Chapter 8: Sticker Shoc

(True-but-unseen account)

If you are searching for a story about a boy who window-shops responsibly, with a working budget, reasonable expectations, and decent negotiating skills, close this book now. Dear Reader, Arthur Specter had none of those things, and the Gift Administration office was about to make that extremely public.

The building itself looked like a bank that had given up on being taken seriously. Marble floor, velvet rope, and a chandelier dripping something that wasn’t quite light. Behind the counter sat a woman in a cardigan, stamping a form, who looked up, saw Voss, and went very still in the specific way people go still when someone above their pay grade wanders somewhere they shouldn’t.

"Headmaster." She stood so fast her chair complained about it. "You don’t... I mean. This is a surprise."

"Just showing a new cadet around," Voss said, easy as anything.

She looked at Arthur the way you’d look at a smudge on an otherwise clean window. Politely, and with zero recognition. No house colors. No file open on her desk. Just a kid.

Behind her, a board listed the day’s inventory in careful gold lettering:

COLD COLA — 10

PIZZA — 50

INSPIRATION PILL — 100

ESSENCE CHAIR — 500

CAR — 1,000

DRAGON — 2,000

MAGIC CASTLE — 5,000

SPACESHIP — 10,000

GOLDEN TICKET — 15,000

Arthur scanned it twice, then checked the number sitting quietly in the corner of his vision.

COINS: 0

The System had been kind enough to add a coin tracker to his view.

He couldn’t afford the cola. He couldn’t afford air. It didn’t bother him much. He was used to being poor. His father never seemed able to keep a job, and his mother supported them on a teacher’s salary. He never blamed his parents for it; they worked hard, and that was all he’d ever needed from them to accept the fact that they didn’t have money. They did have a rich uncle. Well, not really an uncle. He was their childhood friend, but everyone called him uncle anyway. They refused to take charity from him regardless; his uncle had pretty much had to force them to accept anything at all. He was a sneaky uncle, but in a good way. Always in his corner, always telling him how much potential he had.

"Dragon," he said anyway, because hope is a renewable resource in twelve-year-olds. "Is there a discount?"

The woman blinked at him like he’d personally insulted her. "Do I look—" She caught herself, correcting course after a nervous glance at Voss. "...That one doesn’t have a discount."

"What do you mean it doesn’t have a discount? Everything has one. I’m poor. That’s how poor people live. You buy things right before they rot away, and you eat them the same day."

"I mean there’s no discount next to it. There’s never been a discount next to it." She looked, faintly, like someone who’d had this exact conversation before and hated it every time.

Voss frowned. Actually frowned, the real kind, not the diplomatic one. "We don’t function like that," he admitted, which Arthur decided was somehow worse than a large number would’ve been. A large number was a wall. No discount was a locked door nobody in the building had a key to.

No discount was set, and none would show...

some wants just aren’t yours to know.

"You’re not the first one to ask for something unreasonable," the woman offered, mostly to fill the silence Arthur left behind, and also because Voss was standing right there, and this was the perfect chance to complain about her job without technically complaining about her job. "There’s a girl who comes in. Hadjer. Similar question. Same face you’re making right now."

Arthur filed that. Someone else stupid enough to want the impossible pet. Good to know he wasn’t alone in his own novel.

Voss, meanwhile, had gone quiet in a different way. Watching Arthur with the specific squint of a man doing long division on a problem he wasn’t sure had a clean answer. Twenty minutes ago this kid had accused him of running a leash-with-a-bow-on-it recruitment scheme. Now he was heartbroken over a price tag.

Either he really is just twelve, Voss thought, or he’s better at this than I am. He didn’t love not knowing which.

"I have somewhere to be," he said instead, which was true the way most convenient exits are true. "I’ll leave you in good hands."

"That’s not really—" the woman started.

"I appreciate it," Voss said, already turning, already gone.

She didn’t finish the sentence. There wasn’t anyone left to finish it to.

She smiled at Arthur anyway. A thin, professional smile, the kind that costs nothing and means less, and decided, privately, to get this over with as fast as possible.

"Coins come from Academy Quests," she said. "Not from standing here wishing. Do you have a team?"

"Working on it," Arthur said, which was generous phrasing for one healer and a headmaster’s guilt.

"There’s a girl with the same problem." She was already walking, already done with him in every way that mattered. "Hadjer. Same corner, most days. I’ll take you."

The corner turned out to be a courtyard bench under a tree that didn’t get much sun, which felt, Arthur thought, like the kind of detail a novel would use on purpose.

A girl sat there with her knees pulled up, dark hair loose over her shoulders, staring at nothing with the specific stillness of someone who’d stopped expecting company. The gift administrator dropped him off with a nod that somehow communicated good luck, not my problem anymore and left without another word.

Arthur approached. Hadjer looked up.

[WARNING: STATUS DETECTED — POISONED.]

[SOURCE: UNKNOWN TALENT. EFFECT: MINOR. NON-LETHAL.]

Oh, come on—

His whole body did the sensible thing and tried to step back. This was, historically, exactly the kind of notification a smart person listened to. So this is why she sits alone, he thought, already halfway into a theory about a passive nobody had warned him about.

He didn’t step back.

He couldn’t, really, on account of the fact that she’d looked up at him with the kind of face that made "poisoned" feel like a technicality worth ignoring, and Arthur, twelve, dead once, currently under a formal threat assessment from a man who dreamed the future, discovered, with the sudden clarity of a new stat unlocking, that he apparently had a type.

Some poisons come dressed as a girl gone still...

sweetest doses are the hardest to kill.

TO BE CONTINUED...