Time Is Money

In Sallow, when they tell you time is money, they are not being clever. They are quoting the exchange rate. Mira Quill had spent her whole life on the wrong side of that rate, so she knew it better than the bankers did. She knew that a healthy hour of a healthy young body, drawn out clean by a Lending House extractor, sold at eleven copper marks. She knew that the same hour, ladled into the veins of some Hillside dowager who wanted to see another spring, resold at four silver. She knew that the difference between eleven copper and four silver was the entire architecture of the city — the Hill living three hundred years on time it had bought, the Flats dying at forty having sold it. She knew, specifically and to the minute, that her father had sold twelve years. He had not meant to sell twelve. Nobody means to. You sell a month to cover the winter rent, and the interest on a time-loan is itself charged in time, and the months compound the way months do, and one grey morning the Lending House clerk reads you the total and it is twelve years and you are suddenly an old man at forty-eight with a daughter who remembers when you could lift her. He had died at fifty. He should have died at sixty-two. The Grand Lending House of Sallow had those twelve years in a vault, and Mira Quill wanted them back. Not the value of them. The years. That was the thing nobody she pitched could get through their heads, in those first weeks — they kept hearing a robbery and thinking gold. "There's no profit in stealing time you can't sell," said the fence on Carrow Street, not unkindly, and slid her cup of bad wine back across the table as though the offer of it had been a mistake. "Time's traceable. Every hour in that vault is stamped with the name it was drawn from. You can't fence a stamped year. Hill won't touch it, Flats can't afford a lawyer to. It's the one thing in Sallow worth everything and worth nothing." "I don't want to fence it," Mira said. "I want to give it back." The fence looked at her for a while. He had a good face for a fence — soft, forgettable, the face of a man you would not describe accurately to a constable an hour later. "Give it back," he repeated. "To who?" "To the people it was drawn from. The vault's full of stamped years. Stamped means named. Means I'd know exactly whose decade is whose. I crack the vault, I read the stamps, and I put twelve years — and forty other people's years, and four hundred, however many I can carry — back into the bodies they were cut out of." She turned her cup but did not drink. "My father's dead. I can't give his back to him. But the man in the next room over from where he died is fifty-one and sold nine years and he is still alive, and nine years is the difference between him seeing his grandson walk and not. I can give it to him." "That's not a heist," the fence said. "That's a sermon." "It's a heist with a sermon's accounting." Mira finally drank, because she needed the moment the cup bought her. "I know how that sounds. I know there's no crew in Sallow that pulls a job for free. But I'm not asking them to work for free. I'm asking them to work for the only wage I've got, and it happens to be the same wage everyone in this city is actually starving for and too polite to say so." She set the cup down. "Years. I can't pay in silver. But anyone who helps me crack that vault — they walk out of it able to take back whatever the Lending House took from them. Their own stamped time, off the shelf, into their own arm. I'm not offering money. I'm offering people their lives back. Their literal, measured, stolen lives." The fence was quiet a long moment. Outside, the Lending House bell rang the hour — it always rang the hour; it was the cruelest bell in the city — and somewhere on the Flats, that chime meant another loan had compounded. "The Grand Lending House vault," he said slowly, "has never been cracked. Forty years, best crews in three cities, never." "I know." "The reason it's never been cracked is the vault isn't guarded by men. It's guarded by time. The lock runs on a borrowed century — you don't pick it, you'd have to outlast it, and nobody outlasts a century." He leaned forward, and the soft forgettable face was, for just a moment, sharp. "You'd need a crew that could beat a clock. There's maybe five people in Sallow with the trades for that, and every one of them has a reason to never work together, and you, Mira Quill, are a nobody from the Flats with a dead father and a sermon." Mira smiled. It was not a warm smile. It was the smile of someone who had done the sums a thousand times in the dark and kept arriving at the same answer and had finally decided to act on it. "Then it's a good thing," she said, "that I've spent two years finding out exactly what each of those five reasons is. Get me a meeting with the cracksman. I'll handle the reason he'll say no. I already know it's a woman named Edra, and I already know she's not dead, whatever he's been told." The fence's forgettable face did something it was not, professionally, ever supposed to do. It showed surprise.