I was at Counter 3.
The walls were missing again. The waiting chairs ran out in their neat rows into a pale gold sky with no sun in it. The queue display above my head was dark.
And in the customer's chair, with their crumpled queue ticket smoothed flat on my desk, sat Lumeth.
They looked different. Not much. Their slight shoulders were the same, and their soft oval face, and their pale, unevenly cut hair. But the edges of their body no longer flickered quite so much. And the ribbon wound around their thin wrists, which had been fraying thread by thread the last time I saw it, had a few new threads woven back into it. Short ones. Bright ones. Not many.
"Good evening," I said, automatically. My hands folded. "How may I help you?"
Lumeth smiled.
"You've helped quite a lot already," they said. They touched the ribbon on their left wrist, very lightly, the way Maren Tallow had touched the edge of her heir form. "A baker who stood in a line. A boatman who wouldn't break his word. An old man with one gold coin. A man in a tavern who wouldn't let you stamp his promise." Their large grey eyes, much older than the rest of them, rested on me. "Promises about money, kept. Here. In my world."
I didn't know what to say to that. So I said what I always say.
"Thank you for your trust."
"That's still my line," said Lumeth.
Then they reached into their faded robe and laid something on the desk between us.
It was a stamp. A second one. Smaller than mine, plain brass, with no handle and no date wheel. Its face was smooth and blank.
"What is that?" I asked.
"Not yet," said Lumeth, and slid it back into their robe before I could touch it. "You can't hold every promise in this world with one pair of hands, Sekar. You found that out today." Their smile was very gentle. "When you're ready to trust someone else's hand on the stamp, it will be there."
"Is that," I said carefully, "a new term and condition?"
Lumeth laughed. It was the first time I had heard them laugh, and it sounded like a bell, or like a promise being kept.
"Read it this time," they said.
And the gold light swallowed the counter, and the chairs, and the sky.
When I opened my eyes, I was looking at a ceiling I didn't know.
Low beams. A crack in the plaster shaped like a river. Morning light coming in through a small window, warm and yellow, and the smell of bread rising from somewhere below.
Brenna's room, I thought slowly. I'm in Brenna's bed. Upstairs. I have never once been upstairs.
I turned my head, which took a surprising amount of effort.
Fenn was asleep on the floor beside the bed, curled up on a folded blanket like a cat, with one hand still holding onto the edge of the coverlet. In a wooden chair by the window, with his chin on his chest, his cracked spectacles pushed up onto his forehead and the brown leather ledger open on his knees, Corvin was asleep too.
On the stool beside the bed, neatly folded, lay my navy blazer. It was spotless, of course. The creases were perfect. Some god had pressed it in the night, whether I was wearing it or not.
The door opened, and Brenna came in with a steaming bowl in her hands, and stopped.
She looked at me. I looked at her.
"Well," said Brenna, very quietly. "About time."
She set the bowl down, rather hard, on the windowsill. Then she went to the chair, and put her floury hand on Corvin's shoulder, and shook him awake. He jerked upright, the ledger sliding off his knees, his spectacles falling down onto his nose. He saw me.
For a moment, his face did something complicated.
Then it settled into its usual expression of mild disapproval.
"You've been asleep," he said, "for two days."
Two days, I thought. Two working days. The Trust House. The ledger. The pending entries. The—
"Who's been validating?" I said. My voice came out as a croak.
"Nobody," said Corvin.
I tried to sit up. Brenna pushed me back down with one hand, without apparent effort.
"Old Gwen's been," she said. "The herbwife from the river steps. Twice."
I would meet Old Gwen properly later: a tiny, wrinkled, brown-faced woman with a pipe, a voice like gravel and a basket of foul-smelling roots. But she had left her diagnosis with Brenna, and Brenna delivered it word for word, with grim satisfaction.
"Emptied like a well," she said. "Fills again if she stops drawing. If she doesn't stop, it doesn't. A week in bed. No stamping. And broth." She picked up the bowl from the windowsill and held it out to me. "This is the broth."
"But the bank—"
"Has been open," said Corvin. "Both days. I opened it."
He picked the ledger up off the floor, and turned it around, and held it out to me.
The last page with gold on it was the one from the day of the run. After that, the rows went on in his own cramped, careful handwriting. Ordinary ink. No stamps. In the officer's box at the end of each row, he had written two small words.
Pending validation.
"I told them the keeper was ill," Corvin said. "I told them every entry would be written in ordinary ink, in both the ledger and their passbook, and validated in gold when you were well enough. I told them they could have their coin back today, in full, if they didn't want to wait."
"And?"
"Nobody took their coin back." He turned a page. "Four new accounts opened. On the strength of my handwriting." He paused. "Which is a first, I assure you."
I stared at the rows.
Pending validation.
They didn't need the gold, I thought. Not after the run. They just needed to see that we'd pay them.
That's... that's what a bank is. That's all a bank ever is.
There was something in my throat. I drank some of Brenna's broth to get rid of it. It didn't work.
Corvin reached into his coat and took out my pocket notebook, and set it on the coverlet beside my hand.
"You missed your daily closings," he said, to the window. "I didn't think you'd want a gap."
I opened it.
After my own last entry, in my own small handwriting, Day 33. Depositors: 44. Days remaining until the Harvest Festival: 50, there were three more lines. Cramped. Careful. Ink-stained.
Day 34. Depositors: 27. All who asked were paid. Keeper collapsed at closing. (Written by C.D.)
Day 35. Depositors: 29. Many people asked after "the lady in the clean coat." Told them she is resting. (C.D.)
Day 36. Depositors: 31. Achievement: 31%. I am told this line is important. (C.D.)
I read them three times, the way Brenna counted coins.
Then I closed the notebook and held it against my chest, and lay back on Brenna's pillow, and looked at the crack in the ceiling shaped like a river for a long time.
"Corvin," I said.
"Mm."
"When I fell. At the counter. You said my name."
"I say your name every day."
"You said it right."
There was a pause.
"You were hallucinating," said Corvin Dalle, and picked up the ledger, and walked out of the room with the tips of his ears bright red.
I lasted four days in bed before I went back to the Trust House. Old Gwen said a week. Brenna said a week. Corvin said nothing at all, which was worse.
When I walked in on the fifth morning, in my spotless blazer, with my hair neatly tied, he looked up from behind his grille, put down his pen, and slid a sheet of paper across the counter to me without a word.
It was written in his cramped hand, and ruled into neat boxes.
RULE. The keeper of the Trust House shall validate no more than fifteen records in a single day. Every record beyond the fifteenth shall be written in ordinary ink, marked PENDING, and validated on the next day it can be. This rule may not be broken. Not for a crowd. Not for a crisis. Not for anyone.
At the bottom, there was a space for two signatures.
He had already signed his.
"Fifteen," I said.
"Old Gwen said ten." Corvin's face was perfectly flat. "I negotiated."
I looked at the paper for a long time. Then I took out my pen, signed under his name, and reached for my stamp.
Corvin put his hand flat on top of the paper.
"No," he said. "That's not what it's for. This one you keep because you choose to."
Of course, I thought. Of course he would.
I put my stamp away.
After that, the weeks ran together.
Not like the day of the run. That had been a fever. This was more like a river: slow, and steady, and always going the same way.
They came back. Not all of them, and not all at once. But they came.
The kindly old man who had told me he would come back when things were calmer came back on my second day, and said things seemed a good deal calmer, and reopened his account with exactly the same amount he had taken out. The cooper's wife came back, still apologizing. The young adventurer and his wife came back, and named each other heirs again, and blushed about it again.
The cheesemaker came back in the third week, stood at my grille with his magnificent mustache bristling, and slapped two marks down on the counter.
"I'm only doing it," he informed me, "to keep an eye on you."
"Of course," I said. "Thank you for your trust."
"Spy," he muttered, with what I was almost sure was affection, and went away with a new passbook.
And there were new ones. A lot of new ones.
That was the thing nobody had told me in the training module about liquidity crises, the one I'd fallen asleep in. A bank that dies in a run is gone forever. But a bank that survives one, in front of the whole town, with every single bit paid out in gold on the counter where everyone can see it, is something else. It's a bank that has been tested.
People came who had stood on the riverbank that day just to watch. They had seen Bartholomew Keane get his thirty crowns. They had seen a carter get his mark and forty-five bits, and an old harness-maker get his crown and a half, less the five bits on the board, and a chandler's wife get her mark and four bits at sunset. And they had seen Brenna Holt walk up to the counter on the worst day of all and put money in.
"If the baker trusts it," a tanner told me, sliding his first deposit across the counter, "that's good enough for me. Brenna Holt never trusted anything in her life."
I wrote it down. I stamped it, if it was one of my fifteen. If it wasn't, I wrote PENDING in the officer's box, and the customer looked at it, and nodded, and went away with a passbook full of ordinary ink, and came back the next day for their gold without complaint.
Nobody minded waiting anymore. That was the strangest thing of all.
There was one other visitor, in the second week.
It wasn't a person. It was a basket.
It arrived on the doorstep of the Trust House one morning before we opened: a beautiful wicker basket of autumn fruit, pears and red apples and a bunch of dark grapes, wrapped in green ribbon. Tamsin found it. She didn't touch it. She called Corvin, who came up from the vault, looked at it, and went very still.
Tucked in the ribbon was a small cream card, written in a neat, gentle, schoolmaster's hand.
Congratulations on your recovery. I do so look forward to our next meeting. — H.G.
Nobody said anything for a while.
"I'll check it," said Corvin at last. "For anything that shouldn't be in fruit."
There wasn't anything. That was somehow worse.
In the end, we gave the pears to Old Gwen, and the apples to Liesl, and Fenn ate all the grapes before anyone could stop him, and was perfectly fine, and very smug about it.
I kept the card. I put it in the back of my notebook, behind the ruined test passbook, where I would see it every time I wrote my closing.
Just so I don't forget, I thought, that somebody is watching.
The closings in my notebook, those seven weeks, look like this:
Day 44. Depositors: 38.
Day 52. Depositors: 51. Hettie Brook brought her sister's whole family.
Day 60. Depositors: 64. Term Deposits: 9.
Day 70. Depositors: 81. Borrik has started calling himself "Head of Security." Nobody gave him this title.
Day 78. Depositors: 94. Corvin smiled at a figure today. I saw it. He denies it.
And then, on the evening before the Harvest Festival:
Day 82. Depositors: 99.
Ninety-nine.
I stared at it by the light of Brenna's oven for a long time.
Everyone had tried. Hettie Brook had walked the length of the river steps twice that afternoon, roaring at every washerwoman she could find who didn't have a passbook yet, and found that there weren't any left. Borrik had gone round the Guild Hall asking every adventurer with a wife, a mother or a girl he was planning to marry. Jory had brought his apprentice, who turned out to have opened an account a fortnight earlier and forgotten to mention it. Even Marga had offered, with great generosity, to open a second account under a different name, and had been very offended when I said no.
"A hundred people," I told her. "Aldous said a hundred people who walked through the door and chose to trust us. Not a hundred accounts."
"I'd be choosing," said Marga. "Twice."
In the end, at closing, I had sent everyone home.
You don't chase the last one, I thought. You don't stand in the street and beg. Pressure isn't trust. If someone opens an account because I begged them, on the last night, then it isn't the thing Aldous asked for. It isn't the thing Lumeth asked for. It's just a number.
I knew all that. I believed it.
I still sat up very late, looking at the number.
Day 82. Depositors: 99. Days remaining until the Harvest Festival: 1.
Achievement: 99%.
Back home, ninety-nine percent was a failure. Not a big one. A small, quiet, tidy failure, the kind that got you a sigh in the quarterly review and a slightly higher target for next quarter, because if you could do ninety-nine, surely you could have done a hundred if you had really tried.
I had spent four years being exactly one percent short of something.
It's fine, I told myself. It's fine. It's the best ninety-nine percent in the history of this world. Aldous is reasonable. Aldous will—
Aldous signed a contract in gold ink that says one hundred.
I closed the notebook and lay down by the oven and did not sleep at all.
The first morning of the Harvest Festival came up gold and cold and clear.
I was out of the bakery before Brenna had finished her first batch. I didn't oversleep this time. I walked through streets that were already strung with garlands of wheat and red ribbon, past stalls going up in the market square, past the fountain where I had woken up in another world with a stamp in my hand and a chicken staring at me, and across the bridge toward the old customs house.
And there was someone sitting on the step.
I stopped on the bridge.
It was small. It had straw-colored hair and a shirt made for someone much larger, and it was sitting with its knees pulled up to its chin and both arms wrapped around them, guarding something in its lap.
"Fenn?"
He looked up. He had clearly been there for a while; his nose was pink with cold.
"You're late," he said. "I've been sitting here since the bread went in."
I had heard that line before, from someone else, on this same step. I was fairly sure he had heard it too.
"We open at the second bell," I said.
"Then open early."
I unlocked the door. He followed me inside, still hugging whatever it was against his chest, and when I went behind the counter, he came up to the grille and stood on tiptoe, so that his chin was just above the brass rail.
Then he put a small, grubby cloth purse on the oak.
"I want one," he said. "A passbook."
I looked at the purse. Then I looked at him.
"Twenty-three bits," he said, in a rush, before I could say anything. "I been saving. From running errands for Marga. And Borrik gives me a bit when I carry his lunch. And the tanners pay me to take their messages. I didn't tell you." His jaw set. "I thought you'd think I stole it."
The Trust House was very quiet. Outside, I could hear the first music of the Festival starting up in the square, a fiddle and a drum, faint and far away.
"Did you steal it?" I asked.
"No."
"Then it's yours," I said. "And it's safe here."
I opened the ledger. I took a fresh passbook from the stack, ruled into neat rows of boxes, and wrote his name on the first page, and the account number beneath it. C1000123. It had been a busy few months, and not every account was still open, but the numbers never went backward.
"Can you write your name?"
Fenn shook his head, embarrassed.
So I opened the little tin of stamp ink, and pressed his thumb into it, gently, the way I had pressed Brenna's thumb on the very first morning, and guided it onto the page. Once in the ledger. Once in his passbook. A small purple oval, with every whorl and ridge of a ten-year-old former thief's thumb pressed into the paper.
"That's me?" he said.
"That's you," I said. "Nobody else in the world has that thumb."
Then I slid the heir form across the counter.
"If anything ever happens to you," I said, "who should this go to?"
Fenn thought about it with enormous seriousness.
"You," he said.
"I can't," I said. "I'm the officer. The person who keeps the money can't be the one named to receive it. It's a rule."
He scowled. "That's a stupid rule."
"It's a very good rule," I said. "Choose someone else."
He thought again. And then his ears went pink, and he looked at the counter, and mumbled.
"Brenna, then. She feeds me."
I wrote it. Brenna Holt. He pressed his thumb again, in the box for the depositor. I laid the passbook over the ledger, so that the rows met, and signed in the officer's box. And I pressed my stamp across the seam.
The ink flared gold.
It ran along the edge where the two pages touched, a thin, bright, living line, and then settled into a quiet half-stamp on each. The first of my fifteen. The hundredth depositor of the Corrinford Trust House.
Fenn picked up his passbook in both grubby hands and held it the way Brenna had held hers, as if it might fly away. He stared at the gold for a long time.
Then he looked up at me.
And his mouth fell open.
"Your face," he said. "Sekka. Your face is doing something."
I didn't understand at first.
Then I did.
It wasn't my Service Smile. I knew exactly how that one felt: the precise, practiced set of every muscle, the four visible teeth, the eyes that stayed politely where they were. I had worn it ten thousand times.
This was something else. It had arrived without asking me. It was small and crooked and a little bit wet at the corners of my eyes, and I could feel it all the way down in my chest, warm, like the stones by Brenna's oven.
Oh, I thought.
So that's what it feels like. From the inside.
Behind me, I heard the door open, and footsteps stop. I didn't need to turn around to know it was Corvin. I heard the sound of his satchel, full of ledgers, sliding off his shoulder and hitting the floor.
He didn't say anything.
Neither did I.
Fenn just kept staring at me, holding his passbook against his chest, as if he had seen a dragon.
Aldous Penhallow came down the hill at the second bell, in his sedan chair, with Mistress Hale walking in front of it like a general and four household men sweating under the poles.
He did not take my word for it. I hadn't expected him to.
He had the chair set down beside the counter, put on a pair of spectacles I had never seen him wear, held out a ringed hand for the brown leather ledger, and counted the names himself. Every one. Slowly, page by page, running one thin finger down the rows, his lips moving. Mistress Hale stood at his shoulder and counted with him, silently, in case he lost his place. He did not lose his place.
It took a long time. Nobody spoke. Outside, the Festival music in the square had grown louder, and the smell of roasting chestnuts had begun to drift across the bridge.
At last, Aldous's finger stopped on the last line.
"Fenn," he read aloud. "No family name. Thumbprint. Twenty-three bits. Heir: Brenna Holt." He looked up over his spectacles at the small boy sitting on the customers' bench, still clutching his passbook. "Fenn. The thief?"
"Former," said Fenn, with enormous dignity.
Aldous Penhallow looked at him for a long moment. Then he threw back his bald head and laughed, a thin, dry, delighted cackle, like paper tearing.
"One hundred," he said, and closed the ledger. "One hundred people who walked through that door and chose." He took off his spectacles and looked at me. "The capital stays, Miss Halim. And the building is yours for as long as the bank stands. Hale."
Mistress Hale already had the paper ready. Two copies. Terms of the Agreement of Capital, fulfilled in full, on the first morning of the Harvest Festival.
Aldous signed both, with his sharp, spiky flourish. Mistress Hale signed below him. I signed below her. Then I laid the two sheets one over the other, so that the edge of the top one crossed all three names on the one beneath, and pressed my stamp down across the seam.
The second of my fifteen.
The ink flared gold.
And as it did, something else happened.
It was very faint. If I hadn't been looking for it, I would have missed it entirely. Somewhere at the very back of my mind, in the same quiet place where a single word had settled on the night I signed Lumeth's agreement, there was a flicker. As if a second word had been written there, a long time ago, in ink so pale I couldn't read it.
I held still, and looked at it, the way you look at a faint star.
[Delegation]
It was grey. Not gold. It didn't glow. It sat there, dim and patient, like a door with no handle yet, or a plain brass stamp with a blank face, waiting for a hand that wasn't mine.
Not yet, Lumeth had said.
Not yet, I agreed, and let it be.
The second visitor of the morning arrived just as Aldous's chair was being carried out.
He was a rangy, sunburnt man of about forty, with a gap-toothed grin, a coil of rope over one shoulder, and the rolling walk of someone who spent more time on water than on land. I knew him. Hob Marrin, bargemaster, one of the five merchants Corvin had lent to at the start of the harvest. His barge had come down the river two days before, low in the water with grain, just in time for the Festival markets.
"Sold the lot," he announced, beaming at Corvin, who allowed himself the very smallest of nods. "Best prices in six years. You'll have your coin back next week, and the interest on it, all proper, like the board says." Then he turned to me, and scratched the back of his sunburnt neck.
"Thing is, miss," he said. "My partner's in Aubrelle. I owe him forty crowns for his half of the cargo. Three weeks down the river road, that is, with forty crowns in my boots and bandits on every bend." He leaned on the counter. "Could I leave it here with you? And have him take it out up there, at your place in Aubrelle?"
I looked at him.
Inter-branch transfer, I thought. The most ordinary thing in the world. Back home, I did forty of them a day without looking up.
Here, it would need a second branch, in a city three weeks away. Someone there I could trust with a stamp. A way to make two ledgers, two hundred miles apart, know what the other was doing. And someone to carry the coin itself down the river road, safely, past the bandits on every bend.
I thought of the grey word at the back of my mind. I thought of the Guild's crystal ledgers. I thought of Tamsin, who had guarded caravans on that very road for eleven years.
"Not yet, Master Marrin," I said. "We only have one door."
His face fell.
"But ask me again," I said, "next year."
The third visitor came at noon. She was wearing her green Guild coat.
Liesl stood in the doorway of the Trust House with the Festival noise behind her, her braid over her shoulder and her face perfectly professional, and for a moment she didn't say anything at all. She looked at the board. At the counter. At Fenn, still sitting on the bench with his passbook, refusing to go out and enjoy the Festival in case someone stole it. At me.
"One hundred," she said. "Hettie Brook's telling the whole square."
"I heard."
"The Guildmaster heard too." She came to the counter. Then, in her official voice, the one she used for registrations and section eleven: "Guildmaster Varga of the Corrinford branch presents his compliments to the keeper of the Corrinford Trust House, and requests a meeting at her convenience, after the Festival."
I blinked.
"A meeting," I said. "About what?"
Liesl's professional face cracked, just slightly, at one corner.
"He didn't say," she said. "He only said, Tell her I've read clause four twice now."
I thought about Rook Varga, broad as a barn door, chewing on his liquorice root in front of my painted board. Every branch in the kingdom but yours.
"Please tell the Guildmaster," I said, "that I would be very glad to meet him."
Liesl nodded once. Then she leaned across the counter, quickly, as if she were breaking a rule, and squeezed my hand.
"Congratulations, Sekka," she whispered, and was gone again into the noise.
We closed at noon, for the Festival. Corvin said it was against every principle of sound banking. Then he locked the vault and came with us anyway.
The market square was full of light and music and smoke. Garlands of wheat and red ribbon hung from every window. There were fiddlers by the fountain and dancers on the town hall steps, where Reeve Ashby, his chain of office gleaming, was trying very hard to look dignified while a small child pulled on his sleeve. There were stalls selling roast chestnuts and hot cider and honey cakes, and one stall at the edge of the square with a borrowed trestle table and a basket of rye, where Brenna Holt was selling bread, just this once, again, and pretending not to enjoy it.
Hettie Brook found us within a minute and loudly told everyone within thirty yards who I was. Borrik, off duty and very full of cider, introduced himself to strangers as Head of Security. Tamsin stood by the fountain with her crossbow on her back and an apple in her hand, and watched everything, and once, when a juggler dropped all his clubs at once, I saw her laugh. Maren Tallow danced with her son. Jory Penn gave away wooden bowls to anyone who would take one. Marga sold sausages from a cart and shouted insults at her customers, who loved it.
And Corvin walked beside me through all of it, with his hands behind his back and his cracked spectacles catching the lantern light, and said nothing, and didn't need to.
At sunset, I sat down on the edge of the stone fountain. The same fountain. The same spot where I had woken up in another world, a lifetime and a little over a hundred days ago, with a stamp in my hand and a chicken staring at me as though I owed it money.
I took out my notebook, and my pen, and wrote my closing.
Day 83. Depositors: 100.
Achievement: 100%.
I looked at it for a long time.
Back home, a hundred percent meant a nod at the quarterly review, a slightly larger target for the next quarter, and a message in the branch group chat with three praying-hands emojis and a flexed arm. Then you started again from zero.
Corvin leaned over my shoulder and read it.
"Next season's target," he said, "is two hundred."
I closed my eyes.
"Of course it is," I said.
But I wasn't, I found, upset about it. Not even a little.
Across the square, the lanterns were coming on, one by one, small and yellow, the way they had come on along the riverbank on the morning of the run. Only now they weren't a line. They were scattered everywhere, at every stall and every window and every doorway, the way lights are when people aren't afraid.
I thought about the agreement I had signed at Counter 3, in a branch with no walls, under a sky with no sun. Paragraphs and paragraphs of very small text. An empty box. A meterai. Gold ink.
I still hadn't read it.
But I thought I could guess, now, more or less what it said.
Interest, I thought, watching the lanterns. In another world.
Accrued daily.
Compounding.
My face did something then. I didn't stop it.
Afterword
Thank you for reading the first volume of Interest in Another World.
If you have ever taken a queue number at a bank in Indonesia, you have already met Sekar. She is the officer at Counter 3 who greets you with the same smile at the first customer of the morning and the last one of the afternoon, who reminds you to read the terms before you sign, and who, as you stand up to leave, asks whether there is anything else she can help you with. This book began with one question: what is going on behind that smile?
Many of the habits she carries into Lorvane are real. The queue tokens. The rate board by the door. The meterai, the small duty stamp that makes a signature binding. Jemput bola, going out to fetch customers instead of waiting for them. The free gift for a new account, which in our world is more often a set of glasses than a wooden bowl. The daily closing. They are so ordinary at home that it took moving them into a medieval town to see how strange, and how useful, they are.
At its heart, though, a bank is not a vault or a ledger. It is a promise that your money will be there when you come back for it. Sekar has a Skill that makes records impossible to forge, but as Brenna, Corvin and one very stubborn boatman showed her, magic only proves what was agreed. People still have to decide to trust each other. That decision is what this series is about.
Volume 2 will take her beyond one counter. Rook Varga wants a meeting. Hob Marrin still wants to send forty crowns to Aubrelle. Inspector Voss will be back in six months, Master Grane is looking forward to their next meeting, and Corvin has set the next target at two hundred depositors.
Sekar will, of course, keep a perfectly calm face through all of it.
Inside, she will be screaming.
See you in Volume 2.
Bonus: Customer Satisfaction
Every branch I ever worked at had a small box on the counter with three buttons: a green smiling face, a yellow flat face and a red frowning face. After each transaction, the customer pressed one. At the end of the month, the branch manager read the results aloud at the morning briefing, slowly, the way a teacher reads exam scores to a class that has disappointed him.
On the first working morning after the Harvest Festival, I realized that the Corrinford Trust House had a vault, a license, a hundred depositors and a target of two hundred.
It did not have a satisfaction box.
That, I thought, is unacceptable.
Jory carved me three bowls. On the bottom of the first, he burned a smiling face. On the second, a frowning one. On the third, after I had explained it twice, two dots and a straight line.
"What's that one for?" he asked.
"For when the service was neither good nor bad," I said.
Jory looked at the bowl. Then at me. Then at the bowl again. He opened his mouth, closed it very carefully, and said nothing at all. I did not understand why at the time.
I set the three bowls at the end of the counter, with a dish of river pebbles beside them. After every transaction, I smiled my Service Smile and said, "If you have a moment, please put a pebble in the bowl that matches how we served you today."
Data, I thought, with deep satisfaction. Finally, some data.
At the end of the week, after closing, Corvin and I counted.
Smiling face: four pebbles.
Frowning face: two.
Flat face: ninety-one.
I looked at the bowls for a long time.
Ninety-one, I thought. Ninety-one people found our service neutral. Back home, "neutral" is just a complaint wearing a nicer shirt. What did I do? Was it the queue? Was it the PENDING entries? Was it the—
"It's you," said Fenn.
He was sitting on the customers' bench, swinging his heels and eating one of Brenna's honey buns.
"Pardon?"
"That bowl." He pointed at it with the bun. "Everyone says it's the one that looks like you." He took another bite. "They didn't want you to feel bad. So they all picked you."
I turned and looked at the bowl. Two dots. One straight line.
I looked at my reflection in the brass rail of the counter. Two eyes. One mouth, perfectly straight.
Oh, I thought.
Oh no.
My face, of course, did not move. Which, I realized, was rather the point.
Behind his grille, Corvin had not stopped counting. He set down the last pebble and frowned.
"Ninety-seven pebbles," he said. "We served ninety-four customers this week."
We both turned to look at the door.
Borrik, who was leaning against the frame with his arms folded, studied the ceiling with great interest.
"Mister Borrik," I said.
"Head of Security gets three votes," said Borrik.
"Who decided that?"
"Head of Security."
Corvin made a note. "That accounts for two. One more."
One of the two frowning pebbles belonged to the cheesemaker. He had told me so himself, loudly, at the counter, so that I would know he was keeping an eye on me. Nobody ever admitted to the other one. When I asked Tamsin, she thought about it for a while.
"Chicken," she said. "Third morning. Came in the door. Looked at the bowls a long time."
I thought of the chicken by the fountain, on my very first morning in this world, the one that had looked at me like a creditor who had decided to come back later.
It had come back later.
That night, I wrote my closing.
Customer satisfaction: 95 of 97.
Corvin read it over my shoulder, took my pen without asking, clicked it four times and added a line underneath in his cramped hand.
Adjusted for Borrik and the chicken: 93 of 94. (C.D.)
I looked at the two lines for a long time.
Ninety-one people, I thought, looked at a bowl with no expression on it and said, that's the bank.
Back home, we would call that brand recognition.
I underlined it twice.