Chapter 2: The Scoreboard
I stood in the passage with my shoulder against the bricks and waited for it to go away.
It didn't go away.
I shut my eyes. The words stayed. Not printed on the inside of my eyelids the way an afterimage stays — they were just there, in the same place they'd been, as though my eyes had nothing to do with them.
MAFIA SYSTEM ACTIVATED
I opened them again. Down the passage, in the front room, Arthur was saying something and John was laughing at it.
I went back up the stairs before either of them came out and found me holding the wall.
In the room I sat on the edge of the bed with my hands on my knees and tested it, the way you'd test a tooth.
I moved my head. The words came with me. Not sliding across the wall like a projection — anchored somewhere behind my eyes, at a distance my eyes couldn't measure. I looked at the window, then at the floor, then at the back of my own hand. Same place every time.
I said, "Hello?"
Nothing.
I felt stupid, which under the circumstances was almost a relief.
Then the message faded — no flicker, no fanfare, it simply stopped being there — and four words took its place, stacked small and pale in the corner of my vision. STATUS. TASKS. SHOP. And beneath those, two more that weren't words at all, just brackets with nothing inside them.
The Shop was greyed. I couldn't have said how I knew that. I looked at it and understood not yet the way you understand a locked door by the handle.
TASKS wasn't greyed.
I thought about it, and it opened.
ACTIVE TASKObjective: Earn 50 Reputation.Progress: 15 / 50Reward: £100. 5 Perk Points.Time limit: none.
I read the reward line four times.
A hundred pounds.
I didn't know 1919 the way a historian knows it, but I'd been in this body long enough to have looked at the wallpaper, and I had another man's sense of money sitting in my head whether I wanted it or not. A factory man might take home two pounds and change in a week and think himself lucky to have the work. A hundred pounds was a year of a life. It was more than a year — it was a year with nothing taken out of it for rent or coal or beer, which meant it was three or four years of what a man actually kept.
For that, I'd do a great deal.
And that was the first thing about it I didn't like, and I noticed I didn't like it and then went straight past it anyway, because I was twenty-something years old in a body I hadn't earned in a city that was going to kill me, and something had just offered me a year of my life for a number I didn't understand.
Perk points, I thought. What are those.
Perk Points may be applied to attributes.
That was all. It didn't offer to elaborate and I got the distinct sense that asking again would produce the same sentence.
Fine.
STATUS, then.
JACK SHELBYAffiliation: Shelby FamilyRank: AssociateTerritory: NoneStatus: Active
Influence: 12Fear: 8Reputation: 15
Cash: £3
Strength: 10Stamina: 8Vitality: 10Agility: 7Luck: 4
I sat with that for a while.
Associate.
I'd been in this house one morning and I already knew what that word was doing. Arthur was a Shelby. John was a Shelby. Tommy was the reason the word meant anything. And I had the same surname, the same blood, a place at the table, and the system had looked at all of it and filed me under associate, which is what you call a man who is near a thing without being part of it.
Something that had never met these people had assessed my position in this family in about four seconds and come back with replaceable.
I'd have argued if I'd had anything to argue with.
Territory: None.
That one I looked at longer than it deserved. I hadn't been thinking about territory. I'd been thinking about not being found out. But there it was on the list, sitting between rank and status like it was a normal thing for a man to have, and I could feel the shape of the implication: other people had some. It was a category. It was on the form.
Then the cash.
I went through the trousers hanging on the chair and found what was in them. Two Treasury notes, soft as cloth from being carried. Two ten-shilling notes folded together in the watch pocket.
Three pounds.
Not three pounds and something. Three pounds, to the penny, exactly what the thing behind my eyes had said before I'd put my hand in the pocket.
I sat with that for a second and then decided not to sit with it.
It was more than nothing. It was a week's wages and change, and there were men on this street who'd have thought me flush. But I sat there with it in my palm and did the only sum that mattered: I could not leave. I couldn't take a room, I couldn't take a train, I couldn't disappear into a city I didn't know with three pounds and a face that half of Small Heath recognised. Whatever I was going to do here, I was going to have to do it from inside this house, under these people, with their money.
I put the notes back in the trousers.
Then the body.
Strength ten. Vitality ten. Ten looked like the baseline — what a man probably was if you picked him off a street at random and measured him. Nothing had told me that. It was just where the number sat. So I was middling in the two things a Shelby likely needed most.
Stamina eight. Agility seven.
That stung more than it should have. I'd been a runner, before. Not a good one, but I'd done a half marathon in a bad time and been pleased with myself, and now I was in a body that had spent years being shelled and the months since being drowned in whisky, and it showed on the form.
I stood up to see how it felt. The room tilted about six inches to the left and came back. Head injury, still there, from last night, from a fall I hadn't taken.
Then, last:
Luck: 4.
"Right," I said out loud.
I looked at it a while longer in case it went up.
It did not go up.
Here's what I kept coming back to.
It wasn't measuring whether I was a good man. It was measuring strength, stamina, rank, territory, influence, fear and reputation. Five of those were about where I stood among criminals.
It hadn't turned up to make me healthy. It had turned up with a form already printed, and it had put me at the bottom of one and shown me the ladder.
I should have found that more frightening than I did.
What I actually felt, sitting on a dead man's bed with a cracked head, was the first thing that had felt good since the headlights.
Because reputation was a number now. And numbers move.
I went at the problem the way you go at any problem with a target on it.
Fifteen to fifty. Thirty-five to find.
And I had, in my head, whether I wanted it or not, a working knowledge of how the Shelby family actually made its money — not the version from the television, the version from the inside. Books taken on horses in the yard behind the Garrison and in half a dozen pubs besides. Money out on the street at interest that would have got you arrested in my century. Men who paid every Friday to have nothing happen to their shop.
And the collections. That was the part that came clearest, and it came in the hands again — a doorway, a man in it, and the specific feeling of standing at a threshold with your weight already on the front foot.
The original Jack had done that work for years. Then he'd stopped doing it well, and then he'd mostly stopped doing it, and that was why Arthur talked to me like I was funny and John talked to me like I was slow.
So the work existed. The work was sitting there. Nobody would question me for doing it, because I'd done it before.
But quiet collections probably weren't going to move a number like that in any hurry. Reputation had to be other people's opinion of me, near enough, and people don't form opinions about what they don't see. That was a guess. It was the only guess I had.
And if it was right, the fast way and the safe way weren't the same way, and the system had put the fast one on the form.
I understood that perfectly well.
And then I stood up and put my jacket on anyway, because there was no version of the next six months where I stayed in this room, and the difference between a man who has three pounds and a man who has a hundred is the difference between hiding and choosing.
The stairs came up at me a bit on the way down. I took them slow with a hand on the rail.
Arthur was still in the front room with the bottle. He looked up.
"Thought you were going for air."
"Changed my mind." My own voice, still wrong, still lower than it should be. "Is there work on today?"
He put the glass down.
"There's always work, Jacky boy."
"Then I'll take some."