The second draw happened at ten-oh-five on Thursday morning, at Owen's kitchen table, with a bag of frozen peas taped to the back of his skull.
He had called in sick. It was, for once, not a lie. His ribs had turned the exact color of an eggplant, and his neck moved like a rusty gate. He'd slept four hours on the floor of the bedroom because the bed felt like too much effort, and he'd woken up with a headache and a very clear sense of purpose. His glasses were in three pieces on the table beside him. He hadn't been able to bring himself to throw them out.
He sat with his hands flat on the wood and the ticket sitting in his awareness like a warm stone.
"All right," he said. "Again."
THE LEDGER RECOMMENDS THE CLAIMANT REVIEW SECTIONS 3.6 AND 3.7.
"You say that every time."
IT IS EVERY TIME.
He almost smiled. "Draw."
The room leaned. The gold ledger unrolled into the air, vast and ruled and endless, columns and figures cascading down into a dark he couldn't see the bottom of. Titles blurred past. Kanji. Hangul. A phrase in a script he couldn't read. A Marvel name he half recognized before it blurred away. He watched them spin, and he thought, absurdly, of the wheel on a game show, and the family sitting in the audience with their fingers crossed.
The columns slowed. A single line caught the light and held.
ENDOWMENT SELECTED.
ORIGIN: JAPANESE SERIALIZED MANGA (SUPERPOWERED-YOUTH GENRE).
DESIGNATION: MEND.
STAGE: ONE (BASE FORM).
He read it slowly.
"Mend."
AFFIRMATIVE.
"What is it?"
THE LEDGER DOES NOT CHARACTERIZE ENDOWMENTS. THE CLAIMANT MAY REVIEW THE FILE.
The page turned.
ENDOWMENT FILE: MEND (STAGE ONE).
DESCRIPTION: THE CLAIMANT MAY RESTORE A DAMAGED INANIMATE OBJECT TO ITS PRIOR STATE THROUGH DIRECT PHYSICAL CONTACT.
LIMITS: OBJECT MUST HAVE BEEN INTACT WITHIN THE PRECEDING TWENTY-FOUR (24) HOURS. RESTORATION MAY NOT EXCEED THE VOLUME OF A HAND-HELD OBJECT.
RIDER (3.7):
(A) DAMAGE IS NOT DESTROYED. IT IS REASSIGNED. THE CLAIMANT ABSORBS A PROPORTIONAL FRACTION OF THE RESTORED DAMAGE AS BODILY WEAR.
(B) THE ABSORBED WEAR IS NOT ADJUSTABLE BY THE CLAIMANT AT THIS STAGE.
(C) THE CLAIMANT MAY NOT MEND LIVING TISSUE AT THIS STAGE.
He read it three times. Then he sat back, very slowly, and stared at the ceiling.
"Oh," he said. "Oh, that is cruel."
THE LEDGER DOES NOT CHARACTERIZE ENDOWMENTS.
"It's a repair power. It's exactly the thing I'd want. I spend my whole life staring at broken buildings, and you give me the one power that could—" He stopped. He laughed, a short, painful sound. "And it hurts."
THE RIDER IS INHERENT TO THE ENDOWMENT.
"You keep saying that."
IT KEEPS BEING TRUE.
He rubbed his face. It was, of all the powers in all the fiction ever written, the most thematically unfair. It was the desire of every man who'd ever looked at a ruined storefront. And it came with a price tag the size of a small wound.
And it doesn't help me in a fight, he thought, with a strange, aching amusement. I can't mend a knife wound. I can mend the knife.
He tested it on the mug.
It seemed like the right one. WORLD'S OKAYEST ADJUSTER, the crack running clean from lip to handle, a hairline fracture Owen had apparently ignored for years. Dev picked it up in both hands, and turned it toward the window, and felt the little tremor of the Endowment stirring in the base of his spine.
Just touch it, said the Ledger's file. Just want it whole.
He wanted it whole.
It felt like nothing at first. Then like a pull, a tightening in his palms, as if the mug were a magnet and his hands were iron. The crack shivered. It ran backward along its own length, in a fast, seamless zip of white, like a film played in reverse. The porcelain closed. The glaze knit. In two seconds, the mug was whole.
And a hairline ache lit up across the palm of his left hand.
He looked at it. There was nothing there, no mark, no scar. But it ached, thin and sharp and exact, in a line that precisely matched the length of the crack. He curled his fingers. The ache stayed.
"It's the same line," he said, staring.
THE WEAR IS PROPORTIONAL.
He set the mug down. He turned his palm to the light. Very faintly, as he watched, a pale seam of skin was forming across it, a thin white line, like the memory of a scar.
Conservation, said the tester in him, with a peculiar, delighted horror. It's not a repair. It's a transfer. The damage doesn't go away. It goes somewhere.
He knew that shape. He knew it better than any other. It was the oldest concept in the insurance business.
It's subrogation.
Someone always pays. You can move the loss from the insured to the insurer, from the insurer to the reinsurer, from the reinsurer to the fund. You can slice it, pool it, defer it, spread it across a thousand policies until nobody feels a thing. But you cannot make it vanish. In the end, a loss is a loss. The only question is who bears it.
"Ledger," he said slowly. "If damage has to be absorbed... does it have to be me?"
There was a pause.
SECTION 3.7(B). THE ABSORBED WEAR IS NOT ADJUSTABLE BY THE CLAIMANT AT THIS STAGE.
"'At this stage.'"
AFFIRMATIVE.
"But I might be able to direct it. To something else. If I set it up right."
THE LEDGER DOES NOT CHARACTERIZE THE CLAIMANT'S EXPERIMENTS.
He grinned. It was the first honest grin he'd worn in three days.
"That's a yes."
THE LEDGER DOES NOT CHARACTERIZE THE CLAIMANT'S EXPERIMENTS.
He spent the day running trials, in the tester's flat, patient way.
He mended the glasses. It took him three tries, one for each piece, and the transfer hit him in three places: a bruise-blue ache across the bridge of his nose, a pinprick behind his ear, a thin sharp itch in the meat of his thumb. The lenses came out whole, as if they had never been in a boot. He put them on and the world sharpened, and he sat back and breathed.
Cost: a headache and a sore thumb, he noted, writing in the same notebook where he kept the sense log. Repair: full. Damage transfer approx. 1:1 by "severity," not by mass. A cracked lens costs more than a cracked handle.
He mended a chipped plate. He mended a snapped pencil, the wear arriving as a stiff pinch in his wrist. He mended a torn page from a paperback, a slow, sweet peeling-back of ink and fiber, and felt something like a paper cut bloom under his fingernail.
By noon, he had a hypothesis. By two, he was standing at the kitchen counter with a jar of dry beans and a coffee cup full of pennies, doing something a normal person would have found deeply strange.
He held the cracked plate in his left hand and the jar of beans against his right hip. He wanted the plate whole. He also wanted the cost to go somewhere else. Not into me. Into the jar.
It was a stupid thing to try, and he tried it.
The plate mended. The ache came, sharp and bright, and he flinched, and the jar of beans in his other hand shifted. Something ran through it. When he opened his hand, a hundred beans had gone gray, hard as pebbles, cracked and brittle. The wear had landed in the jar, in some incomprehensible, sideways way, and the jar had absorbed the worst of it. The pain in his wrist was a distant whisper.
He stood there staring at the beans.
"Ledger," he said, hoarsely.
YES.
"Did that work?"
THE LEDGER DOES NOT CHARACTERIZE THE CLAIMANT'S EXPERIMENTS.
"Ledger."
There was a very long pause. For once, the gold line took its time.
THE CLAIMANT HAS DISCOVERED A CONVENTIONAL LOOPHOLE.
THE LEDGER NOTES THAT LOOPHOLES ARE LEGITIMATE.
THE LEDGER FURTHER NOTES THAT LOOPHOLES ARE NOT FREE.
"What's the cost?"
A BEARER MUST BE PREPARED IN ADVANCE.
A BEARER RECEIVES THE WEAR AT A LOSS.
THE CLAIMANT WILL DISCOVER THE REST.
He looked down at the jar of ruined beans. He looked at his palm, at the pale seam across it.
A bearer, he thought. A sacrificial third party. A cheap asset to absorb the loss.
It was the oldest structure in the business. A reinsurance treaty, in a jar.
"I'm going to need a lot of jars," Dev said.
THE LEDGER DOES NOT CHARACTERIZE THE CLAIMANT'S SHOPPING.
He laughed until his ribs hurt.
It was dusk when he finally stopped. The kitchen was a mess of broken things and mended things: a chair leg, a cracked tile, a shattered coffee cup, a music box he'd found in the back of a drawer with a broken spring. He'd tried that last one carefully. It had cost him a small, sharp twinge behind the knee, and the tinkling lullaby that came from it was a sound he had never heard in his life and knew by heart.
He sat down on the floor with the music box in his lap.
Owen's, he thought. From a grandmother, or an aunt. It was already broken when he was seven. He didn't remember the story, but the memory was there anyway, deep and warm and untouchable.
He put the box on the table. He wound it again and listened to it play.
I fixed something of his, he thought. I don't know what that means.
He thought about the sticky note on the fridge, the roof, the jollof rice. He thought about Owen's mother, waiting in Ridgewood with a brisket. He thought about the man in the photograph, laughing at something out of frame.
MERIT: 64 / 100.
ENDOWMENTS: DIVINE SENSE (STAGE 1). MEND (STAGE 1).
"Two powers," Dev said, to the dark kitchen. "One tells me where things are. The other one moves pain around."
He looked down at the pale seam in his palm.
"Neither one of them can punch anything."
THE LEDGER DOES NOT CHARACTERIZE THE CLAIMANT'S CIRCUMSTANCES.
"No," he said. "But you're thinking it."
There was no answer. But for the first time, he was almost certain that the gold line had come very close to a smile.