(Luna:There was a rune on this building, and it did one thing, to everybody, no matter how old they were or how good they were at this.
You could not say a false thing in here.
She'd known that a long time. Mostly it hadn't mattered. Usually the only thing she wanted to lie about in here was money.
Options.
One: say yes. Then came when, and how, and why a registered spirit didn't come out anymore, and then exactly what Luna had done to her, which was the reason.
Two: say no. Her mouth would move and nothing would come out, in front of all of them.
Three.)
"Define met," Luna said.
Solaris's pen stopped.
"...Define met."
"Yes. Because there's a version of that word where two people are introduced, which requires a third party, and there wasn't one." She was speaking briskly, as if reading out a delivery address. "And there's a version where you're simply in the same place at the same time, which is true of everybody in a building, including her and including the pipes. If you're asking whether I know she exists, then everybody in that building knows something exists. If you're asking whether we spoke, then that would depend on which of us started, and she started, in the sense that she was already there, and I would not describe what followed as a conversation because a conversation requires both parties to continue afterwards."
There was a silence.
"So," said Solaris. "Is that a yes."
"That's what I said."
"That is not what you said."
"It's exactly what I said."
Every word of it had come out with sound. Solaris looked at her a while longer, then gave up.
"...I'm putting unclear," Solaris said, and wrote it down.
"Fine."
"I'm flagging it as unclear."
"That's fine."
(Luna:Suspicious was fine. Suspicious was a lot cheaper than found out.)
Josh leaned over.
"What was that?"
"Nothing."
"That was four sentences and I understood none of them—"
"Nothing."
✦ ✦ ✦
Then they put a rune on him.
He'd been braced for a ceremony. Instead the tallest one came back up the corridor, said "Hold still," slapped a hand flat between his shoulder blades hard enough that Josh went forward half a step, and took it away again.
"Done."
"What's done?"
"Monitoring." The tallest one was already walking off. "The Embassy will know where you are and what you are doing with it. At all times."
"And?"
"And what?"
"And what am I not allowed to do?"
The tallest one stopped and turned around.
"Do whatever you like," he said.
✦ ✦ ✦
No restrictions, then. No don't practice, no list of things he wasn't allowed to do. He'd come in braced to be told he was dangerous, and he was walking out with a rune and a shrug.
"Is it on all the time?" he asked, on the way out. "The monitoring."
"Yes."
"Like — all the time all the time. If I'm in the bathroom."
"Yes."
"Oh."
He found a mirror in the corridor, turned his back to it and looked over his shoulder. It looked like a really cool tattoo. He'd take that.
✦ ✦ ✦
After that they were free to go.
In the lobby, under the coat hooks at nine feet, Josh got his phone out to take a picture of his own back, which required a certain amount of arm, and noticed that he had no bars.
Zero, in the middle of a city.
He opened the maps app to see whether it could at least find him. It couldn't. The little circle went around and around, and the blue dot never showed up.
"Huh," he said. "Okay. So magic messes with tech. Like Harry Potter. Too much magic in the air, and electronics go haywire."
"That's stupid." Luna was putting her hair back with one hand and not really listening. "How would Earth signals reach here? This is Jupiter."
Josh lowered the phone.
"Jupiter?!"
"Yeah, duh."
"Like, how? Jupiter doesn't have any ground to begin with. And the gravity's so much higher. I should be flat on the floor."
"The building has runes. They make it like Earth in here. The air, the weight, everything."
"Islands. There's no ground, so the land floats." She finished with her hair. "You'd need a bunch of runes to go out there. I don't."
"Floating islands," Josh said. "On Jupiter."
"Yes."
"I've been on Jupiter all afternoon."
"About that."
"There's a — there's a door in a street in my city and the other side of it is on Jupiter."
"The doors go to all the branches." She nodded across the lobby. "Ours is over there."
"How?"
"Don't know."
"Who does?"
Luna started to answer and stopped, and Josh got there at the same moment she did.
Nobody. There's nobody left who knows how.
He stood in the lobby with the phone in his hand for a second.
"...Right," he said.
✦ ✦ ✦
They went out through the door, and it felt like a door. No pressure, no cold, no lurch. He pushed it, and he was on the other side.
Behind him: Jupiter. In front of him: the street they'd parked on, with the Lincoln on it, and a guy walking a dog.
"That's it?"
"What did you want?"
"I don't know. Something."
"It's a door," Luna said.
✦ ✦ ✦
In the car, to cheer himself up, he opened his bank account.
He hadn't looked. Not once, not since the debut: he'd looked at the follower graph, the traffic, the platform dashboards, all the numbers that were about the thing, and somehow never the one about him.
He looked at it now.
CHECKING
Available: $29,131.22
Then he stopped moving entirely, and made a sound.
"What."
"What."
"No—" He held the phone up, then took it back, then refreshed it, then refreshed it again. "No, that's — Luna. Luna."
The car went sideways about a foot and a half.
"Shut up," Luna said.
"Sorry."
"I'm driving."
"Sorry. Sorry." He put both hands around the phone and stared at it. "Sorry."
✦ ✦ ✦
He took the number apart, because that was the only way he was going to believe it.
$13,503.17 divided by $3.264 was 4,137. That was 4,137 new people at the cheapest tier, since a clip of a girl turning her head.
The rest of the balance was what he'd expected. The last payout had come in at $21,961.13: the $19,043.67 he'd counted before the grocery run, plus $2,917.46 in upgrades from the Sable announcement. Since then he'd paid for one grocery run, $4,469.08, and his own bills, $1,864.00. That left $15,628.05.
Checking Left of the last payout$15,628.05New members+$13,503.17Total$29,131.22Then he made himself do the part he'd skipped.
When he'd done the books before the grocery run, he'd left tax out, because he paid it every quarter and none of it was due yet. It would be. At $21,961.13 a month, the tax on that payout came to $6,764.27, and he hadn't put a cent of it aside. It was still sitting in the account with everything else.
So $6,764.27 of the $29,131.22 belonged to the IRS. The part that was actually his was $22,366.95.
Then the month, the way it would look from now on, if the new people stayed.
$21,961.13 from before, plus $13,503.17 from the new members. Together, $35,464.30 a month.
The tax on that, counted this time: $11,841.56. He'd keep $23,622.74.
What went out: her food, $19,408.52, and his own costs, $1,864.00. Together, $21,272.52.
$23,622.74 minus $21,272.52 left $2,350.22.
Per month, if they stay $35,464.30Tax−$11,841.56Her food and his costs−$21,272.52Left+$2,350.22For the first time since she'd rung his doorbell, the Patreon covered her, tax and all, with something left over.
Then he opened the other dashboard.
TWITCH · REVENUE
Subs: 304 × $2.99 = $908.96
Bits: 64,000 × $0.01 = $640.00
Total: $1,548.96 (locked)
Path to Affiliate: 2.1 / 4 hours · 1 / 4 days
Still locked. Affiliate wanted four hours across four separate days, and he had two hours on one. Three more streams, and after that Twitch would pay once a month, for the month before.
One stream had made $1,548.96. Twice a week, over a 30.4-day month, that came to $13,453.82.
It wouldn't hold. Nothing did. Saturday had his whole readership in the room and a clip going viral halfway through, and the next stream would get whatever was left of that. So he called it a third: $4,484.61.
That made $5,128.86 a month he hadn't had before the clip.
"Okay," he said. "So if it holds. If it holds — and it won't, because nothing does, so call it a third of this — that's still. Hm."
"Hm what."
"We could get a bigger car."
Luna's head swung toward him, which for her was barely a turn.
"What's wrong with this car?"
"Nothing's wrong with this car. This car is incredible. This car is also a hundred years old and I have watched you put a hand inside the engine while it was running." He was already typing. "I'm saying: something with airbags. And a back seat that isn't holding the frame together."
"Buy one, then."
"That's the thing — we wouldn't buy it, exactly. We'd finance it."
"What's that?"
"You pay a bit every month instead of all of it at once."
Luna thought about this.
"Why?"
"Because you don't have all of it at once."
"Then you don't have the car."
"No, you do have the car. That's the point. You have the car and you pay for it while you're driving it."
"That's not yours, then. That's theirs, and you're keeping it in your house."
Josh opened his mouth to argue and then discovered, with some irritation, that this was essentially correct.
"Sure. Yes. Technically. But everybody does it, and at the end of it, it's yours."
"And they let you do this out of kindness."
"No, they charge you extra. That's the interest."
"So you pay more for the car than the car costs."
"Yes."
"For the privilege of not having the money."
"...Yes."
Luna drove in silence for a moment.
"That's the stupidest thing I have ever heard," she said, "and I bought this car new."
✦ ✦ ✦
He tried to teach her the numbers. It took the rest of the drive and got nowhere.
"So over sixty months, at six percent—"
"Six percent."
"Yeah."
"Of what."
"Of the balance. What's left."
"So it's six of them."
"No, it's six percent — it's six for every hundred."
"Every hundred what."
"Dollars."
"There aren't a hundred dollars. You said thirty thousand."
"No, I mean for each— okay." Josh put the phone face-down on his knee and got both hands out in front of him, the way he did when he'd decided to build something from the ground up. "Right. A percent is a hundredth."
"A hundredth."
"A hundredth. One part out of a hundred parts."
"Of the car?"
"Of the money."
Luna thought about this at forty miles an hour, on a road she'd been driving since it was gravel.
"Which part," she said.
Josh gave up and looked out the window.
He picked the phone back up and did it for himself. $30,000 over sixty months at six percent came to $579.98 a month. By the last payment he'd have paid $34,798.80, which meant $4,798.80 in interest, the part she'd just called stupid.
$5,128.86 a month, minus $579.98 for the car, left $4,548.88. At that rate the loan from his savings, $6,991.52 at 4.21%, would be paid back in two months.
He looked at the balance one more time. Every new dollar in it had come from two seconds of her turning her head.
"Tomorrow," he said. "The stream."
"What about it."
"You're still not doing any of it? The shifting?"
"No."
"Not even a finger?"
"I said what I said."