The money was still there in the morning.
Sebastian checked before he got out of bed, on the phone, in the bank's own font rather than the system's. One thousand nine hundred and nine dollars and six cents. The deposit line still said nothing about where it came from.
[Daily Objective]
Exhaust today's Spending Limit before Settlement.
$1,000 remaining · 15h 51m
He got the notebook off the nightstand and read yesterday's line again.
It doesn't count if you still have it.
Four data points. He'd built rules on less in worse conditions and he'd also been wrong doing it. Today there was no need to test whether the thing worked. The question was how fast it could be made to work.
Food had counted. Food was the easiest thing in the world to make disappear.
He went to find breakfast.
The kitchen was in the basement at the end of a corridor with a stone floor, and he found it by following the smell and the sound of a radio playing to nobody.
It was a big room built to feed thirty. Two of the six burners had been taken off the range and the gaps capped with metal plates. The walk-in larder had more shelf than tin.
A woman in her fifties was at the far counter with her back to him, working a knife through something. The girl from breakfast — seventeen, fast, permanently four minutes behind — was drying a pan with a cloth that had been a shirt.
The girl saw him first and stopped.
"Mr Jules."
The woman turned. She had flour to the wrist and she did not stop what she was doing, but everything about her changed by a degree.
"Sir. We weren't expecting you down here."
"I can go up."
"No." She wiped her hands. "No, sir. What can I do for you? There's — " She glanced at the larder door and appeared to make an assessment. "There's eggs. There's toast. I've no bacon until Thursday, I'm sorry. The order's been shortened."
Sebastian looked at the counter behind her while she said it.
Two jars of the same jam, both open. A bag of flour standing in a plastic tub because the paper had gone. A box of vegetables sorted into what could be used today and what could be cut around. Butter scraped down to almost nothing and not thrown out.
Nobody in a house like this ate like this.
"What does the kitchen need?" he said.
Both of them stopped.
It was not a difficult question and it produced the reaction of a difficult one. The girl put the pan down. The cook looked at him and then, briefly, past his shoulder to the doorway, and Sebastian did not have to turn around to know who was standing in it.
"That's not really — " the cook said.
"I'm asking."
"There's a list," the girl said.
"Tess."
"There is, though." The girl was already going to the wall by the door, where a sheet of paper hung on a nail with a pencil on a string beside it. "Miss Lucia does it Fridays. Only it's Wednesday and it's already two pages."
Sebastian took it off the nail.
It was written in two hands. Most of it was Lucia's, tight and small, and some of it was the cook's, larger, with quantities. Flour. Milk, three days. Coffee — the cheap, underlined. Bin liners. A brand of tea with a question mark after it.
"Who's the supplier?"
"Renwick's," the cook said. "They deliver Tuesdays." She wiped her hands again, and they were already dry. "They've stopped the account, sir. Miss Lucia's dealing with it. They'll want the old balance before they'll start again. So it's cash and carry, and we send Tess on the bus, and she can only carry what she can carry."
"How long has it been cash and carry?"
"Five weeks."
Sebastian folded the list in half and put it in his pocket.
"I'll do it today," he said.
The cook opened her mouth and did not find anything in it.
"For Miss Lucia?" she said.
"No."
He was at the door before she worked out what to say to that, and Aldric stepped back out of it to let him through without appearing to have been standing there at all.
"Sir."
"Is there petrol in the car?"
"Enough."
"Good."
Aldric considered the folded list showing out of Sebastian's pocket, and did not ask about it, and did not move out of the way quite fast enough for it to be nothing.
The supermarket was twenty minutes out, on a road with a tyre place and a garden centre on it, and at half past nine on a Wednesday it belonged to people over seventy.
Sebastian took a trolley and went down the list. Flour. Milk. Coffee, and not the cheap. Tea, without the question mark. Bin liners, four boxes. Butter, six. Eggs. Sugar. Two kinds of rice.
The counter in the corner of his vision did not move, and he had not expected it to. Yesterday it had waited until the money was gone. A trolley was not gone. A trolley was a list of intentions.
He worked on the assumption that this would count, because a meal had counted and this was a great deal of meals, and about halfway along the third aisle he understood something he had not considered the day before. One man eating alone is an inefficient way to destroy money. A household of a dozen people is not.
He started adding things that were not on the list.
Meat. A whole side of salmon. Cheese from the counter where a man had to cut it and weigh it. Four crates of the sort of vegetables that go off in a week. Everything he put in had a shelf life, and he checked.
The copper pans stayed where they were. Yesterday had settled that question.
At the till the woman scanned for eleven minutes and then looked up.
"Doing an event?"
"No."
She waited. She had the whole rest of her shift and she was prepared to give some of it to this.
"Right," she said eventually, and read him the total. Three hundred and twelve dollars, with the delivery.
Sebastian handed back a jar of honey and a bag of the good coffee. It came to three hundred exactly. The woman looked at him longer than she had looked at the trolley.
He paid.
Daily Spending Limit: $700 remaining
Good. Groceries counted.
Seven hundred dollars left, not yet eleven in the morning, and he had bought two weeks of food for twelve people to get rid of three hundred of it.
That was the thing worth writing down. Groceries worked and groceries did not scale. A house could only eat so much.
The delivery came at noon. The van was in the drive when he got back, the side door open, Tess going in and out with boxes at a speed that suggested she thought somebody might take them away again.
Sebastian carried in the salmon and then stood on the gravel because he'd noticed the wall.
The downpipe on the east corner had come away from its bracket, and where the gutter joined it somebody had packed the gap with a folded feed sack and wired it in place. The wire was rusted. Beneath it the stone had gone dark in a long streak down two floors, and the streak was old — there was moss in it.
A man in his sixties was up a ladder next to it with a roll of tape.
"Morning, sir."
"Is that going to hold?"
"It'll hold till it rains properly." He came down three rungs. "It's the bracket that's gone. And the joint. You want the whole run off and re-hung, and that's a day's work with two men and a proper ladder, not this one."
"So why hasn't it been done?"
The man got very interested in the roll of tape.
"It's been raised," he said.
"Vernay's won't come," Aldric said, from behind them, in the voice he used for facts. "They did the roof the year before last and there is an outstanding balance of some size. They were quite pleasant about it the first three times." He looked up at the sack. "Mr Coombes has been keeping the water off that window for eleven months."
"Who else does gutters?"
"There's a man in Aldershaw. Sowerby. He is not Vernay's and he does not have their insurance, and he will want cash."
"How much?"
"For that? A hundred, perhaps, with the bracket."
"Get him."
Aldric did not move.
"Sir. Household maintenance is not customarily — "
"I know."
"It goes through Miss Lucia."
"Then it can go through her after it's fixed," Sebastian said, and went inside.
Sowerby came at one o'clock in a van with his own name on it, took the old bracket off in about four minutes, and charged a hundred dollars including the part.
Daily Spending Limit: $600 remaining
It didn't fit. The gutter was still there. The bracket was still there, screwed into the wall, and it was going to be there in ten years. He hadn't consumed anything. He hadn't given anything away. The house was better off than it had been at breakfast and the number had still moved.
It doesn't count if you still have it did not survive that.
He wrote services count underneath it and did not try to write anything cleverer. Two facts and no theory. He'd already learned yesterday what happened when he built one too early.
He was hungry by two and there was nothing in the kitchen he could take without somebody insisting on cooking it for him, so he drove back into town, and because he wanted to eat rather than to think about eating, he went to the place he'd been the day before.
The waiter recognised him from the door.
That was the first inconvenience. The second was the table — the good one, by the window, held with a hand on the back of the chair. Yesterday Sebastian had sat at the back and been ignored competently for forty minutes, and it had been the best part of the day.
"The special is very good today," the waiter said. "Also we have the sea bass, which is not on the board."
"Fine." Sebastian looked at the board and did the arithmetic he was there to do. "And I'll take food away. Whatever travels. Six or seven portions."
The waiter's face did a thing.
"Of course, sir."
The sea bass came, and it was good. The waiter came back three times to ask whether it was good. The takeaway went into a box tower that took two hands, and the bill was ninety-two dollars.
Sebastian put eight beside the bill and made it an even hundred, and the waiter's face did a second thing.
Daily Spending Limit: $500 remaining
He went out to the car.
Restaurants worked. He added it to the mental list and thought no more about it. That was the mistake, and he would not find it for another nine hours.
Lucia caught him in the hall with the boxes. She'd come out of the study with a pen still in her hand and stopped when she saw what he was carrying, then looked past him at the kitchen stairs, where two crates of vegetables were still stacked because there was nowhere yet to put them.
"How much."
"Three hundred."
"On the food."
"On the food."
"And the man on the ladder."
"A hundred."
She wrote nothing down. She did not need to.
"Whose money?"
"Mine."
"You don't have any," Lucia said.
"I had some."
She looked at him. It went on slightly too long to be a look and became something closer to an examination. Sebastian stood there with a tower of takeaway boxes in his arms and let it happen, because moving would have been an answer.
"Right," she said. "Don't do it again without telling me. Not because I mind. Because I do the books, and if food arrives that I didn't order and didn't pay for, then either I've made an error of three hundred dollars or somebody's given us credit I don't know about, and I have to chase both of those before I can go to bed."
"The house needed the food."
"The house needs a lot of things." She capped the pen. "Needing it and affording it are two different columns, Jules. I've got both open in there."
She went back into the study. The door did not slam, because it never did.
Coombes was still on the grounds at five, doing something to a hedge that did not need doing at five.
Sebastian found Aldric in the pantry with a candle stub and a box of new ones and asked him why.
"He'll finish the hedge," Aldric said.
"His shift ended at four."
"It did."
"So why is he still here."
Aldric put the candle down and squared it with the edge of the shelf.
"Four of the staff are owed wages," he said. "Mr Coombes is one of them. He is owed rather more than the others because he has been here longest and has not asked."
"How much?"
"Five hundred dollars."
"Since when?"
"March."
"Does Lucia know?"
"Miss Lucia knows to the cent, sir. She has moved it three times and each time something else has come due first." Aldric took a used candle out of a holder and put a new one in. "You may draw whatever conclusion you like from a man who works past four for a house that hasn't paid him since March. I have drawn several."
Sebastian went out to the hedge. Coombes came off it with the shears held down and away, the way a man does who has been told once about carrying tools.
"Sir."
"You're owed five hundred."
Coombes's face shut. "Miss Lucia said — "
"She didn't say anything. She doesn't know I'm out here."
"Ah." He turned the shears over in his hands. "Then I'd not want to put you wrong with her, sir. It'll keep. It's kept this long, and I know there's the thirtieth coming, and if the money's wanted for that then it's wanted for that."
Sebastian looked at him.
He had met a great many people who said things like that as a manoeuvre. This was not that, and it took him a second to file it correctly.
"It's owed," he said. "Do you want it or not?"
"I want it," Coombes said.
Sebastian paid it there, standing on the grass, off the phone, into an account number Coombes read out twice from a card he had evidently been carrying around for some time.
Daily Spending Limit: $0 remaining
He looked at that a little too long.
"It's gone through?" Coombes said. "Only you're — "
"It's gone through."
"I can sign something. If you want it written down that you — "
"It's recorded."
Coombes nodded. He put the card away and then didn't seem to have anywhere else to put his hands.
"Thank you," he said. "That's — thank you." He gestured at the hedge with the shears. "I'll finish this off."
"Go home."
"It's half done."
"It's a hedge," Sebastian said. "Go home."
Coombes went, eventually, after standing there long enough to make it clear he did not know what had happened to him. Aldric was at the pantry window with the candle box in his hands.
He said nothing.
Upstairs, Sebastian wrote in the notebook:
Wages count.
He was awake for it this time.
He sat on the end of the bed at ten to midnight with the notebook open and the day's four numbers in a column. He had already done the arithmetic twice.
Three hundred. One hundred. One hundred. Five hundred. Tallied against the counter: one thousand exactly, spent, the first full day.
Ten thousand dollars at midnight.
[Settlement — 00:00]
Qualifying expenditure: $1,000
Return applied: $9,500
Account balance: $10,409.06
Sebastian read it twice and then got the pen.
Nine and a half. Not nine thousand nine hundred, not a rounding, not a fee. Five hundred dollars short of the number, and five hundred was too clean to be an error.
He wrote the four transactions out again with their returns beside them and started crossing off what couldn't be wrong.
The groceries were new. He had never been in that supermarket. Three thousand.
The gutter was new. Sowerby had never had a dollar from him. One thousand.
Coombes was new. Five thousand.
Nine.
The restaurant was a hundred dollars and it should have been a thousand, and if it had paid five hundred instead, the whole thing came out at exactly the number on the screen.
Sebastian sat looking at it.
He had eaten in that restaurant the day before. It was the only thing he had done twice.
Half. Not nothing — half. He didn't know whether it was the restaurant, or restaurants, or eating out, or the man who served him, or simply doing the same thing twice inside a day. He had one instance and one instance was not a rule.
He drew a line through the restaurant on the page.
Then he looked at what was above it. Groceries. A gutter. A man's back pay. Three things that had worked, and this house was going to stop needing all of them fairly soon. There was one gutter. There were four unpaid staff. The kitchen was full.
At a thousand a day it hardly mattered. The city had enough shops in it for him to keep moving.
But if the limit ever moved — and he had written ask what raises the limit on the previous page and underlined it — then a thousand dollars of groceries stopped being the answer. Ten thousand dollars of anything meant finding somewhere that had never seen him before. Every day. Indefinitely.
The problem had changed shape while he wasn't looking at it.
[Daily Objective]
Exhaust today's Spending Limit before Settlement.
$1,000 remaining · 23h 52m
Sebastian picked up Julien's phone and opened the map.
The house sat near the top of it, in the green part, with the long road down into town where he'd been twice now. He put two fingers on the screen and pushed the whole thing outward until the streets he'd used were a small pale patch in the corner. The rest of it opened up. The docks, the east side past the yard, a grid of streets with nothing on them he recognized, going on for miles.
He looked at the parts he hadn't been to.
Then he got a pen and started writing down street names.