“You,” Tamsin Marsh said again.
She got to her feet.
She did it slowly and carefully, the way people move when something inside them is still broken, one hand pressed flat against her ribs.
She was smaller than Lucan had thought.
The top of her head would barely have reached his chin.
She didn’t look afraid.
That was the first thing he noticed.
A young woman alone in a graveyard at dawn, face to face with the man who had killed her brother, and there was no fear in her face at all.
There was only a kind of hard, bright, terrible attention, like a cat watching a mousehole.
“You can see it,” Lucan said quietly.
“The writing.
Over my head.”
“Silver,” she said.
“Yours is gold, I suppose.”
“Yes.”
“I wondered.” She took a step toward him across the wet grass.
“When the panel told me there was another one, I wondered what yours would look like.
I thought maybe you’d be old.
Or rich.
Somebody important.” Her eyes moved over him: the plain coat, the white flowers he’d left on Ottilie’s grave across the churchyard.
“You’re just a boy.”
“I’m nineteen.”
“Tobin was twenty-two.” Another step.
“He was going to get married in the spring.
A girl from the laundry on Copper Street.
Her name’s Bess.
She’s got a wooden leg and the best laugh in Brassmarket.
He’d been saving for a ring for two years.” Another step.
“He was the one who walked me home from the tailor’s every night, because I’m not allowed out after dark on my own.
Bondswoman’s curfew.
Did you know that?
He walked three miles out of his way, every single night, after twelve hours on watch, so I wouldn’t get stopped by the Marshals.”
Lucan didn’t answer.
“Bess cried so hard at the funeral, they had to carry her out.” Tamsin stopped a few feet from him.
“You know what the Concern said?
A hound turned on him.
A tragic accident.
They promised compensation.
Fifty silver.” Her mouth twisted.
“It never came.
And Tobin’s debt passed to me instead.
Two hundred and sixty silver, on top of my own.
So I went to Holloway, because I needed money to bury him, and they lent it to me at eighty percent, and a week later they sent a man to collect it.”
She touched the bruise on her cheek.
Then the cut on her lip.
Then her ribs.
“He was very thorough,” she said.
“He broke three of these.
And my wrist.
And he kept going for a long time after I couldn’t stand up.
Because Holloway likes to make an example of the ones who can’t pay.
So the others will remember.” She smiled.
It was a dreadful smile.
“I died, I think.
For a little while.
On the floor of my room in Brassmarket.
Lying in my own blood.
Owing money.” She tilted her head.
“Twice now.
I’ve died owing money twice.
I suppose you have too, or you wouldn’t be here.”
“Yes,” Lucan said.
“And then the silver panel came.
And the first thing it told me was your name.”
“Tamsin—”
“Don’t.” Her voice cracked like a whip.
“Don’t you dare say my name like you know me.”
The churchyard was silent.
Somewhere beyond the wall, a cart rattled past.
“He was trying to help me,” Lucan said.
She went very still.
“Your brother.
That night.
I’d been thrown down the spoil chute.
I was climbing out.
He saw me through the grate, and he thought I was hurt, and he unlocked it to let me out.” Lucan made himself hold her gaze.
“Then he saw my face.
He recognised me.
Varga had written me down as dead that afternoon.
And he was going to blow his whistle.”
“So you killed him.”
“If that whistle had blown, they’d have thrown me back down the hole.
And this time I wouldn’t have climbed out.” Lucan’s throat felt thick.
“I didn’t think.
I didn’t decide.
It just happened.
I’m not telling you it was right.
I’m telling you what happened.
You deserve to know what happened.”
“And that makes it all right?”
“No.”
“No,” Tamsin agreed softly.
“It doesn’t.”
She held out her hand.
A panel opened in the air beside her.
It was silver, as she’d said.
Not the warm, glowing gold of the Exchequer but a cold, hard, steely silver, the colour of a knife’s edge or a cell door.
And the shape of it was wrong.
The Exchequer’s panels were neat and rectangular, like ledger pages.
This one was narrow and tall and edged with thorns of light, like an iron gate.
Lucan could see the words on it.
They were in the same language as his own panel.
His first language.
Earth’s language.
[ THE COLLECTOR ]
[ CLAIM — Debtor identified.
]
“I’m sorry,” Lucan said.
“For what it’s worth.
I’m sorry.”
“It isn’t worth anything,” said Tamsin Marsh, and lunged.
She was fast.
He hadn’t expected that.
She was small and hurt and couldn’t have weighed more than ninety pounds, and she crossed the space between them in a blur and caught his wrist in both hands.
Her grip was cold.
Colder than the river.
Colder than the bottom of the spoil chute.
“Lucan Marr,” she said, staring up into his face.
“I claim what is owed.”
Something went out of him.
It wasn’t pain.
Not at first.
It was like the bottom of a bucket giving way.
Like something warm and heavy and alive pouring out of his chest and down his arm and into her hands.
His heart stuttered.
Skipped.
Stopped, for one long hideous second, and then lurched back into motion, thin and fluttering like a trapped bird.
His knees buckled.
His vision went grey at the edges.
He looked down at his hand.
The back of it, where she held his wrist, was changing.
The skin was thinning, going dry and papery and spotted.
The veins stood up under it, blue and knotted.
An old man’s hand.
Years.
She was taking his years.
Above him, the Exchequer flared gold.
[ WARNING: Hostile Account action detected.
[ CLAIM against Account Holder — debt not settled.
Resistance permitted.
]
Resistance permitted.
Lucan pulled.
He put everything into it: the Rank-1 strength the Exchequer had built into his body, the Second Form’s iron weight in his bones, every scrap of desperate animal will he had.
He tore his arm out of her grip, and the cold broke like ice, and Tamsin Marsh was flung backward across the wet grass and landed hard among the rotting wooden markers.
She cried out.
One hand went to her ribs.
Lucan staggered.
He caught himself on the corner of a tilted gravestone.
He was gasping.
His heart was hammering, thin and fast.
He looked at his hand.
The skin was slowly filling out again, the spots fading, the knotted veins sinking back.
Not all the way.
The skin over the knuckles stayed a little looser than it had been, a little lined.
He’d lost something.
A few months.
A year, maybe.
He didn’t know.
Tamsin pushed herself up on one elbow.
There was blood on her lip again, where the cut had reopened.
She was staring at him with something like wonder.
“You pulled away,” she said.
“Nobody’s ever pulled away.”
“How many people have you done that to?”
She didn’t answer.
She got slowly to her knees, then to her feet.
She swayed.
She was very pale.
Lucan straightened up, and looked at her.
He could reach her in three strides.
She was hurt and exhausted and alone.
He could end this.
Right now, in this empty churchyard, in the smog, with nobody watching.
She knew it, too.
He could see it in her face.
She lifted her chin.
“Go on, then,” she said.
“You’ve done it once.”
Lucan looked at her for a long moment.
Then he turned around and walked away.
He walked out through the churchyard gate onto Tallow Street and didn’t look back, and the whole time his back felt naked and his neck crawled and he waited for the cold hands to close around his wrist again.
They didn’t.
Behind him, he heard her voice, high and clear and furious.
“I’ll find you!
I know your face now.
I’ll find you, Lucan Marr, and I’ll take it all!
Every year you’ve got!
Every single one!”
Tamsin Marsh had been a debt collector once.
Not here.
Not in Grisholt.
In the other place.
The place she still dreamed about.
A cold grey northern city of red brick terraces and black slate roofs and rain that never stopped.
She’d been twenty-six.
She’d worked for a company that bought up other people’s debts, little ones, store cards and phone bills and payday loans, for a few pennies on the pound, and then chased them for every penny of the full amount.
Plus interest.
Plus fees.
She’d been very good at it.
She’d knocked on doors in the rain.
She’d stood on doorsteps while women in dressing gowns cried in front of their children.
She’d taken televisions and washing machines and once, a little girl’s bicycle, out of a back garden, while the little girl watched from an upstairs window.
She hadn’t enjoyed it.
She’d been good at not thinking about it.
She’d told herself it was just a job, and that people should pay what they owed, and that if she didn’t do it someone else would.
She’d had debts of her own.
Everyone did.
Credit cards.
A car loan.
A bit of gambling she didn’t tell anyone about.
She’d died on a wet night in November, crossing a road, and the last thing she remembered thinking, lying on the tarmac in the rain with the headlights swimming above her, was that she still owed four thousand on the car.
And then she’d been born again.
Here.
In Grisholt.
Into a bondsman’s family in a back room in Brassmarket, with a brother three years younger who’d followed her everywhere like a puppy.
She’d remembered the other life in fragments, the way Lucan had.
She’d never told anyone, not even Tobin.
She’d grown up and gone to work for the tailor at fourteen and sewn shirts for twelve hours a day for a debt that only ever got bigger, and every night her little brother had walked her home.
She had thought, more than once, that it was a punishment.
For the doorsteps.
For the bicycle.
Then Tobin died, and a man from Holloway kicked her to death on her own floor, and a silver panel opened in the dark.
[ THE COLLECTOR ]
[ Clause Zero: “One who has died in debt twice may petition for a ledger of their own.” ]
[ Petition ACCEPTED.
]
[ Account Holder: Tamsin Marsh.
]
[ Functions: ]
▸ CLAIM — Collect any debt owed to you, by touch, upon speaking the debtor’s true name.
If the debtor cannot pay in coin, payment is taken in kind: labour, blood or years of life.
▸ ACQUIRE — Debts purchased, inherited or recognised become yours to Claim.
▸ BIND — Any person whose debt you hold may be Bound.
A Bound debtor obeys you in all things, and receives a portion of your strength, for as long as the debt remains unpaid.
▸ BOUNTY — Post any debt you hold.
All Bound debtors will sense its target and hunt it.
[ The Collector does not create value.
It extracts it.
]
The first thing she had done, the very first thing, lying on the floor of her room with her ribs broken and her blood soaking into the boards, was to look at her Ledger.
There had been two entries.
One was Lucan Marr.
One life.
The other was the man from Holloway.
Jasper Pike.
Who owed her, according to the panel, “one beating, delivered in full, with interest,” and twenty-two silver he’d taken from the tin under her bed on his way out.
Jasper Pike lived in a rented room above a tobacconist’s on Shovel Lane.
Tamsin had found it easily.
Everybody in Brassmarket knew where Holloway’s collectors lived.
It was how they made sure people were afraid of them.
She’d gone there the night after the panel came.
She had climbed his stairs with her broken ribs strapped tight under her dress, one step at a time, gasping.
She had knocked on his door.
He’d opened it, a big, heavy, shaven-headed man with a gin bottle in one hand, and looked down at her and laughed.
“Well, look at this,” he said.
“Come back for seconds, sweetheart?”
She had taken his wrist in both her hands.
“Jasper Pike,” she said.
“I claim what is owed.”
She remembered every second of what happened next.
She thought she always would.
He had twenty-two silver in his pocket.
The panel took that first.
The coins simply vanished out of his coat and appeared in a cold heap in her free hand.
Then it took the beating.
She hadn’t known it could do that.
She’d thought it would just be years.
But the debt was for a beating, with interest, and so the Collector collected it in kind.
She felt it pass through her hands into him: every kick, every blow, every broken bone.
Three ribs cracked in Jasper Pike’s chest at once, with a sound like snapping kindling.
His wrist folded backward.
His cheekbone caved in.
He went down on his own floor and lay there screaming, and the screaming went on and on, because the interest kept coming, kick after kick after kick, delivered by nothing at all, out of the empty air.
When it was over, he was lying in a spreading pool on his floorboards, whimpering, and he couldn’t stand up.
She had stood over him the way he had stood over her.
Then she’d looked at her panel again.
]
[ The debtor has no further obligation to you.
]
[ However: Pike, Jasper, owes 140 Silver to Holloway Loan Society (wage advance).
Holloway is in liquidation.
This debt may be ACQUIRED.
]
She had sat on the floor of his room among the blood and the broken gin bottle and thought about that for a long time.
Holloway was dying.
Everybody knew it now.
The Bureau was all over its offices, auditing everything.
Its doors had been chained.
Its debts, thousands and thousands of them, every loan it had ever made to every desperate soul in the lower city, were going to be sold off at the Registry to whoever would buy them.
For pennies on the pound.
She knew all about buying debts for pennies on the pound.
She bought Jasper Pike’s debt four days later, for nine silver, from a Registry clerk handling Holloway’s smaller notes before the main auction.
She paid with his own coins.
[ ACQUIRED: Pike, Jasper — 140 Silver.
]
[ BIND?
]
She said yes.
She felt it happen.
Like a hook sinking into meat.
Across the city, in his room above the tobacconist’s, lying in a bed he hadn’t been able to leave for a week, Jasper Pike went suddenly rigid.
His eyes went blank.
Then he sat up, slowly.
His broken ribs didn’t seem to hurt him any more.
He got out of bed, dressed, walked across Brassmarket in the dark, climbed her stairs and knocked on her door.
When she opened it, he stood on the landing with his hands at his sides, waiting.
His face was empty.
His eyes were dull and silver at the rims, like old coins.
“Ma’am,” he said.
He was the first.
There were eleven of them, by the time Tamsin knelt in front of her brother’s grave that morning and felt someone watching her.
Eleven Bound debtors.
Holloway collectors, mostly.
A few of their bosses.
The men who’d made Brassmarket afraid.
She bought their debts one by one from the dying bank’s back office, cheaply and quietly, with coins Claimed from the men themselves, and she Bound them, and now they belonged to her.
They were very strong when they were Bound.
Her strength flowed into them through the hook, and made them faster and harder and tireless.
They didn’t sleep much.
They didn’t eat much.
They didn’t speak unless she spoke to them first.
She didn’t like them.
She didn’t like looking at their faces.
But she understood them.
She’d been one of them, once, in the other world.
A collector.
A creature that existed to take.
[ THE COLLECTOR — Account Holder: Tamsin Marsh.
]
[ Rank: 1.
]
[ Bound: 11.
]
[ Rank 2 requirement: 1,000 Claims collected OR 1 life Claimed.
]
One life Claimed.
She had looked at that line every night for a week, sitting by the window of her room in Brassmarket, with her eleven Bound men standing silently in the stairwell outside her door.
There was only one life in her Ledger.
After Lucan Marr walked out of the churchyard, Tamsin Marsh sat down on the wet grass beside her brother’s grave and didn’t move for a long time.
She was shaking.
Her ribs were on fire.
The cut on her lip was bleeding into her mouth.
But it wasn’t pain that was making her shake.
Resistance permitted.
She’d seen the words flash up on her own panel the moment he tore free.
Silver, edged with thorns.
[ CLAIM interrupted.
Debtor is an Account Holder.
]
[ Account Holders may resist Claims while their own Ledger remains in good standing.
]
[ Partial collection: 1 year, 2 months, 6 days.
]
[ To complete a Claim against an Account Holder, the debtor must first be brought into DEFAULT.
]
Default.
She knew that word.
She knew it better than any other word in any language, in either world.
It was the word that came before the knock on the door.
You couldn’t collect from a man who could still pay.
You had to break him first.
Make him miss a payment.
Make him fall behind.
Make him owe more than he could cover.
Strip away everything he had, piece by piece, until there was nothing left but the debt.
Then you could take whatever you liked.
She took a deep breath.
Then another.
The shaking slowly stopped.
She thought about the flowers he’d laid on the old woman’s grave.
White ones.
Strange ones.
She’d never seen flowers like that in Grisholt.
She thought about where he’d gone when he walked out of the gate.
She’d sent two of her Bound men after him, at a distance.
They’d followed him down Tallow Street, through the narrow back lanes of Tallowgate and up to the corner of Hob’s Cross, where he’d gone in through the side door of a crooked old apothecary’s shop with coloured glass jars glowing in the window.
Greaves & Son.
She’d heard of it.
Everybody in Brassmarket had heard of it this week.
A new owner.
A young man from the provinces.
Medicines that actually worked.
A young man named Thorne.
That evening, as the furnaces under the smog turned the sky the colour of a wound, Tamsin Marsh stood on the far side of Hob’s Cross in the doorway of a closed haberdasher’s, with her shawl pulled up over her straw-coloured hair, and looked across the street at Greaves & Son.
The queue was gone.
The shop was closing.
Through the bow window, past the great glowing carboys of red and green and blue, she could see figures moving inside.
An old man in green spectacles, shuffling.
A tall man in a ridiculous naval uniform, carrying boxes.
A red-haired girl with her sleeves rolled up, sweeping.
A thin woman in a scorched grey robe with enormous round spectacles, writing in a ledger.
And behind the counter, in a white apron, laughing at something the tall man had said, Lucan Marr.
He looked happy.
He looked like a man who had a home.
Tamsin watched him for a long time.
Then she took a folded sheet of paper out of her shawl.
It was a notice.
She had torn it down that afternoon from the wall of the Lower Wards Debt Registry.
NOTICE OF LIQUIDATION.
The entire loan book of the Holloway Loan Society, comprising 4,118 notes of obligation, will be offered for sale by public auction at the Lower Wards Debt Registry on the 14th of Frost, at the tenth bell, by order of the Crown Court of Insolvency.
Below it was a list of the largest debtors.
She had read it twenty times.
She knew most of the names by heart now.
She found the one she was looking for, near the top, and ran her finger along it.
Varney, Saul — 9,400 silver.
Secured: properties on Needle Lane, Tallow Street, Wicker Row.
She’d done her research.
It hadn’t been hard.
A man like Lucan Marr, a dead man with a new name and a shop full of miracles, needed friends in Tallowgate.
And there was only one man in Tallowgate worth being friends with.
She folded the notice and put it back in her shawl.
“Default,” she whispered to the dark street.
“First, you make them default.”
Then she turned and walked away into the smog, and behind her, at a distance, keeping to the shadows, eleven silent men with silver-rimmed eyes followed her home.