The first useful thing Sebastian did that morning was search his own room.
He did it the way he'd been taught. Low to high, outside to in. It took forty minutes, because the room was the size of a tennis court and had been furnished by people who believed in drawers.
He started with the wardrobe, because clothes told you about a body and a budget at the same time. Julien Jules had eleven shirts and four suits and all of them fit Sebastian exactly, which was the first genuinely unpleasant thing that had happened to him that day. The suits had been good four or five years ago. Two of them had been let out at the waist and taken back in again.
Under the shirts, at the back, a shoebox with nothing in it but a shoe tree.
The desk next. Three drawers, none locked, which told him either that nobody in this house went into anybody else's room or that Julien had nothing worth locking up.
A passport. Julien Ambrose Jules, twenty-three years old, born in a month Sebastian would not have guessed. Four stamps, all of them the same country, all of them inside a single year. He turned the pages twice looking for the rest and there wasn't any rest. A boy with money and a passport and one destination, four times.
Military academy, then. School trips with a rifle in them.
Eleven letters, held together with a fold rather than a clip, all from the same instructor at the academy, all typed, all beginning Cadet Jules. He read two of them. They were not warm and they were not unkind. They were the letters you wrote about a boy who was good enough at everything and outstanding at nothing, and who had been raised to believe that was a moral failing.
The third drawer down had a knee brace in it. Still sealed. The plastic hadn't been opened, and the cardboard backing had gone slightly soft at the corners the way cardboard does after a year in a drawer.
Sebastian sat back on his heels and looked at it.
Not on that knee, Aldric had said, and had watched him walk on it, and had said nothing to anybody.
He turned the packet over. No receipt. No pharmacy sticker. He put it back exactly where it had been, face up, the way it had been lying, and he did not have a theory and did not go looking for one.
The phone was in the bedside table, dead, with a charger that took ten minutes to locate and turned out to be behind the headboard.
The cigarette burn he found on his back.
He was lying on the floor checking the underside of the furniture, because that was where things got taped, and there it was on the bottom face of the middle desk drawer — a single round scorch about the size of a thumbnail, black at the center, brown at the edge. Somebody had put a cigarette out on the underside of a drawer. In a house with ashtrays in it.
The burn itself did not interest him. Where it was did.
Sebastian got up off the floor and brushed his knees off and thought, All right. So you weren't nothing.
Then, because he had left the wardrobe half done, he went back to it, and in the inside pocket of a jacket he found a debit card in a leather sleeve with a folded receipt tucked behind it. The receipt was for a taxi. It was eight months old.
The phone had enough charge by then to turn on. No passcode. That told him something too, and none of it was flattering.
The banking app took a second to load.
$2,412.06
Sebastian looked at it for a while.
That was the entire liquid position of the youngest son of the Jules family. Two and a half months of somebody's rent, in an account that had not moved since March.
[Daily Objective] Exhaust today's Spending Limit before Settlement. $1,000 remaining · 14h 08m
"Yes," Sebastian said. "I heard you."
He caught Aldric in the hall on the way out. Aldric had a cloth and a candlestick, and went on having both for the entire conversation.
"The arrangement," Sebastian said. "Lucia says you're the one who'll give me the real number."
"I will."
"Now would be good."
"Now would be inaccurate." Aldric turned the candlestick a few degrees. "The ledger is with Mr Pell until Thursday. I can tell you what I believe the figure to be, and I would be within some thousands, and you would carry my guess around in your head as though it were the number. I'd rather show you the page."
"I don't need it to be exact."
"You do, sir. That's rather the whole difficulty with it." He set the candlestick down. "Thursday. You'll want to be sitting, and you'll want no one else in the room."
"That's four days."
"It's been four months. Four days is not the difference."
Sebastian let that stand, because it was true and because arguing would have taken longer than the information was worth today.
Aldric picked the cloth back up. "You're going out."
"I am."
"There's a car."
"Is there a driver?"
There was a pause of perhaps half a second, and in it Aldric did not look up.
"There is not," he said.
"Then there's a bus."
"There is a bus," Aldric agreed. "The eleven, from the bottom of the drive and left. It runs every twenty minutes and it is not, in my experience, punctual."
Sebastian went out through the front door of a house with a chandelier in it and walked twenty minutes to a bus stop.
There was a parade of shops at the bottom of the hill with a cash machine set into the wall between a laundrette and a shuttered unit. He took out eleven hundred dollars, because he did not know yet what a gold coin cost and did not want to have to come back.
The day pass on the eleven was eight dollars. He bought one and sat near the door.
He had spent eighteen months not being able to afford things and eleven days being dead, and he found he was not interested in easing into this.
So he ran it like a systems check.
He bought a notebook for four dollars from a pharmacy on Chandler Street — a small green thing with a stitched spine, the kind he'd carried for eight years and had stopped carrying about two weeks after the discharge. Then he sat on a bench outside and wrote down what he actually knew, and it took half a page.
Spend money. Get 10x back. Midnight. Cap $1,000/day.
Underneath that he wrote TESTS and underlined it twice.
His working assumption was that this would be simple. Money went out; money came back tenfold; the only real question was the ceiling. If almost anything counted, then the smart play was to spend the thousand on something that held its value, take the ten thousand at midnight, and do it again tomorrow with a stack of things he could sell.
He was aware that this was too easy. He wanted to know where the edge was, so he went looking for it on purpose.
Test one. A coin dealer three blocks north, behind a door with a buzzer and a camera above it, its cable hanging loose from the wall.
Sebastian bought a one-ounce gold coin for nine hundred and eighty dollars. It was over spot. The dealer told him it was over spot, in the tone of a man who had made his peace with people like this, and asked twice whether he wanted it in a capsule.
Sebastian counted out a thousand in twenties. The dealer counted it again, slower, and put two tens back on the counter.
Sebastian looked at the corner of his vision.
Daily Spending Limit: $1,000 remaining
He read it four times, standing on the pavement outside with a gold coin in his coat pocket.
"Nothing," he said.
The counter agreed with him, silently, in small clean letters.
He wrote gold — $980 — 0 in the notebook and stood there thinking about it. Precious metal. A store of value. Maybe the system had a rule about hoarding, or about commodities, or about the specific kind of person who walks into a coin dealer at eleven in the morning.
Too many maybes. He needed to cut the variables down.
Test two. A department store four minutes' walk away, because he wanted the least exotic purchase he could think of.
He bought a watch. Three hundred and forty dollars, steel, unremarkable, the sort of thing a man buys when he doesn't care what's on his wrist. Not an investment. Not a commodity. A normal object bought normally in a normal shop by a man wearing someone else's coat.
He put it on at the counter.
Daily Spending Limit: $1,000 remaining
He stood in the aisle and worked through it. Not the price — the gold had been three times the watch and both had returned nothing. Not the type of shop. Not the speed; there'd been forty minutes between them.
He wrote: not amount. not shop. not speed.
Something the two purchases had in common. He was fairly sure he was looking straight at it and not seeing it, and that irritated him more than the failures did.
Test three. A bank on the corner, a real one, marble floor and three tellers and a queue of six.
His theory by then was about ownership — that maybe the system wanted the money to leave him, and buying a thing wasn't leaving, because a thing was just money in a different shape. So he tested the cleanest version of leaving he could arrange. He opened a savings account and put eight hundred dollars in it.
It took twenty minutes. Two forms. A photograph of his own face that he did not enjoy looking at, and a woman named Priya who asked him three security questions about a life he'd never had and accepted all three answers off the card in his hand.
The money went from one account to another. It was, on any sensible reading, no longer where it had been.
Daily Spending Limit: $1,000 remaining
Sebastian walked out and stood on the pavement and lost his temper, in public, for the first time in about six years.
It lasted maybe four seconds and consisted entirely of standing very still. But a woman with a stroller crossed to the other side of the road, so it must have been visible from outside.
He now had a hundred and twenty dollars in his pocket and a hundred and sixty in the account, a coin he didn't want, a watch he didn't need, and a savings account holding more money than he'd had at any single point in his previous life. Three tests, three failures, and the counter had not moved by one dollar.
There was a man sitting against the wall of the bank with a paper cup.
Sebastian had walked past him on the way in. He had also walked past him that morning, going the other way, on his way to the coin dealer. He had not seen him either time.
He noticed that about himself now, standing there, and did not like it, and put it away to look at later.
He took the twenty out of his back pocket — the change from the coin, as it happened — and put it in the cup.
"That's a lot," the man said. "You sure?"
"No," Sebastian said, which was honest, and walked on.
He got four steps.
Daily Spending Limit: $980 remaining
He stopped in the middle of the pavement and a cyclist swore at him.
Twenty dollars. Not the nine hundred and eighty. Not the eight hundred. Not the three hundred and forty. Twenty dollars, handed to a stranger who was going to turn it into coffee or a sandwich or something worse, and it was gone the instant it left his fingers, and it was never coming back to anybody.
He got the notebook out and stood there with the pen not moving, because he had a shape and not yet a rule.
Gold: still his. Watch: still his. Savings: still his.
Twenty dollars: gone.
"Huh," he said.
He wanted one more data point before he committed anything to the page, and he was aware, even at the time, that the next one was going to be sloppier than the first three. He'd stopped being methodical about forty minutes ago and he was hungry.
Test four, if you were being generous about it.
The restaurant had six tables and a chalkboard and was chosen for no reason except proximity. He took a table at the back out of habit, ordered the most expensive thing on the board and a beer he didn't particularly want, and watched the counter while he ate.
Sixty-one dollars.
Daily Spending Limit: $919 remaining
It moved while the plate was still in front of him. Food went in, food was gone, the number went down. That was consistent with the twenty. Sebastian sat back with a beer he didn't want and felt something that was not quite triumph.
Then he did the second stupid thing of the day, and he would admit afterward that it had not been a test at all. It was a man pushing a button to see whether it still lit up.
He put a hundred dollars on the table under the salt cellar. For a sixty-one dollar meal. Then he stood up and left while the waiter's back was turned, because he did not want to be there for the part where somebody thanked him.
Daily Spending Limit: $819 remaining
Sebastian stood on Chandler Street in a borrowed body with ninety-nine dollars to his name, and started laughing, which frightened a second stroller.
The bus took fifty minutes.
He sat at the back with the coin in one pocket and the notebook in the other and went back over the day. Three careful, expensive, intelligent transactions, and all three had returned exactly nothing. Three careless ones — a stranger's cup, a meal, a tip he'd left mostly out of spite — and every one of them had moved the number.
He wrote a single line under the crossed-out tests.
It doesn't count if you still have it.
He looked at it for most of a mile. It was probably not the whole rule; it was too neat, and systems that looked this neat from four data points usually weren't. But he didn't have a better one, and a rule you could act on beat a rule you were still waiting to be sure about.
The house came up on the left, past the gates, at the end of a drive that had not been resurfaced in some years.
Marcus was standing in it with a phone against his ear, saying the word crane at somebody in the flat, over-patient voice of a man who has explained this before. The light was on in the study window on the ground floor, and it had been on when Sebastian left. There was a van by the side entrance with a name on it he didn't recognise and a man loading something long and wrapped into the back of it, and nobody was supervising him, and nobody came out to watch him go.
Aldric was not visible anywhere. Sebastian was beginning to understand that this meant Aldric was somewhere he could hear you from.
Sebastian went upstairs and lay down on a bed the size of his old kitchen. He did not sleep for a long time, and then did.
He woke at twelve minutes past midnight because the letters were bright enough to come through his eyelids.
[Settlement — 00:00]
Qualifying expenditure: $181
Return applied: $1,810
Account balance: $1,909.06
Sebastian sat up.
The phone was on the nightstand. He opened the banking app, because he did not trust letters that lived inside his own head. The number was there too, in a bank's font. The transaction line said DEPOSIT and gave no origin, no reference, no sender.
Then the notebook, and the pen, and the arithmetic done out loud, the way he'd been taught to check anything that mattered.
Twenty. Sixty-one. One hundred. One hundred and eighty-one dollars.
Times ten. Eighteen hundred and ten.
Exact. Not approximately, not rounded, not adjusted for anything. The three transactions that had vanished had come back at precisely ten times, and the two thousand one hundred and twenty dollars he had spent that day being clever had come back at nothing at all.
Sebastian sat in the dark in a house that was being taken apart around him, and understood that he had been handed a machine that paid out on exactly one thing.
Losing it.
"Okay," he said.
He looked at the gold coin on the nightstand, and the watch beside it. Both of them were still worth what he'd paid. Neither of them had earned him a cent.
Then he did the arithmetic he had actually been avoiding all day.
A thousand a day, spent properly, returned ten. Call it nine thousand a day in profit, every day, without a single mistake and without a single day off.
A million dollars was a hundred and twelve days of that.
He had twenty-eight.
Sebastian looked at the number he'd written on the page and drew a line under it, and then, below that, wrote the only thing worth writing.
Ask what raises the limit.
He was still underlining it when the letters changed.
[Daily Objective]
Exhaust today's Spending Limit before Settlement.
$1,000 remaining · 23h 47m