The Ghost Accounts

Willka laid the fourth copper foil flat on the crate lid and did not like the number it gave her.

Eleven thousand four hundred and ninety pounds of stolen phosphor-bronze, at Vault Nine's internal valuation, came to a sum that could buy out half of District Three's sub-licenses outright. A sum like that did not disappear into a ledger. It had to be fed in, gram by gram, into accounts that already looked tired enough to swallow it without anyone checking twice.

She had three candidates from Paqari's own dormant sub-license registry, blackmail leverage that was finally earning its keep, and she needed a fourth before the surveyor disc stopped clicking and started pointing.

The disc sat on the crate beside her ledger, still narrowing. Still patient.

"Account Seven-Delta," she said, mostly to herself, stylus moving. "Last filing fourteen months ago. Absorbs twenty-one percent of total value without crossing historic-average deviation." She underlined the figure twice. "Account Three-Kappa. Eleven months dormant. Absorbs eighteen percent." A third line. "Account Nine-Rho—"

She stopped.

The foil said Nine-Rho's last recorded transaction was six weeks ago. Not fourteen months. Not eleven. Six weeks, filed under a maintenance exemption Paqari had used to bury the fuel-siphoning she'd caught him running at his own canal station. An account that recent wasn't dormant. It was watched, or close enough to watched that routing a quarter of a stolen Imperial shipment through it would flag faster than a fresh wound.

"That one's wrong," she said.

Amaru looked up from where he was coiling rope at the vault's mouth. "Which one."

"Nine-Rho. You told me it hadn't moved since spring."

"It hadn't, far as I knew."

"It moved six weeks ago. Someone's still touching it." She crossed it out hard enough to tear the foil's surface. "If I'd routed through that, the deviation flag trips inside a day, and it leads straight back to Paqari, and Paqari leads straight back to us."

"So we're short a pocket."

"We are." She went through the remaining decoded entries again, slower this time, checking dates against dates instead of trusting the first clean number she found. The next came up on a defunct grain-weighing license, nineteen months cold, the longest-dormant so far. "Account Twelve-Beta. Absorbs twenty-eight percent." She found the last one on the fourth foil, buried under a festival-tax exemption nobody had touched in two years. "Account Four-Sigma takes the rest. Thirty-three percent, not thirty, because the thresholds don't like round numbers."

"You want me to carry grain-license money."

"I want the shipment to stop existing as a number anyone can trace to a crate." She looked up. "Your five percent comes off the gross. Not the net. We settled that upstairs before the heist, and it hasn't changed."

"A man can ask."

"A man asked and was answered. Twice." She did the arithmetic anyway, out loud, because precision was the only thing in the room she still fully controlled. "Five percent of eleven thousand four hundred ninety pounds' equivalent value is five hundred seventy-four point five, not six hundred, and not 'call it six hundred for luck.'"

"Luck's cheap at twenty-five pounds."

"Luck is not a line item." But her stylus didn't press as hard writing his figure down, and across the vault Kusiqa made a sound that might have been a laugh if he'd had the energy to finish it.

He was on the floor beside the open crates, one bronze billet in each hand, the Chuyma-Knot's spiral scarring lit faint gold at his wrist where it fed into the metal. Two of the twenty-nine crates had come through the flume rough — the ones nearest where the thirtieth had sheared and dropped — and the billets inside had taken a resonance jolt that left them humming faintly, out of true, the way overworked metal hummed before it cracked instead of bent.

"How many unstable," she asked, not looking up from the foils.

"Forty-one billets reading hot. I've settled nineteen." He set one down, flexed his hand, picked up the next. "Each one's about ninety seconds of holding the lattice still while it remembers what shape it's supposed to be. Rush it and it splits. Don't rush it and the resonance keeps bleeding into the air the whole time I'm doing it."

"Bleeding into the air is a problem."

"Bleeding into the air is the only alternative to a billet that's worth nothing." He didn't look up either. "Ghosts need better bookkeeping than the living, Willka. At least the living only have one set of numbers lying to them."

She almost smiled. She caught it before it reached her mouth, because the disc clicked again, and this time the interval between pulses had shortened — not by much, a fraction of a second, but she had been counting them since they'd reached Berth Fourteen, and a fraction of a second mattered when the thing counting toward you was a search algorithm instead of a clock.

"Twenty-two minutes," she said. "That's my estimate before the grid's narrow enough that a physical sweep team gets dispatched to this quadrant, not just the disc."

"Then I've got twenty-two minutes to finish forty-one billets at ninety seconds apiece, which is sixty-one and a half minutes of actual work," Kusiqa said. "Someone want to tell the metal it's behind schedule?"

"Prioritize load-bearing stock. The ones going out first if we have to move again." She went back to the foils, because the arithmetic in front of her was the only arithmetic she could actually fix.

It was Kusiqa who stopped first.

He had the logbook open beside him on the vault floor — the decrypted phosphor-bronze logbook, Wayra's own hand in the margins, the one he'd pried out of a smashed valve in the Berth Nine dross two days ago and hadn't let out of reach since. He wasn't reading it. He was holding a billet an inch above the open page, and the resonance hum coming off the metal had changed pitch, gone thin and specific, like a struck glass finding the one note that matched something else in the room.

"Willka."

Something in his voice made her set the stylus down.

"This billet's carrying a tracer. Embedded, not surface — I didn't feel it until it started answering the book." He turned the logbook so she could see the page it had settled over: a column of frequency notations in Wayra's cramped hand, dated years before the man died, headed with a formula she recognized from nowhere official, because nothing official would have printed it. "Tell me if that number means what I think it means."

She crossed the vault and took the billet from him without asking, turning it under the lamp, reading the faint stamped code along its unmelted edge that she hadn't bothered to check because stamped codes were usually just mill marks. She set it against the open page.

The frequency notation in Wayra's hand and the resonance signature bleeding off the stolen Imperial billet were the same number to four decimal places.

She had cross-checked worse matches and trusted them less.

"This is a Vault Nine shipment," she said slowly, "carrying a tracer compound formulated from research the Empire banned, from a man they say died by accident." She looked up from the page, and for once the number in front of her didn't make her feel precise. It made her feel cold. "Kusiqa. They didn't bury his work. They're still using it."

He was quiet for exactly as long as it took him to close the logbook.

"Then we're not waiting for whatever the second lock decides to show us on its own time," he said, and set the next hot billet in his palm without looking at it, like his hands already knew the answer before the rest of him had finished catching up. "We're going to go find out how deep this runs. Tonight, if we have to."

Willka looked at the crossed-out line for Nine-Rho, then at the four accounts she still trusted, then at him. Yesterday afternoon she would have told him patience was cheaper than being wrong. She didn't say it now. She capped her stylus instead, and that was the whole of her answer.