I'd handed the collection over at the Garrison, got a look from Tommy I couldn't read, and left before anybody decided to discuss James.
I got back to the house past ten and went straight up, because the kitchen light was on and I didn't want to find out who was under it.
I sat on the bed in the dark and waited for the guilt.
I knew what it was supposed to feel like. I'd felt it before, in my old life, over things that were nothing — a lie to a friend, a girl I'd stopped calling. It came in the stomach first, and then it sat in the chest, and it kept you awake. I'd cut a man's face open tonight for money he'd stolen to buy medicine for his son, and I'd done it in front of twenty people because I wanted them to talk about it, and I sat on the edge of the bed with my hands on my knees and waited for the stomach to start.
It didn't.
What came instead was the yard again. Not the blood — the second before it. James on the ground, and the quiet, and Scudboat stopping because I'd put my hand out, and the razor open in my fingers, and every face in that yard turned toward mine and waiting to see what I'd do.
Nobody had ever waited to see what I'd do before. Not in this life, and not in the other.
I sat with that until I was sure of it, and then I said, out loud and quietly, "Right," because there was no point lying to myself in the dark.
I wasn't sorry. I wanted to do it again.
My right hand had gone stiff on the walk home, and now under the lamp it was a mess. Two knuckles split and the split gone dark. The third swollen up to twice its size, so the fingers on either side of it wouldn't close properly. I could make a fist, just, and it hurt to do it, and I could feel something moving in there that shouldn't move.
I poured water from the jug into the basin and put the hand in it and swore.
I'd have to keep it in my pocket tomorrow. That was the first practical thought I'd had since the yard and it landed like a bill. Tommy would look at the hand. Polly would look at the hand. Whatever story had reached the Garrison tonight, the hand would confirm it tomorrow morning, and I'd better have decided by then what I wanted the story to be.
I took it out of the basin and dried it on the sheet and reached into my jacket for the day's money, to count it before I slept.
There was more in the pocket than I'd put there.
I knew it before I'd got my fingers round it — the pocket was wrong, fatter, the lining pulled tight. I brought it out and set it on the blanket under the lamp and looked at it for a while without touching it.
A wad of Treasury notes, banded with a strip of brown paper. Ones, mostly, and some ten-shilling notes, and the whole thing had the soft, handled feel of money that had been in circulation for years.
I counted it twice, because of the hand.
One hundred pounds exactly.
It hadn't been there when I'd handed Tommy the collection. I'd taken the takings out of that pocket at the Garrison an hour ago, in front of him, and there'd been nothing else in it, and now there was a year's wages in used notes sitting on a dead man's bed in a room where no one had been.
I turned the wad over. Ordinary. Serial numbers. A grocer's pencil mark on one of them where someone had totted up a bill. I could have taken any note off it and spent it in the Garrison tomorrow and nobody on God's earth could have told it from money.
Where does it come from, I thought, and the thing behind my eyes did not answer, and I understood that it wasn't going to.
I put ninety of it under the loose board by the washstand, and ten in the coat, and I sat back down and thought: that's a hundred and three pounds. And I can't explain a hundred of it. And I live in a house where a woman counts the coal.
That was a problem for another day. I made myself put it there and leave it.
Because there was something else in the corner of my sight now, and it had been there since the yard, and I'd been not looking at it the way you don't look at a drink you've decided to have.
5 Perk Points.
The status came when I thought about it. I didn't need the whole thing. Just the five numbers at the bottom.
Strength: 10Stamina: 8Vitality: 10Agility: 7Luck: 4
I looked at Luck for a moment and thought about putting one there, just to see. Then I thought about what a point of luck would have done for me in the yard tonight — nothing I could name, nothing I could measure, nothing I could feel in the morning — and I left it.
Stamina was the one. Stamina was the reason the stairs came up at me and the reason the round had left me hollow by four and the reason this body couldn't be trusted past a certain hour. Two there. Agility next. Seven was bad enough that I could feel it every time I moved, and I'd need to move quicker than that if I meant to keep cutting people. Two there. And one on strength, because the hand had told me tonight exactly what ten was worth against a cheekbone.
I did it with my attention, the way I'd opened the tabs. The numbers moved.
Strength: 11Stamina: 10Vitality: 10Agility: 9Luck: 4
Nothing happened.
I sat there feeling exactly the same and thinking, well, that's that then, it's just a number, and I was halfway to being disappointed when the heat started.
It began in the back, low, either side of the spine, and it wasn't pain. It was the feeling of having been running for an hour — the deep muscle heat that comes when you've asked more from a body than it wants to give — except I'd been sitting on a bed. It spread up between the shoulder blades and down into the legs, and my heart picked up to meet it, and then I was sweating through the shirt and I'd only been sitting there.
And then the hunger.
I've been hungry. I'd skipped meals in my old life to make rent. This wasn't that. This was a hole that opened in the middle of me like a hand closing, and my mouth filled up with spit and my hands started to shake — the bad hand and the good one — and I understood in the space of a second that if there'd been food on that bed I'd have eaten it off the blanket like a dog.
Metabolic strain detected.Eat. Rest.
It hadn't warned me before. It hadn't said this will cost you. It had let me spend the points and then told me the price after, the way a landlord tells you about the damp.
I got downstairs somehow with the shakes going and my shirt stuck to me and the whole staircase swimming to the left. The kitchen light was out now. I didn't light one. I went to the bread crock by feel and took the end of a loaf out and ate it standing up in the dark with my back to the range, and it went down like nothing, like I'd eaten air, and I went back for the rest.
There was dripping in a bowl. I ate that with my fingers.
Half a cold pudding under a cloth. I ate that.
I ate until the bread was gone and the pudding was gone and I'd found cheese I hadn't been looking for and eaten that too, and I was still hungry, but it had gone from a hand closing to something I could stand up inside. I drank water from the jug until my stomach hurt.
Then I stood in Polly Gray's kitchen with grease on my fingers and looked at the empty crock and thought: she is going to notice this in the morning, and there is no lie in the world that covers a man eating a day's bread at midnight.
Another thing to explain. The hand, the story from the yard, the bread. The hundred pounds under the board.
I went back up. The heat had gone to a low burn and the shaking had stopped. I lay down in my clothes and put the bad hand outside the blanket where it wouldn't press on anything, and I was asleep before I'd finished thinking the next thought, which was this:
It wasn't giving me anything. It was letting me buy things, and it was taking the price out of the body, and it hadn't told me what happened to a man who kept buying.