[ Good morning.
]
Rurik was holding a cup of noodles.
[ Good morning.
]
“I heard you the first time.”
[ You did not respond, so I logged a fault.
Diagnostics come out of your balance.
Please respond.
]
“My what?”
[ Please respond.
]
“Good morning,” Rurik said.
[ Thank you.
]
He had come down the stairs four minutes ago.
He had come down them the same way he came down them every morning, sideways on the third step because the third step had never been right and he’d never had the money to have it looked at, and he had gotten to the bottom and turned toward the counter and stopped.
The front of the building was glass.
Two stories of it, floor to mezzanine, which had been the single most expensive decision of his life and the one he’d never regretted.
It faced east.
Every morning for ten months it had shown him a parking lot with four spaces, a dumpster enclosure, and the sign for a tax place that was open three months a year.
This morning it was showing him a street.
The street was cobbled and it was wide, wider than any road in the county, wide enough that two wagons could have passed with room to argue.
There were people on it.
Most of them were running.
One of them went by the window at a speed Rurik associated with motorcycles, wearing scale armor, carrying a sword in a way that suggested he had recently stopped intending to use it.
Somewhere out of sight to the left, something was on fire in a way that fire does not usually manage.
Rurik set the cup down on the counter.
Then he picked it back up, because the counter was where he’d put his laptop and the laptop was not insured for anything anymore.
[ Your establishment has been relocated to the Dominion of Harth, outer ward, Marrow Street.
]
[ Please do not open the front door.
]
“Okay.”
[ You have been enrolled in the Proprietorship Program.
]
[ Congratulations.
]
[ Please note that the Proprietorship Program does not include structural defense, medical coverage, insurance of any kind, or personal protection.
]
“Then what does it include.”
[ Inventory.
]
Rurik looked at the noodles.
There was a fork in them.
He had put the fork in them himself, in a kitchenette upstairs, in Kentucky.
The thing about the morning was that it had already been the worst day of his life before any of this.
That was the part he kept coming back to later, when people asked him how he’d been so calm, and he never had a good answer because calm wasn’t it.
The foreclosure was at noon.
The number in the register was thirty-two dollars and it had been thirty-two dollars since Thursday.
He had spent the small hours of the night going through a decision tree that ended, on every single branch, in a man in a rented sedan putting a notice on his door.
He had reached the bottom of what he had.
There wasn’t any further down to be knocked.
So the street was, in a way he would have had trouble defending out loud, not the largest problem in the room.
“Am I dead,” he said.
[ No.
]
“Is this a stroke.”
[ No.
]
[ Due to local conditions, you are eligible for the Founding Staff Provision.
]
“What are local conditions.”
[ Look outside.
]
Rurik looked outside.
A woman in grey robes was standing in the middle of the road about sixty feet off, with both arms up, and the air in front of her had gone the wrong color.
Something came at her from the direction of the fire.
The wrong-colored air took it and folded it and there was a sound Rurik felt in the fillings of his back teeth, and then the robes came apart and she went down and did not get up, and two men in the same grey ran to her and started dragging.
Rurik’s hand had gone to the counter’s edge at some point.
He noticed it there.
[ You may select one (1) individual currently within your line of sight and bind them as your first employee.
]
[ They will be contractually obligated to the operation and defense of this establishment.
]
[ You may not select a second.
]
[ You may not dismiss the first.
]
[ Please choose carefully, as I will not be assisting.
]
“Hang on.
Defense.
You said no defense.”
[ I do not provide defense.
Your employee may.
That is the design.
]
“That’s not a design, that’s—”
[ Ninety seconds.
]
“Why is there a timer?”
[ There is always a timer.
]
He went to the glass.
Up close it was worse, because up close you could see faces.
A monk with a shaved head and a bloody ear went past at a jog with a child under each arm and a third child running alongside holding his belt.
Two men in blue surcoats were trying to get a door open across the street and the door was not cooperating and one of them had started hitting it with a shoulder.
Down at the corner, something enormous was fighting something else enormous, and neither of them looked like they had wanted to be there when the day started.
Everyone was moving.
That was the thing his eye kept catching on, the way it used to catch on an empty table in a full room.
Everyone out there was moving and one person wasn’t.
She was standing at the center of the street with her hands folded behind her back.
No hood.
Dark coat down past the knee, plain, the kind of plain that costs money.
The fighting went around her the way water goes around a bridge piling.
As Rurik watched, a section of roof came off the building on the corner and came down close enough to raise a sheet of dust over her, and she didn’t turn her head.
She was watching the corner where the two enormous things were.
She had her weight on one leg.
Rurik had employed people for ten months.
He’d had six of them, briefly, before he couldn’t make payroll, and he had learned to read the exact posture of a teenager who has finished the closing checklist and is now waiting out the clock.
Bored.
She looked bored.
She looked like a woman standing in line at a DMV.
The part of his brain that had been running the shop for ten months, that ran whether he wanted it to or not, not through the second mortgage or the phone calls or last Thursday, put a note in a file.
Not panicking.
Not running.
Available.
“Her,” Rurik said.
[ … ]
“What’s that.
What’s the dots.”
[ Confirm selection.
]
“The one who isn’t running.
The tall one, in the coat.”
[ Confirm selection.
]
“Yes.
Yes.”
[ Selection confirmed.
]
[ Founding Staff Provision executed.
]
[ Please open the front door.
]
Out in the street, the woman in the coat turned her head and looked directly at him.
Nobody had looked at the building all morning.
He hadn’t noticed himself noticing, but he’d noticed.
Their eyes went across the frontage and kept going, the way your eye crosses a fence.
Hers stopped.
Rurik stood there with a cup of noodles going cold in his left hand and thirty-two dollars in the register behind him and a foreclosure that was, by his math, still technically scheduled for noon.
Then he lifted his right hand and gave her the small flat wave he gave people who showed up at ten till close.
The one that meant we’re open, come on in.