Chapter 396 - 395 - Credit Earning Strategy
It was a genuine question. He was asking himself with the focused honesty of a man in private, which was a different kind of honest than the kind he used in public.
The answer was available but he didn’t want it.
The answer was: ’because they can see you, and what they see isn’t what you’ve been told you look like, and you’ve spent twenty-eight years building an image in mirrors held by people who needed to reflect something specific, and Millbrook doesn’t have those mirrors, and the face you have in a real reflection is—’
"’Do you want credits?’"
Cassius’s hand was at his dagger before the sentence finished.
He turned.
The alley was empty behind him.
Then — not empty.
The figure was there in the way of something that had been there before he looked and he simply hadn’t seen it — a cloaked shape in the alley’s shadow, at a distance that should have required passing him to reach, and yet there. Still.
Cloaked. Full coverage — the hood deep enough that the afternoon light didn’t penetrate to a face, the cloak itself a traveling cut but finer than traveling quality, the fabric moving with the unhurried quality of expensive material.
A mask.
Pale. Neutral expression worked into the surface — not a grimace, not a smile, simply a face that had decided on absence of expression as its expression.
Cassius kept his hand on his dagger.
"’What,’" he said.
"’Credits,’" the figure said. The voice was — male, probably, though the mask did something to the acoustics, smoothing the edges, taking the identifying markers off. "’For the tower. You want them. I can sell them.’"
Cassius didn’t move.
"’Who are you,’" he said.
"’Doesn’t matter.’"
"’It matters to me.’"
"’I know.’" The figure’s hood inclined slightly — not quite a head tilt, more the suggestion of one. "’It matters to you because you were trained to assess threat via identity, and you can’t assess what you can’t identify, and that makes you the specific kind of uncomfortable that presents as aggression.’ That’s fine. I’m not asking you to trust me. I’m asking you to want something."
Cassius looked at him.
The figure reached into the fold of his cloak.
Produced nothing visible.
And yet — in Cassius’s peripheral vision, where the interface window floated at partial opacity — the number changed.
Negative thirty-nine.
Four hundred sixty-one.
He stared at the interface.
His peripheral vision confirmed: four hundred sixty-one. The number sitting there with the glowing patience of a system update that had simply ’happened,’ without ceremony, without visible mechanism, without any of the infrastructure that should have been required.
He looked back at the figure.
"’That’s five hundred credits,’" the figure said. "’Half of the entry threshold.’"
Cassius opened his mouth.
The figure was gone.
Not ’left’ — gone, the alley holding only the dust and the rust-stained wall and the shadow where the shape had been, the air in the spot it had occupied with the faint residue of displaced presence and nothing else.
Cassius stood in the alley alone.
He looked at the empty space.
Then he moved.
’’’
The tower entrance.
He walked to it with the specific pace of a man who has decided to verify something and has prepared himself for the verification to fail, which is a different pace from the pace of someone expecting confirmation.
He stopped at the arch.
The interface appeared.
’’[VISITOR: CASSIUS, DIVISION AGENT]’’
’’[CURRENT COMMUNITY CREDIT BALANCE: 461]’’
’’[ENTRY THRESHOLD: 1,000]’’
’’[AUTHORIZATION: DENIED — INSUFFICIENT BALANCE]’’
’’[YOU ARE MAKING PROGRESS. KEEP CONTRIBUTING.]’’
Cassius read it twice.
He looked at the number.
Four hundred sixty-one. Real. Sitting in the system’s own display with the gold-lit certainty of verified data, confirmed by a mechanism he had spent three hours failing to replicate through legitimate means.
"’What,’" he said.
Quietly.
To himself.
Then, not quietly:
"’I can really—’"
He stopped.
Turned.
Walked back to the alley with the pace that had arrived from somewhere below the professional layer, the pace of a man operating on animal instinct rather than training, and arrived back at the dead end.
Empty.
He looked at the rust-stained wall. At the shadows. At the overhead gap between the two buildings where the late afternoon sky showed a strip of grey-blue.
"’What is the task.’"
He said it to the alley.
Silence.
Then — not silence.
"’The Ktorian knights,’" the cloaked figure said, from immediately to his right.
Cassius did not reach for his dagger this time.
Not because his hand didn’t want to — it did. But because the speed with which the figure had appeared, and the complete absence of any sound marking its arrival, had communicated something efficiently: the dagger was for a category of threat that this was not.
He turned slowly.
The figure stood three feet from him.
Same cloak. Same mask. Same quality of presence that occupied space without ’announcing’ occupying space, the specific trained stillness of something that had decided visibility was a choice.
"’Ktorian knights,’" Cassius said.
"’Deal with them,’" the figure said, "’in your way.’"
A pause.
"’Define ’deal with,’’" Cassius said.
"’You know what it means.’"
"’I know several things it might mean and they have very different implications.’"
The mask’s hollow expression revealed nothing.
"’Your way,’" the figure repeated. "’I’m not specifying further than that.’"
Cassius looked at the mask.
He was running calculations. He could feel them running, the trained intelligence-operator mind doing what it had been built to do: assessing vectors, weighing incentives, trying to map the shape of what this person wanted from the shape of what they’d offered.
The Ktorian knights were — the Ducal Bulls, in capital parlance. Celestia’s escort. The same knights who had been helping villagers with broken carts this morning while ignoring his greeting.
Someone wanted them ’dealt with.’
Someone who had access to the tower’s credit system from the outside, which meant someone with either technical access to its infrastructure or some form of personal relationship with its—
"’Who are you working for,’" Cassius said.
The figure said nothing.
"’The crown prince’s division doesn’t—’"
"’I’m not affiliated with the crown prince’s division,’" the figure said.
"’Then—’"
"’The other five hundred credits,’" the figure said, "’are released on completion.’"
Cassius looked at the mask.
At the hollow of it where a face should be.
At the quality of the stillness in the cloaked figure — not nervous, not performing, not the stillness of someone waiting for a reaction. The stillness of someone who had already made their own calculations and had arrived here with the specific patience of the result.
His jaw tightened.
He thought about the credit system. About the three hours in the market. About the woman with the firewood and the boy at the fountain and the hunters with their axle-grease hands.
He thought about negative forty-seven.
About what it meant that a building could ’see’ him.
He thought about the Ktorian knights doing cart repairs in full battle armor.
About Celestia not looking up.
His fist closed.
"’Fine,’" he said.
It came out quieter than he expected.
The figure’s head inclined once — that suggestion of a nod, acknowledging without celebrating.
"’Your way,’" it said.
Then it was gone again.
Cassius stood alone in the alley a second time, the late afternoon light at the overhead gap having moved another degree toward evening while he’d been standing here.
He looked at his interface number.
Four hundred sixty-one.
’Shit... wasn’t this what I wanted to do either way?’