Hours Unaccounted

Merr was late.

Merr was never late. Merr treated time like a debt with interest.

Kael gave it one hour because one hour was how you distinguished an accident from a message. At two hours he froze Merr’s book. At three he sent Pell’s quietest cart operator along the Cut with instructions that were not a search party.

Merr walked in at 16:40 with dust on his knees and a face that had been rearranged from the inside.

Kael did not offer water. Water was for after the numbers.

“Where.”

“I can’t make it a place you can send someone.”

“That is not an answer I keep.”

Merr sat. The chair creaked in a way Kael found honest.

“A man on the surface side — Rusk, the coat — said you were selling people. Not freight. Beds. Knocks. He wanted a wholesale price. I went to laugh at him. He took me to a room that should have had three sleepers. It had one blanket. He said that was the demonstration. Stock moving. He thought it would impress me.”

Kael’s hands were still.

“You should have broken his foot in the room.”

“I considered it. Then I considered that the room was not ours, and that if I made a map of it by fighting in it I would be doing his work.”

That was why Merr was late, and why Merr still had a job.

Kael had Rusk collected before the evening market. The conversation was short. Rusk believed, sincerely, that everything under the registered street was a warehouse with a nicer myth on top. Kael disabused him of the franchise model. Rusk would not come back. Rusk would also not be able to write a useful report. Kael was good at that kind of ending.

After, in the counting house, he looked at Merr.

“The bed.”

“I didn’t count the remaining sleeper. I didn’t take a name. I didn’t go back.”

“Good.”

“Dess sold the location. That’s the account. The location itself—” Merr stopped, irritated at his own precision. “I don’t know how to invoice a place I am not allowed to see twice.”

Kael almost smiled. It would have been the wrong temperature.

“You don’t. You invoice Dess. You invoice Rusk. You do not invoice the blanket.”

“And the Queen.”

Kael disliked the title in his own mouth. It sounded like a competing firm.

“She will have the absences,” he said. “We have the money. If we try to have both, we become Rusk with better boots.”

Merr left to reopen his book.

Kael stood at the useless window and watched the wall.

Three hours unaccounted. He could have demanded a diagram. He could have owned the demonstration room by force and called it protecting his reputation.

He did not.

The corridor below cleared for him anyway. That was still true. It would remain true longer if he did not start selling the parts of it that only worked because they were not for sale.