd send, and what I keep landing on is that I don't know what I agreed to. Sixteen years. I've never once opened the terms." The truck had stopped. The kitchen was very quiet. "Nobody opens the terms." "That's not an answer." "It's the answer I have." "No." She looked up at him, and there was nothing hostile in it at all, which was worse. "You come to people's homes. You know the schedule, you know what anchoring does, you know the appeal goes nowhere." She set the mug down. "So what I'm asking you, Mr. Vance, is what your balance is." He knew the shape of it. That was the thing he might have told her, if she'd earned it, or if he'd been someone else. You know it the way you know there's a floor under the carpet. Never checked. Never doubted. Never once stood there wondering what the joists looked like. The order sat gray in the corner of his eye. Confirm was one motion. He'd made it four hundred times, the way other men sign for a package. "Ms. Okonjo." "Yes." "Nine days." He heard himself say it and didn't entirely recognize the voice. "Nine days. Then I take all four and you don't make a sound." She set the mug down very carefully, like it might go off. "Why." "That's not what I asked you," Elias said, and stood, and got out of her apartment before the order finished generating the penalty. Two landings down, it caught him. > Recovery deferred by collector election. Penalty assessed: 1,400. > Instrument: Tier-3 Lien, level 31. Accrual adjusted: 41/day → 44/day. > Deferral remaining: 6 days. Lapse: the fourteenth. Six. He'd walked in with eleven. He stood on the stairs of a building that had been nice once and read it twice. The first time he read the days, because the days were what he'd come for and the days were gone. The second time he read the small number underneath. Forty-one to forty-four. It had done that quietly, while he was in a kitchen being asked a question, and it occurred to him standing there — with no particular feeling, the way you notice a smell — that in nine years he had never once seen that number go the other way.