# Chapter 1: The New Arithmetic

*Take three or four days for yourself. Then come see me. I have something that needs the kind of mind you have.*

*I'll come,* I'd said.

I'd come. Four days later, on the nose, because three was below the floor Ledger would have respected and five would have been theatre. Walked into the office. Sat down. Waited.

He hadn't had anything yet.

*When it's ready, I'll send for you. Keep your tools warm.*

That was four months ago.

(*Four months of a man with my particular brain doing nothing. Somebody should have warned him.*)

I had helped Mere. Told myself, and the noise, and anyone who asked, that I was there to help. I was, some of the time, actually helping. Helping Mere did not count as work. This was a definition I had arrived at myself and had no intention of examining.

Four months of moss. Lattice panels, Moonswell trays on a schedule Mere had logged to the quarter-bell, ghostveil jars in three sizes, failures stacked on a shelf she wouldn't let me throw out. One lead that hadn't broken yet and might not tonight. I had opinions about cell walls I had not previously expected to acquire.

In the hours that were mine — and there were more of them than I was used to — I had been taking the thaumometer apart without actually taking it apart. Ledger's wedding gift. Pre-Compact. Fifty yards of range on paper. I had it at seventy on a still day. The lens softened at the edge of its map like glass holding focus a heartbeat too long. It preferred earth-keyed workings to fire by a factor I hadn't pinned down. Leon and I spent an afternoon on an unused dockside lot, him throwing fire at chalk marks and me watching the lens draw the flare in real time at distances the manual had not mentioned.

(*He gave it to me because he needed me to have something. Four months ago he'd known he was going to make me wait.*)

Through all of it, the noise. Three threads at any hour — the moss, the thaumometer, and whatever Ledger still wasn't telling me — riffing, arguing, occasionally synthesising something useful and more often synthesising a migraine. I was not going mad. I was, by the standards of the thing that lived in my head, within tolerances.

I just wanted the case.

Ledger, when he was ready, would send for me.

* * *

That morning he wasn't ready yet.

That morning, the pewter light was late. The kitchen at Chandler's Row faced the wrong way for good dawn light — a grievance I held against the building and would not be renewing the lease over — and the sun came in at an angle that reached the far wall before the table, which meant that Mere, when she came down, would be slightly later than she had been last month and significantly later than she had been the month before that.

I'd noted the pattern and not mentioned it.

The bracelet sat on the side table where I'd left it the night before, cool, quiet. Four months since it had last asked for anything. It had, some weeks back, pulsed faintly at a squall that rolled through the dockside and drained every candle-mark of preserved weather charm out of a bargeman's crate two streets over, and I had filed that not as an event but as the bracelet reminding me it was still paying attention. Otherwise: cool. Sleeping. Inside its own ledger of patient draws and patient rests.

Sniff was in his corner. Folded blanket, water bowl, the breathing of a dog who had established dominion over his allocated space and saw no reason to reconsider it. Jenet Carterson — Carter's wife, who had taken over Sniff's feeding routine during last winter's household move to Millford Street and had never quite handed it back — had dropped a crust of bread wrapped in cloth on the counter sometime before I'd come down. She had a key. She used it on her way to the dockside market most mornings. The crust was for Sniff. We let her.

I put water on.

The brass microscope sat on the table where it had sat for eleven weeks, give or take. Magic-ground lens. A loan-that-was-not-a-loan from a supplier of Mere's who had said *take it, you need it more than I do,* and had then refused payment three separate ways, so that the instrument had ended up on the kitchen table at the approximate cost of two small dinners and one polite argument. Around it: three slides in a rack, a jar of distilled solution, a pair of tweezers with the grip wrapped in thread so they wouldn't slip. In the window, caught behind a lattice panel Mere had built from scrap strip — thin, clean wood, careful angles, a pattern I didn't understand and hadn't asked about — a low tray of pale moss. It glowed faintly under moonlight and did nothing under sun, which was most of what there was to say about Moonswell.

In the workshop corner, off the kitchen, the ghostveil sat in jars. Compact-suppressed. Expensive.

(*She's down. She's slow. She's on the stairs before the water boils. She's been on the stairs before the water boiled for a week now.*)

I did not turn.

"Morning," Mere said, behind me, at the foot of the stairs.

"Morning."

She moved across the kitchen the way she'd moved across it for the last eleven weeks — carefully, not because she didn't trust her feet but because she had developed, during a specific window that started somewhere around the third bell most mornings, a preference for moving with her shoulders square and her stomach not surprised. She sat. She did not immediately reach for tea.

I measured ginger by weight. Two drams. Mere preferred it by volume, which she had admitted, under some pressure, was not a strictly defensible preference, and we had agreed that two drams by weight produced a more consistent result, and had then agreed to pretend that the consistency was the point.

I set the cup in front of her.

"Thanks," she said.

"How's the stairs."

"Stairs are fine. The hour before the stairs is the problem."

"Still."

"Still."

I sat down opposite her.

We drank.

The house plans were on the sideboard. Rev 13. Mere had redrawn the nursery placement six days after I'd shown her my private Rev 12 from the filing week, and we had spent the better part of an evening with a straight-edge and a pair of pencils and — in the end — a clean sheet that Mere had taken over entirely around the eleventh bell and completed on her own while I made dinner. The nursery in Rev 13 sat adjacent to the kitchen on the east side, because Mere had said *I want morning light on a child's face for the first hour of the day, and afternoon light will wake them from naps,* and I had failed to produce an argument. The upstairs room over the drainage pilings, which I had drafted in Rev 12 as a future nursery, had become in Rev 13 an office with a window facing the tree line. I had not objected. The office, in one reading, was for me. In another reading, which I filed and did not examine, it was a room that could accommodate a second child without being explicitly designed to.

Mere drank her ginger. The light slid another inch across the far wall.

"Leon tomorrow?" she said.

"Leon today. Training."

"How's the shoulder."

"Shoulder's fine."

The shoulder was not fine. The shoulder was fine in the sense that I could lift it over my head without audible complaint; it was not fine in the sense that I had been running training long enough that the fifteen-second ceiling, which had held for the entire back half of last year, had at some point in deep winter gone thin in a way I had not forecast, and Leon and I had spent the weeks since pushing through it. Eighteen seconds on a good day. Twenty on a day with weather. I hadn't mentioned the number. Neither had he. The plateau had broken in the way plateaus broke when they were ready to break, and we had, by mutual unspoken agreement, decided not to congratulate ourselves about it.

"All right," she said.

She reached for the microscope. Not to use it — to move it three inches to the left so the morning light wouldn't catch the lens at the angle that, over the course of a morning, would warm the glass enough to matter for the slides. She was a careful user of expensive instruments. I had learned this the hard way, once, with a pair of tweezers.

"Tonight," I said, "do we try again."

"Tonight, yes. Third mix. The seam holds for forty-seven seconds at the last count and then it doesn't."

"The seam is the problem."

"The seam is the whole problem. The rest of it works."

"Tonight we fix the seam."

"Tonight we make a run at the seam."

I let her have it.

The knock came at the second bell. Two, a pause, one.

I stood.

* * *

Devod's walking stick tapped twice on the step before he came in. He did this now. He had not done it before the draining, and he had started doing it some weeks after Brennan Toor's visit, and it was — I had concluded, watching the pattern — not a tell of aging but of courtesy. A sound for Mere, who could be anywhere in the house, to know without having to get up that the man at the door was her father.

"Mere," he said, putting the stick in the corner by the door.

"Dad."

The word was easy. It had been easy since the afternoon the apples had come through the Thresholds door and the twelve-year account had closed, and it had been used in quiet acknowledgment ever since. Not constantly. When it fit. Today it fit.

Devod had a basket.

"Carson said you were out of Reseda," he said. "I'm not out of Reseda. So now you're not out of Reseda either."

"Carson said," Mere repeated. "Carson tells me I'm out of things a week before I'm out of them."

"Carson's right about that."

"Carson is more right than me about my own stockroom, yes."

Devod set the basket on the counter. Under the cloth: a small glass jar with a wax seal he had done himself, and beside the jar, wrapped in damp paper, a cutting. Moonswell. Young. He'd taken it off one of his own trays, and he'd cut it himself, and the angle of the cut was a cleaner angle than he ever used on anything for sale. I noticed. I didn't mention it.

"Thought you'd want a look," he said.

"You bred it longer."

"I bred it longer. Week, maybe week and a half past the last one. Leaves are denser. Not prettier — denser."

Mere turned the cutting over in her hand. "You kept the seventh-bell cycle?"

"I kept the seventh-bell cycle and I shaved three minutes off the lantern exposure on the sixteenth night. That's the only change."

"Three minutes."

"Three. I tried two. Two didn't do it. Four killed a tray."

"Four killed a tray," Mere said, setting the cutting on the counter next to a fresh slide.

"Four killed a tray."

She laughed. It was a short laugh and not a performance laugh and Devod registered it the way he registered everything worth registering these days, which was with the smallest possible reaction.

He sat down at the table.

He moved slower than he had before the draining. Not old — not quite. A man who had come back from being aged twenty years in an afternoon and had, in the four-plus months since, knit most of it back but not all. The left leg took a heartbeat longer than the right on sitting down. The knee, not the hip. I had measured it without meaning to. He caught me looking. He didn't say anything about it, and I didn't, and the observation went into the folder labelled *DEVOD: POST-DRAINING* which had, four months ago, replaced the much thinner folder labelled *DEVOD: WAGON DRIVER.*

"Rev 13," he said, looking at the sideboard.

"Rev 13," I said.

"You moved the upstairs room."

"Mere moved the upstairs room."

"Mere was right to move it."

"Mere," Mere said, "is always right to move anything in the house plans."

Devod nodded. "East kitchen takes morning, which is correct. Afternoon light on the west side of a nursery will wake them."

"It will," Mere said.

"Shade panel. Not curtains. Panel, slatted, you can tilt it. Curtains fade, they yellow, they catch dust. Panels clean."

"Panels," Mere said, writing on the margin of the plan.

He did not ask the question that would have turned the sentence into a conversation Mere had not agreed to yet. He noted the panel. He returned his attention to the Moonswell cutting.

(*He knows. He doesn't know. He knows the shape of it and won't name it because he hasn't been told. He's not going to be told today.*)

I poured him tea.

We went on. Mere logged the cutting's variance on a card; Devod told a short story about a neighbour's daughter who had developed, the winter prior, an opinion about root vegetables the neighbour had found insupportable; I listened without needing to contribute. The microscope sat untouched. The Moonswell in the window stopped glowing and started doing the nothing it did under sun. The kitchen warmed.

Around the fourth bell Devod looked at the ghostveil jars in Mere's workshop corner through the doorway.

Ghostveil was Compact stock. Compact-suppressed, Compact-priced, Compact-watched. The guild and the Compact had been trading paper since Kae's deal closed — testimony releases, hearing schedules, procedural filings that arrived on Ledger's desk like small careful knives and went back the same way — and the ghostveil supply was the blade the Compact owned outright. Every herbalist running a chronic-pain protocol bought through them or didn't run the protocol at all.

"If this works," Devod said — he meaning the hybrid neither of them had named out loud yet — "the guild has enough supply for Kae's herbal treatment to stop buying through the Compact when we run out."

Mere's hand stopped on the card.

"They do," she said.

"That's a second front in the fight."

"It's a second front."

"You know that," Devod said.

"I know that."

He nodded. He didn't push it. He had said the thing. The thing was in the room.

(*He came to say that. The cutting was the reason. That was the second front.*)

I filed it.

After a while he stood. Knee, heartbeat. Stick out of the corner. He'd brought the cutting, and the jar, and the sentence, and he was not going to overstay. I had thought for half a year, watching him, that the post-draining Devod was less of the Devod I had known. I was, increasingly, not sure that was the right framing. He was the same man. He was also a man who had looked at the inside of a crystal drain and come back with the volume on certain dials turned down. Different knobs. Same instrument.

At the door he glanced at me.

"Training's at sixth?"

"Sixth."

"Good shoulder."

"Good shoulder."

He let himself out. I watched him through the window for the seven steps it took him to clear the gate. The walking stick was functional. The eye was not. He watched a cart across the lane for a half second longer than a man who wasn't watching it, and I filed that, too, not because it was new but because it was easy to forget it was new, and because if the four months in Drenwick had taught me anything it was that most of what mattered happened in the part of the day that looked like it didn't.

* * *

I trained with Leon at the sixth. Eighteen seconds on the hold, a shaded courtyard off the dockside, Leon's good-natured running observations on my stance, a handful of small corrections that mattered and a larger number that did not. The sleeve on his wrist warmed and cooled in the rhythm it did when he was throwing for effect and not for training. My shoulder behaved. The shoulder, I had discovered, was a system that responded to correct use the way any system did. I had been using it correctly.

I walked home through the late afternoon.

The kitchen at Chandler's Row in the last bell before evening was a different kitchen than the one I had left. The light came in at a long angle from the west now — bad for the microscope, good for reading — and Mere had moved herself and the slides into the workshop corner to take advantage of the change. She had the third mix on a slide and was watching the seam through the brass. She did not look up when I came in.

I didn't announce myself. I set the thaumometer on the far end of the table, the bracelet back on its strap on my wrist, and sat down.

She worked. The seam held. The seam failed. The seam held. The seam failed. Forty-seven seconds was the number that came up twice in a row, and I watched her write *47* on a card and put the card in the stack that had a lot of *47*s on it, and I did not say *the seam is still the problem* because she already knew and because saying obvious things had, in eleven weeks of this, been the largest single category of thing we had agreed not to do.

She leaned back. Rubbed her eyes.

"Tonight," she said, "I want to try stitching it from the intact side out."

"Stitching it."

"Pulling thread from the unbroken seam on the ghostveil and carrying it into the Moonswell. Not patching. Threading."

"You'd need to see it."

"I'd need to see it at a hundred times what this gives me."

"This gives you forty."

"This gives me forty."

"The microscope won't."

"The microscope won't."

We sat with it.

(*The lens isn't the problem. The lens is what it is. The problem is that at forty you can't see the seam as a seam, you see it as a line. Lines patch. Seams thread. She's right about the thing she's right about, and she's right that this microscope will not get her there.*)

"Tomorrow," I said.

"Tomorrow."

"We try."

"We try."

The knock came at the seventh.

Not Devod. Not the pattern. One firm rap, guild-measured, the kind of knock a courier produced when they had been trained to produce it. I was already standing by the time the second rap would have come, but the second rap did not come, because the courier had been trained also to wait.

I opened the door.

She was a young woman in a grey jacket with a guild pin. She held out a folded card, sealed, the seal pressed in the tight stamp I had seen enough times in enough Ledger files to recognise at a distance.

"For you, Locksmith."

"Thank you."

She went.

I closed the door.

I did not open the card in the doorway. I walked back to the table. Mere had turned; she watched without asking. I laid the card flat and broke the seal with my thumbnail. Inside: two lines, a bell time, a street.

(*Tomorrow. Second bell. Not the office — the file room. The file room is where he goes when he's going to hand me something heavy. The file room means the thing is not the briefing. The thing is the thing. Four months. Four months and he's ready.*)

I set the card down on the table next to the *47* stack.

"Tomorrow?" Mere said.

"Tomorrow."

"Second?"

"Second."

She closed the microscope cover for the night. The brass latched with its small clean click. She picked up her ginger cup, which had gone cold hours ago, and carried it to the sink, and set it down to wash later.

"Get the shoulder warm in the morning," she said.

"I will."

"Get the noise warm too."

"Yeah."

She went upstairs. Sniff followed, two steps behind, the tap of his nails on the floorboards the last domestic sound of the evening.

I stayed at the table. The card. The thaumometer. The bracelet warming, gently, for the first time in four months, against the inside of my wrist.

Ledger, when he was ready, would send for me.

Ledger, it turned out, was ready.
