The list of street names ran to two pages by the time Sebastian stopped writing, and about half of it turned out to be residential.
Day three he worked the useful half.
The linen went to a laundry service on Warren Row that collected in a van and charged by weight, and it took four of them twenty minutes to load, because nobody had sent the house linen out since the spring. Four hundred and twelve dollars. He filled the car at a garage he had driven past twice. Eighty-eight. The man there looked at the front tires and found them worse than Sebastian had. Two new ones came to three hundred and forty.
That left a hundred and sixty and an open question. Everything he had eaten out in the last two days had been in a restaurant, and a restaurant had already cost him five hundred dollars once.
He risked it anyway, in the evening, at a place near the water that did one thing badly and one thing extremely well. He ordered the wrong one. A hundred and twenty-eight.
That left thirty-two, so on the way back to the car he went into a barber with a striped pole and no appointment system and sat in the chair for twenty-five minutes while a man in his seventies cut Julien Jules's hair shorter than Julien Jules had ever worn it. The barber talked about a dog for most of it. The cut was twenty-eight. Sebastian left four on the shelf and that put him on the number.
That was the day. Five new places, nothing repeated.
[Settlement — 00:00]
Qualifying expenditure: $1,000
Return applied: $10,000
Account balance: $19,409.06
Ten thousand. All of it, at ten, including the restaurant, and he had no idea why a restaurant paid in full tonight when the last one had paid half. He wrote the question down and left it unanswered.
Sebastian sat with the phone in the dark and did not feel much about it. He wrote new places pay full in the notebook under the line about repeating himself, and then sat looking at what that actually meant, which was a thousand dollars a day of strangers, forever, in a city with a finite number of streets on it.
He was going to have to keep going outward, and the map only went so far before it stopped being city.
Day four he went east.
The estate sat at the top of the map in the green part. The yard was five miles down, the docks past that, and past the docks the streets went into a grid nobody had drawn for a reason. He worked it in the afternoon — a locksmith, a tailor, a place that resoled shoes. By nine at night he was seven hundred and forty dollars down, two hundred and sixty of cap left, hungry, thirty minutes from home in the wrong direction.
He'd noticed the neighbourhood changing about a mile back. Not the buildings. The habits. Two scooters chained to the same railing and then chained to each other. Security film on the pharmacy window, the yellowed kind that had been up for years. A stretch of shopfront glass that had been replaced and not matched. The bus stop timetable said one an hour after eight.
The diner was on the corner of Renny and something. A lit sign said HALVERS and a smaller one underneath said OPEN LATE. It was open late. There were four people in it.
New merchant, new street.
Sebastian parked where he could see the car and went in.
Booths down one wall, counter down the other, a service door at the back with a rubber flap and a fire door beside it that had a bar across and a mop leaning on the bar. Two exits, then, one of them useless.
He took the booth second from the door, on the side that let him see both.
The place ran on two people. A man on the grill who did not look up. And a woman clearing the far end of the counter, moving down it in one continuous action — cloth, condiment tray straightened, a plate lifted, cloth again — with her hair tied up and her sleeves pushed to the elbow.
She came over with a laminated menu and put it down.
"Kitchen's on till eleven."
"Thanks."
Sebastian opened it and did the arithmetic. Two hundred and sixty left in the cap. He wanted to land close to it without going over. Anything over was wasted and anything short was worse. Steak was twenty-two. The seafood plate was thirty-one. Coffee was three.
"You can order the whole left side," she said. "It's all the same fryer."
He looked up. She was already writing something else on the pad, for a different table, and had said it without particular interest.
"I'm working out how much I can spend."
"Right." She turned the pad over. "It's a diner."
"I know."
She waited about two seconds for the rest of it and did not get any.
"Seafood plate," Sebastian said. "Coffee. And whatever the pie is."
"The pie's apple and it's yesterday's."
"Fine."
She wrote it down and went. On the way she picked up a fork somebody had left on a table she was not serving and dropped it in the tub behind the counter, without breaking stride.
The food came in eleven minutes and was better than the room deserved.
He ate and paid attention to nothing much. A man at the counter with a paper. Two women in the end booth who had been arguing pleasantly for some time. The grill man on his phone during a gap.
She took his plate when he was done and looked at what was left on it. Nothing was left on it.
"You didn't chew any of that."
"It was good."
"That's not what I said." She stacked it along her arm with two others she had picked up on the way. "We're open till one. Nobody's going to take it off you."
She was gone before he decided whether that was a joke.
The waitress worked. She had four tables and the counter, and she ran all of it in a loop that never doubled back. Twice she said something short through the pass. Twice the grill man did it without arguing.
At twenty past ten, two men came in.
Sebastian did not notice them come in. He noticed that the loop broke.
She was at the register with a receipt half torn off. She left it half torn. She came out from behind the counter, went to the end booth, and asked the two women something she had already asked them ten minutes ago. Then she went back and finished tearing the receipt.
He looked at the door.
Two men, forties, coats, nothing about them worth describing to a police officer. One was heavier and had a bag over his shoulder, a soft one, the kind you carry paperwork in. They did not take a booth. They stood at the near end of the counter, where anybody coming out of the kitchen had to pass them. They did not sit down, and neither of them looked at the menu board, and neither of them took a coat off.
The heavier one said, "Yui."
"I'm working."
"You're always working. That's the good thing about you." He put the bag on the counter and did not open it. "Your four hundred came in."
"I know what day it is."
"Say it back to me."
"It cleared Monday." She came down the counter and stopped an arm's length short of him, on her side of it. She did not back up. She did not come closer. "I've got the message on my phone."
"Nobody's saying it didn't." The man turned the bag a few degrees on the counter. "It's been looked at. Your file. Somebody sat down with it this week and did what I've been telling you somebody would eventually do, which is four hundred a month on eighty thousand dollars. Do the sum."
"I've done the sum."
"Then you know it isn't a payment. It's postage."
Text opened at the left of Sebastian's vision, over the top of the ketchup bottle, and he had to read it twice because he was listening to something else.
[Hidden Quest: The Waitress's Debt]
Someone in this room is being extorted.
Resolve it without her learning why you were here.
Reward: 150 Credits / Daily Cap +$9,000
Failure: Daily Cap halved for 72 hours
He read the third line first, and then the fourth, and then went back to the third.
Daily Cap +$9,000.
There it was. He had written ask what raises the limit three nights ago and underlined it. The answer had arrived in a diner on Renny Street. Walk into somebody else's problem.
He put his fork down and did not look at the counter.
The one who talked was doing all of the talking. The other one had not said anything and had not looked at Yui once. He was watching the door and the room. He had looked at Sebastian for about a second on the way in and not since. Neither of them was carrying anything Sebastian could see. Neither of them had the manner of a man spending his own money. Neither had taken his coat off. The heavier one had looked at the clock over the pass twice. They were on a route and she was not the end of it.
"How much," Yui said.
"Six hundred. On top."
"When."
"Friday."
"That's two days."
"That's what I've got written down."
"Give me to the end of the month and I'll have it and the next one."
"I'd like to. It isn't mine to give."
"You could do fourteen if you took the extra shift at the place on Dell Street. Vasilis says you turned it down."
"Vasilis talks to you?"
"Vasilis talks to everybody." The man picked the bag up off the counter. "Look. It's not us you're behind with. We carry the book, we don't write it. Somebody's decided you're a slow one, and when they decide that they stop asking the person who's been paying and start asking round her."
"Then tell them Friday's fine and the rest is coming."
"I'll tell them." He shifted the strap. "Your mother's still doing the alterations place on Kerry, is she. The one that shuts at seven."
Yui stopped moving.
It was the first time she had stopped moving since Sebastian sat down.
"Don't."
"I'm not doing anything. I'm asking after your mother."
"She's not on the paper."
"She's on the paper," the man said, without heat, like a man correcting somebody about a bus route. "That's the whole difficulty. That's what I keep telling you and you keep not hearing." He tapped the counter twice with two fingers, lightly, and stepped back. "Six hundred, Friday. Don't make me come out here Friday."
They went. The door swung and the cold came in and went out again.
Nobody in the diner looked up. The man at the counter turned a page. The two women in the end booth carried on arguing about whatever it was. The grill man scraped the plate down and reached for his phone.
Yui went back to the register and finished the receipt she had left half torn twenty minutes ago.
That, Sebastian thought, was the useful part.
She came back to his table with the coffee pot about four minutes later and topped him up without being asked.
"Pie?"
"In a minute."
"It's not getting any fresher."
"Who owns it," Sebastian said.
She put the pot down on the table, which she had not done for anybody else all night.
"None of your business."
"No."
"So."
"So it isn't my business." He turned the cup a quarter turn. "Is it eighty thousand or is it eighty thousand plus what the eighty thousand's earning."
"Are you a police officer?"
"No."
"Are you a lawyer."
"No."
"Then I don't know what you are, and I've had a long day," she said, "and you've been in that seat for an hour looking at the door every time it opens, so you'll understand if I don't feel like doing this."
"That's fair."
"Good."
"Is your name on it or is your mother's?"
She picked the pot back up.
"Get out."
"I'm not going to ask again," Sebastian said. "I'm asking now because in about four minutes I'll have paid and left and it'll be too late to ask, and then it'll be Friday."
She didn't answer that. She picked a spoon up off the table beside them and put it down again in the same place.
"If somebody paid them," he said, "would they go away?"
And there it was — the first thing all night that got a real reaction out of her, and it was not gratitude and it was not hope. Her face closed like a till drawer.
"No."
"No they wouldn't, or no you're not interested."
"No, I'm not doing this." She said it evenly. "You've been sitting there working out what things cost since you walked in. I've had four of you. Men who want to be the one who fixed it. They pay something once, and they feel excellent about themselves for a month, and then they own you, and the money's still owed anyway because they paid the wrong thing."
"I didn't offer you anything."
"You were about to."
"I wasn't." He drank some of the coffee. "I don't have eighty thousand dollars."
She looked at him properly then, for the first time. It was the look she would give a receipt where the total didn't match the items.
"Then why are you asking?"
"Because I want to know whether the number's real."
She did not answer that. She dealt with the end booth, rang them out, wiped down two tables, and came back past him twice without stopping.
The third time she stopped at the register, and Sebastian watched her take a thing out of the shelf under it — not a phone. A brown envelope, soft at the corners, with a rubber band around it and a pen pushed under the band.
She put it on the counter and opened it flat and wrote a line in it. It took about eight seconds.
The pages were ruled in columns. He was ten feet away and could not read the figures. He could see the shape of it. Dates down the left in a hand that had not changed in a long time. Two columns of numbers. Pages of it, forward and back, the earlier ones softer than the later. There was a second envelope inside the first with a rubber band of its own.
She wrote the line, closed it, put the band back on, and looked up.
He was still looking.
"Do you want the pie or not," she said.
"Yes."
She put the envelope back on the shelf under the register, without hurrying.
He had come in here and watched a woman get leaned on and thought somebody should do something about that.
Every payment. Written down. Going back further than the pages he could see.
He had been alive in this city for four days and had done nothing but arithmetic he couldn't win.
He ate the pie. It was yesterday's.
The bill was thirty-four dollars. He paid it at the counter and left eight. The counter in the corner of his vision went down and stopped. He went out into the cold and sat in the car without starting it.
The banking app said eighteen thousand six hundred and twenty-seven dollars.
Eighty thousand.
He sat with that for a while. Nine thousand a day, if nothing went wrong and every merchant was new, was nine days to eighty-one thousand. She had until Friday. Friday was two days, and two days was eighteen, and eighteen was not eighty.
The six hundred he could do out of his coat pocket. He had thought about it before the door finished swinging, and she had already answered it at the table without knowing what she was answering. They pay the wrong thing. Six hundred bought her two days and told everybody holding the paper that a Jules had turned up in the diner.
And the cap was the thing the quest was offering to move. The reward came after the job. He couldn't use it to finish the job.
He had been doing the same arithmetic Yui had.
Those two men had not wanted eighty thousand dollars. They had wanted six hundred by Friday. They carried the book and they did not write it.
Somebody else had written it. Somebody else was sitting on a balance that had been fed four hundred a month for a year and was never going to close, and had just decided to lean on the person paying it, which was not what you did with an asset you were happy with.
The paper said eighty thousand. That didn't mean anybody would pay eighty thousand for it.
Sebastian got out of the car.
The bell went again. The grill man glanced up and went back to his phone. She was doing the condiment trays.
"We're shut in ten."
"I need one thing."
"You've had the pie."
"The name," Sebastian said. "Whoever holds the paper. Not the two of them — whoever they carry it for."
Yui set down the tray she was holding.
"Why."
"Because I can't afford eighty thousand dollars."
She waited. He'd already worked out that she would.
"But whoever owns it might take less than eighty for it," he said. "People do. Paper that's been paid at four hundred a month for a year isn't worth what it says on the front, and anybody holding it knows that better than you do."
The kitchen extractor cut out on its timer.
"You'd need money to do that too," she said.
"Less."
"How much less."
"I don't know yet. That's why I want the name."
She stood there with both hands on the edge of a tray of ketchup bottles and did not say anything for a while, and did not put the tray down either.
"If I tell you," she said, "you're not doing anything with it."
"That's not an answer."
"No," Yui said. "It isn't."