Chapter 155: The Auditor

The door swung full open on its hinges without a sound, which, for a thing that size, felt wrong, and the vault’s own lights came on behind it, one at a time

Tikki was out of the pocket and through the gap before the door had finished moving.

[Booger-!]

He does that every single time. Customs inspection has been his professional responsibility since a chest on a table on day one, so by the time the rest of us had stepped over the threshold, he was already three cages down the left-hand wall with his tail straight up, checking each shelf against a manifest only he could see.

Gold, and more of it than I had ever seen in my either lives.

Steel shelving in barred cages down both walls, floor to shoulder height, every shelf stacked two deep with bars the size of a brick, dull yellow under the lights, every one of them stamped with the bank’s mark and a number, and a calico cat working his way along all of it one cage at a time, stopping at each to look, and moving on.

Nobody behind me said anything at all for about five seconds.

“Mea.”

He’d sat down at the last cage on the right and was looking back up the vault at me.

“All full?”

“Mea.”

[Every cage… Twelve and a half kilos a bar, if it’s the standard one… Eight hundred bars, or near enough… Ten tonnes of gold, two floors… and I’m the only guy alive who can carry it out in his pocket.]

I reached through the first cage, put my palm on the first bar, and it went.

-Ding!

{

Item: Gold Bullion Bar, 12.5 kg, Bank of Marlow stamp.

C.R.E.D.I.T. Purchase Offer: 856,250 Credits.

Contract fee collected.

Item retained by C.R.E.D.I.T.

Inventory: unchanged.

}

“Eight hundred and fifty-six thousand,” I read out loud, because they couldn’t see it and they deserved to hear it. “Per bar… Times eight hundred.”

Nora did it before I could. “Six hundred and eighty-five million.”

“Say it again…” Kara told her, very quietly.

“Six hundred and eighty-five million.”

It landed on four people who had watched me spend four million on a wall and wince at it, and I watched it land, and Leo actually put a hand on the cage to stay upright.

[…And that thief takes a tenth off the top before I’ve kept a single one.]

So I fed the thief its tenth.

Bar after bar under my palm, each one gone into an Inventory that showed nothing, each one with the same panel stamped over the top of it, retained, retained, retained, while Nia stood at my shoulder counting them out loud in the voice she uses for counting rounds. Tikki had come back up my arm into the pocket to watch each one vanish from six inches away.

“Forty-one… Forty-two…”

Around fifty he’d seen enough of it. A paw came out over my shoulder and pressed on the next bar on the shelf before my hand got there, and he looked at me with his ears halfway back.

“I know. I know it’s a thief.”

“Mea.”

“Nia’s already noting it.”

“It really is a thief,” Nia confirmed for him, cheerfully, around sixty.

The System did not disagree with either of them.

At eighty, the panel finally changed, and the eighty-first bar went into the Inventory and stayed there, and I could feel it sitting in the Inventory the same as I could feel two helicopters.

Then I did the thing we’d come for.

I sold that bar, and the next, and kept going, seventeen of them, and the eighteenth flashed red at fifteen point three six million, so I paid fifteen point three six million straight back to the System for the tenth and last time, and the panel came up with the number I’d been walking toward since touchdown.

-Ding!

{

Daily Selling Limit: 30,720,000 Credits.

Remaining today: 30,720,000 Credits.

}

“Thirty million.” I told the vault, the four of them, and the thief in my head. “That’s the line… I’m not going higher.”

And because raising it had wiped the day clean, I put thirty-five more bars through it on the spot, one after the other, until the warning flashed again.

-Ding!

{

Daily selling limit reached.

Balance: 65,553,750 Credits.

}

[Sixty-five and a half million in the account… Six hundred and sixty-eight bars still on the shelves… Thirty-five bars is a day, and I’d have Nia’s dose ready… All together, that’s four months of Nia’s doses, with change.]

I put my forehead against the cold bars of the cage for a second, because my legs wanted a moment and I wasn’t going to give them the floor. Then a cat’s head came out of the pocket and shoved itself under my jaw, hard, purring loud enough that Kara heard it from the door.

“Yeah,” I told him. “I know.”

When I straightened up, she was looking at me with her lips pressed, which is what she does instead of crying.

“It worked,” Leo told the cage in front of him, checking the words for cracks.

“It worked.” Kara, not looking away from me.

“I would like it noted,” Mr. Norton put in, his glasses going on first, the way they do before a verdict, “… that it worked.”

“Yea… it worked.” I let go of the cage. “Now… let’s stop repeating the same thing and get to work…”

The day’s limit was gone, so the other six hundred and sixty-eight had to come out of this hole in something convenient that wouldn’t take up an entire slot, and for that, I had trailers.

I went up, dropped a forty-footer at the top of the loading bay ramp two floors above us, came back down, and took the cage doors off their hinges one after another, the same way the gate had come off. And with that, the vault turned into the worst gym class of anybody’s life.

Nia and I did the lifting: ten bars to an armful, a hundred and twenty-five kilos a trip at a jog up two flights, while the other four rolled the bank’s own carts up the ramp with four bars apiece, their new bodies learning what half again means on stairs.

Kara didn’t say a word the whole time, and Nora said all of them for her. Leo stopped once on the landing, looked at the four bars on his cart, and laughed at himself, and kept going.

Tikki rode on top of Nia’s armful every trip, ten bars up and an empty Nia down, and when the first trailer was full he walked the length of it from the ramp to the back wall, stepping over gold, before he sat down at the far end and gave me the flat “Mea” that meant I was allowed to touch it now.

“He’s inspecting my work~” Nia leaned on the ramp, not even breathing hard.

“He’s inspecting everybody’s work… He’s the only one here with a job title.”

Two hours and two trailers later, six hundred and sixty-eight bars had come off the shelves, up the stairs, and into steel boxes that each went into the Inventory under my palm.

As for why I didn’t just place those bars into a slot, then carried then up before dumping them in the trailers?

I wanted Kara, Nora, Leo, and Norton to get the perfect feel for their newly enhanced bodies.

“Can we go now?” Nia leaned on the bay doors, arms crossed, gold dust on her sleeves. “I want a shower…”

“Yeah… we’re done here…”

She reached for the button on the wall.

And in the pocket behind my right shoulder, every hair on Tikki’s body went up at once.

His claws came through the jacket and poked into my shoulder, all four sets, ears flat to his skull, and out of his chest came a sound I’d heard from him maybe twice since the alarm clock, low and long and nothing like a hiss, the one he keeps for things that aren’t shamblers.

“Nia, wait-“

She’d already hit it, and the loading bay doors went up on daylight and the street.

And standing in the middle of the exit, three meters outside the doors, was seven feet of black.

Black from the ground up, every inch of it, with the shine of metal and the shape of a man stretched too tall, and set into where a face should have been were just two eyes, and the eyes were purple.

One look at it, and every hair on my body stood on end.

It took one step toward us. And that step rang on the concrete like a boot with iron in it.

-Ding!

{

Ghostbird: status.

Contacts no longer responding to acoustic lure.

Car park emptying.

Contacts converging on Host’s position from all approaches.

Estimated Infected count: 80,000+.