Seventeen Remaining

Chapter 1

Forty minutes in and out, Rem said in the van, and it had been forty minutes. You were at the back with the bags, the way a carry always is: four sacks of nodefall roped across your shoulders, weighed at the mouth, cash the same evening. Naia Brandt eight steps ahead with her light low on the floor, counting the way she always counts, out loud and bored. Eleven. Twelve. Nothing on this floor over knee height. Wet chalk and copper, the smell every E-grade has. The panel opened at eye level, right over the return line, blue as a screen in a dark room. You had a strap in your teeth and both hands full. Something on it moved. You hit it the way you swat a notification off a phone at four in the morning. ACCEPT. The return line — the standing shimmer you walked in through, the one thing in a gate that is always, always open — goes matte. Not shut. Matte, like a wall somebody has painted the exact colour of the air. Naia's light comes around. "What." The panel is still there. It has resized itself to sit at a comfortable reading distance from your face, and it moves when you move. TERMS ACCEPTED — CLEARANCE REMAINING: 17 RETURN SUSPENDED UNTIL CLEARANCE Under that, smaller, in a grey you have to lean in for: full text available on request The survey for this gate said fifteen. Fifteen, on the sheet Rem read out in the van in the flat voice he keeps for the boring part. The radio on your collar coughs. Rem, twelve metres and one wall away, already doing the insurance out loud: "—line's gone dark on the meter, don't touch anything, do not touch anything, I've got Naia's tag and I've got yours and that is what I'm telling them, we're at forty-one minutes—" Naia has her light in your face now. She is looking exactly where the panel is, and her eyes are not adjusting to it, because for her there is nothing there to adjust to. "Hey," she says. "You went white. What did you just do?"

Story details

System Progression · Dungeon Survival · LitRPG · Progression Fantasy · Urban Fantasy

Nineteen years of gates, and the trade around them is a trade: surveys, grades, licensed crews, insured by the hour, forty minutes in and out. You are a carry — the body at the back who hauls what other people kill, paid by weight at the gate mouth, a tag number on a roster. Forty-one minutes into an E-grade clearance a blue panel opened over the way out and you hit ACCEPT with both hands full. The return line has gone matte. The panel reads REMAINING: 17, the survey said fifteen, and the fighter sealed in here with you cannot see the panel at all. It answers direct questions to the letter and never explains why. It pays in doors that were not in that wall and changes grown into your hands, and it charges in names you will no longer be able to say out loud. There is no last floor and no boss — only the next set of terms, and what you can talk it down to.

  • The panel answers to the letter. Ask it something straight and you get something straight back — never a word more, never a reason, never a thing you did not ask about. Ask it something sloppy and the answer will be perfectly true and no use to you at all. Say "full text" and it shows you the full text: the fine print was never a secret, it is just long.
  • Everything it pays and everything it charges is a real thing in the world. It pays in doors that were not in that wall, in changes grown into your hands, in people whose count you can suddenly read over their heads. It charges in a name you will not be able to say out loud any more, a face cameras stop recording, a Tuesday nobody can account for. Both directions, to the letter, and the price is written out before it is taken.
  • You can refuse. Refusing does not kill you — it is a forfeiture, and the forfeiture is spelled out for you before you decline, so read it first. Refuse enough and you are in default. Default is not a punishment; it is a status, and people have lived inside it for years.
  • Nobody else can see it. To the room you are a person who stopped walking and said no to a wall. But a helmet camera records a rectangular dead area where a panel stands, and that is the only reliable way anybody has ever found a holder — which is why Recovery starts every intake with a body camera and a well-lit room.
  • Unregistered awakening is not a crime, it is a status. A licence, a rank and a file would make you legal, insured and owned, in that order. Recovery takes people into program; program is a contract; people do not come out of program so much as get reassigned.
  • Three clocks that do not wait. There is always one open term with a date on it, and an unclosed term accrues a line a day. The ward's gates keep opening on their own schedule and keep posting a grade low, and there is always a crew cheap enough to sign. And everything already paid out was priced in a clause you accepted — it arrives late, and rarely on you alone.