Chương 50: Chapter 49: Priority Zero

"A lot," I said. Bill leaned back, mug in one hand.

"That's good. Because I think we're going to need a bigger budget. Okay," he said.

"Then let's do the boring thing first." He looked around the kitchen, found one of my spiral notebook on the shelf by the door — the one I used for the circles — he tore out a blank page, and grabbed the pen that I had left inside of the notebook's spiral. And he smoothed the paper flat on the table.

"Welcome to my office," he said.

"Don't touch anything." Ella wasn't done with breakfast yet. She hadn't looked up, but I could tell she was listening. Her shoulders had that particular set they got when she was filing something away for later instead of interrupting.

"Item one," Bill said, scrawling it at the top of the page.

"If we don't act now you'll soon be dead."

"I'm not dying," I said.

"Legally speaking," Bill said, pen moving. He had his lawyer face on now — not the face he used on me, but the one from hearings, calm and unhurried and a little bored.

"On paper you disappeared Arcene. You know what this mean right? Frozen account, frozen cards, utilities piling up charges, and a file at the police station that will get bigger each passing day."

"You're a missing person who's about to be presumed dead, if the clock keeps running. Which is why it's the the first thing we need to fix." He turned the paper so I could see. Item one, underlined.

"We need you legally alive. That means you have to resurface. On Earth. In person. With a story."

"What story?"

"That's the problem," Bill said.

"There is no good story.

'I was transported to another world' gets you a psych hold, not a bank account.

'I left voluntarily' gets you liabilities.

'I was kidnapped' gets you a three-year court case and reporters. Every legal way back is slow or expensive or both." He let that sit. Then he tapped the next line. Ella set a plate down in front of me. She was quiet, but her hand brushed my shoulder on the way by, once, light, and she kept moving toward the table with her own plate.

"So we need money," I said.

"Which brings us to—""Your gold," Bill finished.

"That's the thing that actually solves half of this. Not because it's romantic treasure. Because it's liquid. You can't buy a lawyer with frozen fish, and you can't pay a fine with vegetables. Gold is the only asset you've got that crosses over into our world and means something."

"It doesn't cross clean, though," I said.

"No," Bill agreed.

"It doesn't cross clean at all." He wrote it again, this time in letters. MONEY, and next to it, a question mark. He wrote it while Ella was still quiet.

"MONEY," she said, from the table. We both looked at her.

"Gold," she said, it it carefully in English, not Hadran. That was a first.

"Is money. Everywhere." Her eyes went to the window for a second, then back.

"It was the thing my hum... Country? Used. Gold is money. Move it... Hum..." She paused.

"There." Bill stared at her. Then he nodded, slowly, like she'd just saved him ten minutes of explanation.

"She's right," he said.

"But there's a difference between having gold and having cash. Here's the thing neither of you has had to think about yet, and it's about to become our whole life." He turned the paper toward himself again, pen moving as he talked without looking up.

"Let's say we carry a brick of the stuff out of here. It has no paperwork. No assay mark. No provenance. It's not stolen, technically — but it's not clean, either. If I walk into a bank with it, I don't get money. I get a lot of polite questions, and then I get the kind of less-polite questions that come with badges and a warrant."

"So we can't use a bank."

"Right," Bill said.

"We use a person. And here's the ugly part, Arcene — the person who will take it is not a person we would ever invite to dinner. That's not how it works anymore." I frowned.

"Anymore."

"Yeah. The old days — you walk into a dealer, they weigh it, they hand you cash, done. Not now. Everything over a few grand leaves a paper trail, every transaction flags, every cash deposit over a certain amount gets reported. The legal way to convert unknown-source gold is slow and expensive and it leaves statements in four languages with your name on them." He looked at me.

"You're a missing person. Your name showing up on a bullion transaction is the exact opposite of not doing anything suspicious and laying low. Besides is the gold in question even eighteen, twenty-three or twenty-four carats?" Ella was watching him with interest, one hand flat on the table, chin resting on the heel of the other.

"That's why we need the gray market," Bill continued. Not a question.

"I need a man who already has the infrastructure. A man who buys, refine and sells enough of this stuff, quietly, that one more brick doesn't register as an event. Not a fence off a street corner — someone at scale."

"Do you know happen to know one?" I asked. Bill didn't answer right away. He took a sip of cold coffee, made a face, set it down." Fortunately, I happen to know a guy yes," he said.

"I got him off once. It was — actually, it's a long and not very flattering story. All you need to know is that he owe me, and he's the kind of man who takes his debts seriously." He looked at me.

"His name is Léon Vasseur." I let the name settle. Léon Vasseur. I know Bill. And it sounds like that name come out of an old case file he'd never quite closed. I can see it on his face. He took a brief pause then he came back on the main topic.

"How much gold are we actually talking about?" Bill asked.

"Because you said 'a lot,' and 'a lot' is an impression, not a number."

"The throne room has some," I said.

"The throne itself, the armrests, the moldings. But Ella says most of it's in a vault, under the castle."

"So you haven't seen all of it?" Bill said.

"Well, as I told you yesterday, we found the gate right after repairing the castle, and either way, I never had a reason to." Ensure your favorite authors get the support they deserve. Read this novel on the original website. He considered that, then looked at Ella.

"The vault," Ella said.

"Is under the castle. Where the valuable things are kept." She said it in Hadran this time and then she looked at me clearly expecting me to help her to translate in English.

"It held the precious metals among other things." Bill wrote it down. VAULT. Three strokes, all business.

"Then step one of the money part is: we go count what's in it. I can't call business man and say 'I have a lot of gold' — I need a number, and I need it to be real."

"Now the boring part of the boring part," Bill said.

"Money doesn't solve everything by itself. You need people. And people are the part that actually scares me, because people talk." He started a new heading on the page. PEOPLE. I frowned at the paper.

"Sorry bill but I don't follow, can you explain? People for what exactly? Is it to move the gold?"

"Not just that Arcene, everything," Bill said, and the casualness dropped out of his voice the way it always did when he flipped over into the work register.

"Think it through, Arcene. What do you actually lack here? To make this place — not just survive, but stand on its own. I can see it on your face and I know it from the fact that you led me here instead of just crashing at my place. You have no plan to move back right? That's why we need to think about people." He waited. I thought about it for a while. Bill was right, Ella could probably have finished the gate and we could have gone to the other side together. But was there really anything waiting there for me?

I hadn't really taken the time to think about it before. When we found the gate, I just did what felt right on the moment, and I was only now realising, almost two days down the line, that I was acting irrationally. Yes, Bill was right, I had no intention of going back. But doing everything alone with Ella on this side is not sustainable.

"Food," I said.

"Real food. Vegetables, grains. Ella can grow a little, but one garden isn't a field. I'd need farmers. People who know soil." Bill wrote. FARMERS.

"Internet also," I said.

"As you've seen it works only one way, I think it because of the delay — " I groped for the word.

"The time. The mismatch. Someone who actually understands how the internet works would have to tell us. I'm not an engineer." Bill wrote. NETWORK. Under it, in smaller letters: time-ratio.

"And if we let people come in," I through about it a second time "Security," I finally said.

"At the gate." Bill's pen kept moving. SECURITY.

"The gate is a border," I said.

"Right now it's undefended. But if we're going to move people through it — money, supplies, other people — we need someone watching it who isn't asleep or forty kilometres away. A small team. People we'd trust."

"People we'd trust with our lives," Bill corrected. He wrote that down beside the word, a slow underline.

"That's the right standard. Because anyone who crosses learns this place exists. The wrong person isn't an inconvenience. It's a disaster." He looked at me.

"So every name on this list has to be vetted to the bone before they ever see the inside of that circle. That's non-negotiable." I nodded. He was right, and something about the way he said it — casual, but with that lawyer's finality — made it land harder.

"Which brings me to the last one," he said.

"Comunication." He leaned back.

"Ella. Arcene. You two speak Hadran between you, right? That weird language you and your mom—" he stopped himself, glanced at Ella, then back at me.

"Right. So the island has two languages you said. Hadran, and the other one. The local script. People need to be able to communicate properly, either Ella abandon Hadran completely or we find people that may be able to speak and read it."

"So two kinds of translator," Bill said.

"Hadran, Hadran exists on Earth." He tapped the pen against the table once.

"Your mom spoke it. You're the living proof that other people like her can exist out there. Which means somewhere on Earth there are most likely more people who know it — decedents of the people that came from here I suppose." He wrote: HADRAN. Then below it, in smaller letters: CLING?

"Is that what the local one's called?" he asked. Ella nodded. Bill wrote it down without comment.

"Arcene, your mom," Bill said, quieter now.

"Where is she from?" A question.

"I mean, she's French, she have a valid ID and a birth certificate. Not even the cops questioned that." I said.

"I don't know why she knew Hadran Bill." While I was speaking Ella's hand had gone still on the table. She'd been so quiet through the people part that I'd almost let myself forget she was there, but she wasn't quiet now because she had nothing to say. She was quiet the way she got in the castle, holding very still while something large moved through her.

"My people," she said, in English. Then in Hadran, something longer, that Bill wouldn't catch but I did — a sentence about the ones who left this land, and a word I didn't know, that might have meant refugees or might have meant survivors. Bill looked at me.

"She's thinking about why everyone disappeared" I said.

"We should also look for clues about this I suppose, right?" Bill asked her. She met his eyes.

"I don't know what happened to them," she said.

"If some of them found the gate and crossed before the end, some of them might still be on your side. Living whole human lives." The word that came wasn't hope. It was just — wanting. Ella seemed to want to believe that her people was still alive on the other side, and until her next words I couldn't help but think that even if the time was slower on the other side more than two hundred thousand years had passed.

"I want them back," she said. The house was very quiet. Even the floorboards had stopped settling. Bill looked at the paper in front of him, then wrote one more word under the heading, in the same unhurried hand, as if it belonged with FARMERS and NETWORK and SECURITY. PEOPLE. I looked at the page. Four headings now, plus people we couldn't put a name to. It looked like a shopping list, which was somehow worse — a shopping list for restarting a civilization.

"None of this works without one thing," I said "The gate,""Every single thing on that list crosses through it. Money goes out, people come in and right now it takes one mage standing with her hand on a panel the entire time."

"Ella," Bill said. I shook my head.

"The panel's unfinished. Whoever built it stopped halfway. It needs an operator holding the circuit closed. Last time, when I got through, she had to stand there for hours. You came through, she stood there for hours again. Even if she refuse to admit it, every time costs her, she has to be standing still in a room by herself." I looked at Ella, then back at him.

"So before we hire a farmer or move one coin, somebody finishes that panel. If it can be finished." Bill looked at Ella.

"I'll work on this" she said.

"There isn't much to do, it's a couple days worth of work at the most. Only the control face is rough."

"Give me time with it and I will finish it." I likely had an idea of what she had said by the way Ella said it.

"Okay," he said.

"So that's priority zero. The door, before the money, before the people." He wrote it at the very top of the page, above the other four headings, and underlined it twice. THE DOOR. Below it, in the margin, he wrote: everything else waits for this. We went back to our usual activities for until around noon after that. Taking care of the crops and cooking for the midday meal mostly, Fish again of course. Bill had stopped making faces at it by now, which I counted as progress, either for him or for the fish.

"The vault," he said around a mouthful, pointing the fork at me.

"I want to see it before I go back."

"It's a castle ride," I said.

"it's on the other side of the mountain."

"How long we talking." I thought about it.

"Leaving after we eat, we'd be there by the time the light goes long and gold." Bill chewed, swallowed, looked at Ella.

"You up for a field trip?" Ella had already stood up and was at the sink, rinsing her plate. She didn't turn around.

"I was planning to go back today eitherway." she said. Something in her voice said it was more than that, but she didn't offer more, and Bill knew not to push, and so did I. We left Yato asleep on the windowsill with Susanoo snoring in a patch of sun on the rug. Yato opened one golden eye as we passed, judged the three of us, and went back to sleep. The city came into view as we crested the rise. Bill let out a long breath.

"Man," he said, and for once there was no joke waiting behind it. We rolled down into the city, and I watched him watch it the way I had the first time, except he didn't have the scale to compare it against. He'd never seen it broken. To him the streets were just whole, the spires just tall. Bill was completely breathless as we traverssed and soon came the moment to leave the carriage in the stable — in the same bay we had taken it from. The streets were clean.

A sweeper worked at the far end of one cross-street, slow and faithful, and paused only to let the three of us pass. Bill watched it go with the expression of a man whose every reference point had been replaced while he wasn't looking.

"Okay," he said softly.

"Okay." We went in through the way Ella led, down the broad stair into the keep, past the great floor-circle in the foundations and down a further stair I hadn't taken before. The vault door was there. Not a locked door. A sealed one. It was made of metal, not iron but heavier, darker, and set flush into the living rock of the mountain, with mana channels so dense across its face they read as solid text. No handle. No keyhole. Ella stopped in front of it. For a long moment she only looked at it.

Then she laid her hand on the surface and the mana channels woke. Slowly, in bands, the light bled out from her palm and ran across the door in every direction, and something deep in the mechanism took hold with a click I felt all the way through my body, and the door opened.