WORLD OF FICTION (WOF)

Marek discovered his meal card could purchase anything except food. The kitchen clerk pressed it against the brass reader, and the machine accepted his identity before immediately assigning the cost somewhere else.

ASH–31 PROTECTED SUBJECT.

MEAL COST ASSIGNED TO STORY CUSTODY.

Marek took the card back. "No."

The clerk looked over the counter at the cane beneath his left hand. "No bread?"

"No Story paying for it."

"It is breakfast."

"It is a bill with breakfast on top."

The line behind him continued growing. Pavel stood three places back wearing his blue coat, with water climbing from his sleeves into a thin sheet beneath the kitchen ceiling. Dorian sat at the nearest table with a weighted cup and his grey right hand resting inside its open brace.

Neither intervened. Marek appreciated that.

The clerk held out the card. "You are entitled to meals during medical recovery."

"Then charge Medical."

"Medical says your injury originated inside ASH–31."

"My injury is currently inside me."

"That is not an account."

"Make one."

The clerk stared at him. Marek stared back until the puncture under his bandage forced more of his weight onto the cane.

Pavel stepped out of line. "Put it on mine."

Marek turned toward him. "No."

"My account is provisional-person housing."

"I said no."

"It has seventeen meal credits."

"Why?"

"They accidentally issued me a weekly family allocation."

"Do you have a family here?"

"No."

"Then return it."

"I tried."

The kitchen clerk raised one hand. "Please move this dispute away from the bread."

Marek looked at the dark loaves cooling behind her. "How much?"

"Two copper meal units."

He searched his pockets and found a strip of bandage paper, half of the recognition notice he had torn, and a button Bell had removed from his armour. There was no money.

Marek placed the button on the counter. The clerk looked offended.

"That is not currency."

"It held my coat closed."

"It still isn't currency."

"Then I need work."

"You need breakfast."

"Work first."

Dorian spoke from the table. "There is a sack of potatoes blocking the pantry."

Marek turned. "Are you offering me a job?"

"No. I am describing a sack."

The distinction sounded absurd enough that Marek almost laughed. After the last day, he understood exactly why Dorian made it.

The kitchen clerk pointed toward the pantry. "Move it to the lower rack. Do not lift with the wounded side."

"If I move it, I get bread?"

"One loaf."

"Two."

"One loaf and potatoes."

"Dark bread?"

"Yes."

Marek took the cane into the pantry. The sack weighed far more than Bell would have allowed him to carry, so he chose not to lift it and hooked the cane under one corner instead, dragging the potatoes across the floor a few inches at a time.

The puncture in his ribs objected immediately. He kept going until heat spread beneath the dressing and he recognised the wetness of new blood.

Pavel entered the pantry behind him. "Help?"

"No."

"You are moving it badly."

"I am moving it."

"The agreement did not require you to move it alone."

Marek looked at the sack. Pavel was right, which made the pain more irritating.

"Take the other side."

Pavel gripped the coarse fabric. The upward rain around his fingers sank into the potatoes, reducing their effective weight without making the sack wet, and together they slid it onto the lower rack. The kitchen wall printed a classification above them.

MAREK — PROVISIONAL KITCHEN WATCHMAN.

Marek stepped back. "No." The words darkened.

KITCHEN WATCHMAN REQUIRED FOR PROTECTED-SUBJECT EMPLOYMENT.

Dorian's chair scraped outside the pantry. He did not enter because his gold scar had already started to glow.

"State the action," Dorian called.

Marek looked up at the title. "I moved potatoes for bread."

The role flickered. Pavel added, "I helped move potatoes." The remaining words vanished.

The kitchen clerk leaned into the doorway. "No one employed you."

"Good," Marek said. "Where is the bread?"

She gave him one dark loaf, two potatoes, and a narrow strip of roasted meat. The extra meat appeared because blood had already begun showing through his shirt and the clerk had no patience left for negotiating nutrition.

Marek sat across from Dorian while Pavel returned to the meal line. Dorian looked at the spreading stain.

"You should have asked him sooner."

"I did ask."

"After injuring yourself."

"Yes."

"Bad timing."

Marek tore the loaf in half. "You have a dead arm that cuts titles."

"Grey."

"Still attached?"

"Yes."

"Then grey arm."

Dorian accepted the correction without explaining the injury. Marek passed him half the bread.

"I have food," Dorian said.

"Then do not eat it."

Dorian took the bread. Neither thanked the other. For several minutes, the kitchen returned to ordinary sounds: cups against tables, knives against plates, and Pavel arguing through a wall speaker about whether water gathered on his ceiling counted as stored property under Housing rules.

Elias entered carrying a sealed box of registration strips. He saw Marek and stopped.

Marek pointed toward a table one row away. "You can sit there."

Elias obeyed. His heavier splint forced the right leg outward beneath the bench, and he kept the sealed box on his lap instead of crossing the room.

Marek ate one potato before speaking again. "Did I have anyone?"

Elias looked up. "What?"

"In the Story. Family. Friend. Someone expecting me home."

"I don't know."

"Search."

"I do not currently have access to the chapters."

"You remembered the bridge."

"I remembered writing around it."

"Search the public copy."

"The public copy removed your name."

"Search the drafts."

"Restricted."

Marek glanced toward the ceiling, as if Achebe's office might be visible through several floors of stone. "Convenient."

"Yes."

Elias did not add an apology. Marek preferred that to hearing one while he was trying to eat.

A kitchen runner arrived carrying a sealed evidence pouch.

"Marek?"

"Yes."

"This was removed from your armour."

Inside lay a folded pay strip stiff with old blood.

HALF-DAY WATCH PAY.

Below it:

MIRA'S FEVER POWDER.

The name was not Mira Sato. The handwriting did not match any current Errata record Marek had seen and belonged to his Story.

He read the second line three times. Dorian looked away, granting privacy without standing up, while Elias stayed where Marek had told him to sit.

"Who is Mira?" Marek asked.

"I do not know," Elias said.

"You used that answer already."

"It did not become less true."

Marek pressed his thumb against the pay strip. A narrow room moved beneath the uncertainty in his head: a girl coughing into a blanket and a wooden bowl beside a stove that had gone cold.

It was too little to call memory. It was enough to hurt, and Story Custody reacted before Marek could decide whether to say any of it aloud.

DEPENDENT RELATION DETECTED.

PROTECTIVE REPRESENTATION RECOMMENDED.

Marek stood too quickly. The wound pulled beneath his ribs.

"Do not touch her."

No one had established that the girl existed as a current person. Nobody knew whether she survived the Story, whether she had always been Marek's sister, or whether the name belonged to someone whose medicine he happened to carry.

The system had already found a relationship to manage. Elias stood more slowly.

"I will object."

Marek turned toward him. "I did not ask you to."

"No."

"Then why?"

"Because it is using your question as permission."

Marek considered that. "Object as yourself."

"Yes."

"Do not say it is for me."

"Yes."

Elias carried the custody notice toward Achebe's level. He made no promise to find Mira and no vow to save someone whose existence remained uncertain; his objection concerned only the automatic representation Story Custody had created from Marek's question.

Marek finished the bread. Bell found him twenty minutes later and changed the dressing in the kitchen storage room after obtaining consent.

"You reopened the wound moving potatoes."

"I bought breakfast."

"You traded blood for bread."

"The bread was good."

"That does not improve the decision."

"No."

Bell tightened the new bandage and checked whether the pain had changed. Marek asked for housing outside Medical, and she refused discharge from treatment.

He changed the request. He wanted a room where the window opened, his boots stayed visible from the bed, and no wall decided what he had survived while he slept.

Bell agreed to submit that request. Housing offered a converted bakery office by evening, with one window, one door, and a cot positioned so Marek could see both his boots and the bread racks through the inner service opening. Story Custody tried to classify the room.

ASH–31 PROTECTED RESIDENCE.

Marek crossed out the first line and wrote:

CURRENT MEDICAL HOUSING.

Bell signed beneath it. Housing accepted the correction.

Marek paid for his first meal there by sitting beside a basket and separating good potatoes from rotten ones. The work ended when the basket was empty.

No watchman role.

No guard title.

No Story account.

The kitchen clerk handed him another dark loaf. This time, he had purchased it with a task that ended when the basket was empty.