The door opened inward and there was a bell on it.
An actual bell, small, brass, on a bent strip of metal, and it rang.
She stopped in the doorway with her hand still on the wood and looked up at it.
“That’s the door chime,” Rurik said.
“It’s so I know somebody’s come in.
If I’m upstairs.”
She did not say anything.
“You can let go of the door.”
She let go of the door.
It swung shut behind her and the bell rang again and the sound of Marrow Street cut off.
Not muffled.
Cut, entirely, like a line going dead, and the quiet that replaced it had a faint hum underneath it from the lights.
The air was cold.
Not cellar-cold.
Cold the way a sealed room is cold, and dry, and it smelled of paper and something sweet she could not name.
She turned around slowly and looked at the room.
Rurik watched her do it and made himself stand still, which was harder than he’d expected, because the thing he did when people walked in was talk.
He’d had ten months of walking people through the floors.
He had a whole opening.
Ground floor’s tables and the counter, second floor’s got the systems, third floor is the library, first hour’s on the house if you’ve never been.
He had said it maybe two hundred times and it had never worked the way he wanted it to.
He kept his mouth shut and let her look, because whatever was happening to her face while she looked seemed like the kind of thing you don’t interrupt.
“What is the light,” she said.
Her voice was unhurried.
Complete sentences, no lift at the end, the cadence of somebody reading a list.
“Electric.”
“That is not a word.”
“No, I know.”
[ TRANSLATION LAYER ACTIVE.
Certain terms have no local equivalent and will pass through untranslated.
This is not a fault.
Do not log it as a fault.
]
She looked up at where the text was, which meant she could see it, which Rurik noted and put away for later.
“You have a system,” she said.
“Since about ten minutes ago.”
“They are not common.”
“I wouldn’t know.”
She walked to the nearest table.
It was the four-seater by the window, the one with the water ring he’d never gotten out.
There was a box on it, still shrink-wrapped, because he’d put it there in April to make the front of the store look busy from outside.
She picked it up.
“This is very light.”
“It’s cards.”
“Cards.”
“For playing.
There’s a game in there.” He came around the counter, which he told himself was because she was holding stock.
“Two-player.
The rules are on a sheet inside.”
She turned the box over in both hands.
She read the back of it, all of it, for long enough that Rurik started counting the seams in the floor.
“There is more writing on this than seems necessary,” she said.
“It does not say what the game is for.”
“It’s not for anything.”
She looked up.
“It’s a game,” Rurik said.
“You play it because playing it is the thing.”
She held that for a moment.
Then she looked back down at the box, and turned it, and read the small line along the bottom edge where the printer’s mark was.
“Mira,” she said.
“That’s the publisher.”
“I am taking it.”
“You’re—” Rurik stopped.
“You’re taking the name.”
“I require one for employment.
You will need to write it somewhere, on a list, and refer to me by it.” She set the box down, square to the table edge.
“The name currently in use is the Calamity of the Fourth Bell.
It is not mine either.
Somebody in Harth made it up in the spring, and I would rather it did not appear in your handwriting.”
“Is that going to be a problem.
People coming in and knowing you.”
She looked at him as though he had asked whether the floor was going to be a problem.
“No one knows me,” she said.
She straightened the box a second time, which it did not need.
“I have never had to hide.
Nobody has ever looked at a woman standing still in a road and put her together with what happened to the road.”
“Somebody just did.”
“Yes,” Mira said.
“I noticed.”
Rurik discovered he had sat down on the edge of a chair.
[ EMPLOYEE REGISTERED.
] [ Designation: MIRA.
] [ Contract binding: permanent.
] [ Employee duties: operation and defense of the establishment.
] [ Contract holds while the establishment remains solvent.
]
Rurik read that last line twice.
“What happens if it doesn’t,” he said.
[ Then the contract lapses and the employee resumes her previous activity.
]
The bell over the door was still faintly moving.
He could see it out of the corner of his eye, swinging maybe a quarter inch, back and forth.
“Her previous activity,” Rurik said.
[ Yes.
]
Mira had gone to the window.
She was looking out at Marrow Street, at the smoke coming off the chandler’s row, with her hands behind her back and her weight on one leg.
“You knew,” she said.
Not turning around.
“Before you waved.”
“The box told me there was somebody out there I could hire.” Rurik got up off the chair.
“It didn’t say what you were until you did.”
“And now.”
“Now I’ve got a woman on staff who ended four kingdoms, and my contract with her runs on whether I can keep the lights on.” He went behind the counter, because the counter was where he thought, and pulled the drawer.
Thirty-two dollars.
A ten, a five, a run of ones, and the two quarters he’d been keeping separate because the machine upstairs wouldn’t take anything else.
He looked at it for a second.
Then he picked up the ten and held it up, the way you hold up something for a clerk.
“What’s this worth here.”
[ Query logged.
]
“That wasn’t—”
[ Converting.
]
The bill went out of his fingers.
Not snatched, not burned.
It simply stopped being in his hand, and he was left holding the shape of it.
[ ACCOUNT ESTABLISHED.
] [ Balance: 40 credits.
]
“Forty credits of what?”
[ Of credits.
]
“That is not an answer, that’s the same word—”
[ Query logged.
] [ -1 credit.
]
Rurik put both hands flat on the counter.
[ All currency, coin, bullion, ore, and goods of established worth convert to account balance at posted rates on contact with the premises.
Conversion is final.
Conversion is one-way.
] [ The account funds restocking, service requests, structural expansion, consumable acquisition, and queries.
] [ Operations are billed monthly.
] [ First settlement is due in thirty days.
]
“How much.”
[ That depends on what you build.
]
“And if I can’t pay it.”
[ Then the establishment is not solvent.
]
Over by the window, Mira did not turn around, but she did shift her weight onto the other leg, which was the most he had seen her move since the door.
“Yes,” Mira said.
“Right.”
He rubbed his eyes with the heels of his hands.
Later, when he tried to work out where exactly it had gone wrong, or gone right, he never could get it any finer than this: standing behind his own counter at the sixth bell with a dead register and a coworker who was on record as an act of God, and feeling the thing come up through his chest that he hadn’t felt since the day he signed the lease.
Because for the first time in six days, there was somebody else in the building.
“Okay,” he said.
“Okay.
First thing.
Before anything else.”
Mira turned from the window.
“You’re going to need a name tag.”
Out on Marrow Street, thirty feet from the glass, a man in a blue surcoat with a bad arm and no unit left stopped in front of a grey shuttered building that he had walked past twice that morning, and stood there frowning at a door that had not been there, and reached for the handle.
The bell rang.