Chapter 49: The Machine That Was Ordered Twice
Frank was already somewhere else.
He was in the office three floors underground where the requisition ledgers lived, with its bad light and its rows of grey binders and its one window that looked at a wall, and he was looking at a line he had read four hundred times without ever having a use for it.
Aide Lance had issued this man a provisional Hero License. It was not a visitor’s pass with a photograph stapled into the corner. A provisional license carrying S-rank privileges until Headquarters could measure him properly.
Frank had typed the classification code into the system himself, one character at a time, and had checked it twice against the form afterwards, because a code like that did not enter the system by accident.
He had thought at the time that it was the most absurd thing he would ever be asked to do for a boy in a hoodie.
S-rank privileges meant priority medical requisition. It meant a Hero who came out of a Tower floor with his spine in pieces got the rig, and the queue moved for him, and the manufacturer found one, because that was the arrangement the world had made with the people who went up the Tower on its behalf.
Nobody had ever used it for a wife.
And underneath that, quieter and much more useful, was the thing Aide Lance had said in the park with his tie loose and his face perfectly friendly.
"I do hope, Mr Theolyne, that we can at least keep you on favorable terms with the Association. That wouldn’t be a problem for you, would it?"
Frank had been standing two steps behind him at the time, holding the folder, saying nothing, filing it away the way he filed everything his superior said.
He was about to make Aide Lance’s dream come very true, and all it would cost was a machine.
’He hasn’t asked us for anything, not even a word about the Gate reward. And now he’s asking, and he’s asking me!’
Frank’s mouth had gone dry.
"Sir, do you have the model plate? The number on the side of the unit, near the base."
"Two of them. And the serial on the mana regulator, and the name of the engineer who services it, and his shift pattern." Theo turned the billing statement around and showed him the back. "I wrote it down on Tuesday."
Frank leaned in over the paper. It was the back of a hospital billing statement, covered corner to corner in a young man’s small, careful handwriting, the numbers squared off and copied out a second time underneath where the plate had been scratched and hard to read. Tuesday. Four days ago. Before the Association had offered him anything at all, back when there was no reason on earth for the man to believe help was coming.
Frank read it through twice and had a feeling he could not name at all.
’Who are you.’
Theo mistook the silence for reluctance and immediately began apologising, which made it worse.
"You don’t have to. I know it’s not your job, and you’ve already been carrying trays for me, which I’m fairly sure isn’t in the assignment sheet either. If it’s a hassle, forget I asked. I’ll find another way. I usually do."
"Sir." Frank’s voice came out strange. "Please stop talking."
Then he walked very fast toward the stairwell, taking the corner without slowing for it, and Theo watched him go and worried that he had offended the man.
Out of habit, and a little out of guilt, Theo let the Genesis Eyes open for half a second before the door swung shut.
[Subject: Frank Osric. Elevated heart rate. Elevated respiration. No hostility markers. No deception markers.]
’Excited?’
’Why would he be excited?’
Theo shrugged, folded the statement back into his pocket, and went down the corridor to find a phone signal, because there was one more person he felt he ought to at least mention it to.
Billy took the call on the second ring, the way he had taken every call from that number since the day his director had walked past his desk and told him, without slowing down, that the young man in the hoodie was now the bank’s business.
"Lord Theolyne."
"Billy, I keep telling you I’m not a lord."
"You are in this building, sir."
Theo gave up on that, as he had given up on it four times before, and explained. He was careful to explain it as a question and not as an instruction, because it seemed rude to do otherwise, and because it genuinely had not occurred to him that it could be an instruction. He stood at the corridor window with one finger pressed into his other ear while a trolley went past behind him, and he apologised twice for the noise.
"So I only wanted to ask whether the bank knows anybody. If not, it’s no trouble at all."
There was a pause on the line. Behind it, a chair moved, and then a drawer.
"Sir, I want to make sure I have this correctly. You wish to purchase a Class Two Mana-tech suppression array, complete, with a servicing contract, and install it in the private residence at Lake Merrin."
"Yes. Is that a strange thing to want?"
"It is an extremely strange thing to want, sir." Billy sounded as though he was writing very quickly, and had been writing since the second sentence. "Give me twenty minutes."
"Twenty minutes for what?"
But Billy had already hung up, which Theo thought was quite rude for a bank.
***
At sixteen minutes past four in the afternoon, a procurement clerk on the ninth floor of the Vaunhold Mana-tech building received a priority requisition from the Hero Association, countersigned by an Aide, flagged S-CLASS PRIVILEGE — EXPEDITE, for one complete suppression array with a live servicing rider.
He printed it because that was the procedure, laid it by his elbow, and went back to his afternoon.
At twenty-two minutes past four, the same clerk received a private purchase enquiry for the same unit, routed through a bank that did not make private purchase enquiries, with a liquidity confirmation attached that made him sit forward in his chair and read the number twice.
He looked at the two documents lying side by side on his desk, one on Association letterhead with the stamp bleeding slightly at the edge, one on cream bank stock that had come off the machine still warm. Two of the three largest powers in Meteor City, arriving six minutes apart, both in a hurry, both wanting the same machine.
Then he checked whose name was on the end of both of them, and found that it was a name he had never heard, attached to no guild, no agency, no house, and no rank at all.
He typed it into the public registry to be certain. The registry gave him back nothing. He typed it again, slower, and got the same nothing.
The clerk stood up, took both sheets, and went to find somebody senior enough to be frightened on his behalf.