Chapter 30 The Student

The train ride to the city took six hours, the kind of ride that gives a man time to think, or to not think, depending on what he is riding toward. David spent most of it looking out the window at the passing landscape, fields giving way to suburbs, suburbs giving way to the dense clutter of the city, the mortal world unfolding the way a ledger unfolds, from the simple to the complex. He read a chapter of a novel, a mystery about a stolen painting, nothing supernatural, and it was refreshing to read about crimes that could be solved with fingerprints and motive instead of contract clauses and karmic debt, the kind of crime a man could close with a witness instead of a war. At the station, a young man was waiting for him on the platform. Tall, thin, wearing a suit that was slightly too large in the shoulders and slightly too short in the sleeves, the kind of suit a student buys for an interview he cannot afford. He held a sign that read Lin in careful block letters, the way a junior writes a name he respects. "Mr. Lin? I'm Thomas. The Committee sent me to meet you." They shook hands. Thomas's palm was damp, the palm of a man who is both nervous and eager, and his eyes were bright with a mixture of fear and excitement that David recognized immediately, because he had seen it in the mirror the day the demon walked into Whitford. "You're not supernatural," David said. It was not a question, the way most things about a person are not, once you have read their ledger. "No. I'm an intern. Business administration. Second year." "Then why are you meeting me? Interns don't usually greet retired auditors. They fetch coffee and file the things no one wants to read." Thomas hesitated. He looked down at his shoes, the scuffed ones of a student, then back up, the way a man looks down when he is about to say something true. "Because I asked to. I read your book. Ledgers of Light. I read it twelve times. I practically memorized it." David looked at him. The eagerness in Thomas's eyes was familiar, the echo of his own, fifteen years ago, when he first saw the glowing numbers in the demon's contract. The same hunger to understand something that no one else could see, the hunger that had built his whole second life. "Why twelve times?" "Because I see them too. The numbers. The ledgers. I thought I was going crazy until I read your book. I thought I was the only one, the only human who saw the glow behind the words. Your book told me I wasn't. It told me what it was, even if it didn't tell me what to do with it." David stopped walking. The crowd of commuters flowed around them, the way a river flows around a stone, and he stood still in the current, because this was the thing he had not expected, the thing the letter had not mentioned. "You see glowing ledgers?" "Not full ledgers. Fragments. Flickers. When people sign things. When they make promises. I see the glow behind the words, like heat rising from pavement on a hot day. I see the structure of the binding, the thread that ties a promise to a price. I don't know what it means. I don't know how to read it the way you do. But I see it." David was quiet for a long moment. He studied Thomas's face, the young man's sincerity, the particular honesty of a person who has decided to tell the truth even when the truth makes him sound mad. The young man was telling the truth. Or at least, he believed he was telling the truth, which for an accountant is close enough to start with. "Show me," David said. Thomas pulled out a pen. He wrote a simple IOU on a napkin from his pocket, the kind of napkin a commuter carries, the kind with a logo for a coffee chain. I owe Thomas Chen one dollar. Signed, Thomas Chen. He handed it to David, and David looked at it, the words ordinary, written in cheap ballpoint ink. But behind them, faint and flickering, almost invisible in the station's fluorescent light, was a structure. A binding. Incomplete, fragile, but real, a tiny thread of obligation, glowing pale blue, the color of a promise not yet kept. Thomas had made a debt and seen it form, the way David had seen the woman's soul fragments glow, only Thomas had no training to read what he had made. "You're not crazy," David said. Thomas exhaled. His shoulders dropped, the release of a man who had carried a secret to a stranger and been told it was real. "Thank God." "Don't thank God yet. This ability will cost you. It already has. You just don't know it yet. The gray at my temples started at thirty-five. My marriage ended. My sleep was troubled for twenty years. The karmic debt accumulated in my body like sediment in a pipe. The gift is not free, Thomas. It is the most expensive thing you will ever own." They walked to the car, a modest sedan with Committee plates, the kind of car that says official without saying important. David thought about his own gray temples, which had started at thirty-five, the way he had told Thomas. His broken marriage, the wife who had taken the photograph. His years of lost sleep, the dreams of the shadowy figure and the book. The karmic debt that had accumulated in his body like sediment, the price of every contract he had broken for the people who came to his door. "Teach me," Thomas said as he started the engine, the way a student asks, with the hunger David remembered. "Please. I don't know what I'm seeing. I don't know what it means. I don't know how to control it. I only know that I see it, and that no one but you has ever told me it's real." David looked out the window at the city he had left behind, the buildings where he had spent twenty years reading contracts, breaking bindings, balancing the books of the supernatural world. The city that had taken his health and his marriage and given him a purpose, the way all the great works take and give. "We'll see," David replied. "First, I have work to do. Then we'll talk about teaching. A man who cannot close his own audit should not open another's. Let me read the Deep Vault's book. Then we'll see if you have the stomach for the work, and if I have the years left to teach it."