Chapter 20: The Price of Safety and Escape
Chapter 20: The Price of Safety
I argued for eleven minutes with a woman called Administrator Pell, and I have rarely been so comprehensively defeated by someone being polite.
"You didn’t tell me the medical was chargeable."
"The medic asked whether you consented to treatment. You said yes." Pell had a neat office, a ledger, and a bowl of boiled sweets on the desk, which I found genuinely obscene. "Would you have preferred we let the infection run so you could make a properly informed decision in three days’ time?"
"I’d have preferred to know."
"It’s on the intake sheet. Second paragraph, under services rendered."
"In grey type, at four in the morning, after two days without food."
"Everyone arrives that way. That’s what an intake is." She turned the ledger a few degrees so I could see my own line in it. "If we waited until people were rested and clear-headed to explain the terms, we’d be explaining them to corpses. Shall I go through the options?"
"Please."
"You may refuse work. It’s your right. It means no meals and no bunk, and the balance stands at six hundred and seventy until it’s paid." She said the number without checking. "You may attempt to leave with an outstanding balance, in which case you’ll be stopped at the outer gate and held — and detention is charged at nine credits a day, because a detained resident still eats and still occupies a bunk. Or you may take an assignment. General labour is twenty-two. Hazard-rated is sixty. Some people clear a balance like yours in a fortnight."
"And how many of them come back injured?"
"Some."
"And get treated, and charged for the treatment, and go back up."
Something behind her face moved. Not guilt. Assessment.
"You’re quick," Administrator Pell said. "That’s noted." She wrote it down, and when she looked up her voice had gone almost kind, which was worse than anything else she’d done. "There are nine hundred people inside this wall who are alive because there is a wall, and floodlights, and barley in the stores. None of that arrives because people are deserving. It arrives because somebody hauled it and somebody paid for the hauling. I didn’t design a system that makes debtors of frightened people. I inherited a settlement that would starve without one."
She believes it. That’s the part. She’s been saying that sentence to herself so long it’s load-bearing.
"Eat your breakfast, Mr Vale. Someone will find work for you."
I stopped arguing.
That was the single most useful thing I did in Eastbridge, and it cost me more than the debt did. I said thank you. I buckled the band onto my wrist — 1447, stamped into a tin tab that clicked against my knuckle whenever I moved my hand — and went out and stacked salvaged brick for eleven hours.
I’d half convinced myself that the night before I had done something to my body that mattered. I hadn’t — not in any way a brick could tell.
By hour three my forearms shook badly enough that I dropped a brick, knocked half the row loose, and had to restack it. By hour six the gash under my ribs had opened its edges again and I could feel it wet under the dressing. By hour eleven I was counting to four between each brick and pretending it was a rhythm rather than a rest. The man beside me, 0623, was fifty-one and moved twice as many bricks without comment.
At the end of it I smiled at the crew boss and asked him about his knees.
Inside, I was a very small quiet fire.
Because it was a system. Not a gang taking what it wanted — a rate card, a ledger, and a bureaucracy that had worked out to two decimal places how much desperation a person absorbs before they stop being profitable. Eastbridge didn’t need chains. It had arithmetic. Twenty-two a day earned against six a day charged for food and a bunk meant a man could destroy himself and be sixteen credits closer every evening — and the moment he was sick, or slow, or hurt, the sum turned round and ate him.
So I studied it, the way I’d studied the grocery store.
Gate crews change at six, fourteen, and twenty-two, and the fourteen-hundred handover is sloppy because both crews want the mess hall. The inner gate takes an administrator’s chit. The outer gate takes a chit and a named escort who signs for you, which means the escort suffers if you don’t come back — a far better lock than any bolt. The laundry, stores, and water plant are watched constantly. The east salvage yards are barely watched at all, because everything past them is Red Zone and the city does that guarding for free.
There are roughly one hundred and forty grey uniforms and about nine hundred bands. That ratio only holds while nobody in the nine hundred believes the others will move with them, and Eastbridge understood that: crews are reassigned weekly, so you never work beside the same five people long enough to trust them.
And there is a list of hazard postings that people say yes to and don’t come back from. Nobody writes it down. You learn it by watching which assignment names make the quartermaster’s assistant look at the floor.
Charisma got me more than it should have — a tired guard talks to a pretty face at two in the morning, a clerk explains the chit system to someone who seems interested in her. It didn’t erase a single credit. Pell went on being perfectly civil, and the ledger did not care what my face looked like.
The Anchor gave me something, too, though not what I wanted.
Eastbridge’s wall had a hum to it. Standing near the north span, the perception laid it out: a woven pressure running the whole perimeter, fed from four dense knots at the corner towers, thinning where the containers met the old flood channel. It told me the barrier existed and roughly where it was weakest.
It did not tell me who controlled it, what happened to somebody who touched it, whether the channel was watched, or how a Level 4 with a debt band gets past a hundred and forty armed people. Dimensional Energy Perception gives you sensations. It does not give you a plan, and it certainly doesn’t give you politics.
The next two days completed the wait. The ledger counted all three.
Day one, brick: twenty-two earned, six charged for meals and the bunk. Six hundred and fifty-four.
Day two, the water lines with a crew of five. I learned four names and tore a glove on a pipe collar and had to replace it at the stores, which is two credits, which is a thing they can charge you for. Twenty-two earned, six charged, two for the glove. Six hundred and forty.
Day three, a half-collapsed retail unit, pulling copper out of a ceiling void. Hazard-rated. Sixty earned, six charged. Somewhere in the fourth hour a sheared conduit bracket opened a cut across my shoulder blade, and I felt the blood run down under my shirt and did not report it — because a medic is a dressing, and a dressing is a line item, and a line item is another day.
Five hundred and eighty-six.
I lay in a bunk room with thirty-one other men that night, listening to them breathe, doing the arithmetic again in the dark and hoping it would come out different.
And at some point in the small hours of the third night, a blue window opened without a sound.
[Blind Call Charges: 1/1]
[Charge available.]
I got up.