I woke up to the sound of someone punching dough.
For a moment, I didn't know where I was. The ceiling was low and black with old smoke. The floor beneath me was warm stone. The air smelled of yeast and woodsmoke, and somewhere very close, a woman was humming a song I'd never heard while hitting something soft and heavy, over and over.
Then I remembered. Corrinford. The Guild. The chicken. Brenna.
Right, I thought. Another world. Still not a dream.
I sat up, and stopped.
Last night, I had fallen asleep on the floor of a bakery after scrubbing it from one end to the other. My blazer had been grey with the dust of every street in town. My sleeves had been white to the elbow with flour. My shoes had been caked with mud I preferred not to think about.
Now my blazer was crisp, dark navy and spotless. Not a speck of flour anywhere. The creases on the sleeves were sharp enough to cut bread. My blouse was white, properly white, the kind of white you only see on the first day of a new uniform. My shoes shone. Even my lanyard had untwisted itself.
My hair, unfortunately, was still a disaster.
Okay, I thought. Okay. Think.
Yesterday morning, in the market square, my blazer had been spotless too, even though I had slept in it. I had been too busy panicking about the chicken to wonder why.
One time is an accident. Two times is a pattern.
Lumeth.
Lumeth, you fading, brochure-carrying, meterai-buying god.
You gave me laundry.
Other people get transported to other worlds and receive swords that split mountains. Infinite magic. Eternal beauty. And I get—
Free dry cleaning. Every morning. Forever.
I looked down at my sleeve and ran my thumb along the perfect crease.
...Okay. It's actually very nice.
And considering I own exactly one set of clothes in this entire world, it may be the most practical blessing anyone has ever received.
At the kneading table, Brenna had stopped humming. She was staring at me, flour up to her elbows, a ball of dough forgotten under her fists.
"How in the world," she said, "did you get that clean?"
"...It's a long story."
"You slept on my floor."
"Yes."
"In flour."
"Yes."
Brenna narrowed her eyes. Then she shrugged and went back to her dough. "Envoys," she muttered.
It's not because I'm an envoy! I thought. But I couldn't think of a better explanation that didn't involve a god with a queue ticket, so I said nothing.
She worked the dough in silence for a while. Then, without looking up, she said, "You worked well last night. Faster than my last girl, and I paid her."
I waited.
"I can't pay much," Brenna said. "Ten bits a day. A bed by the oven. Whatever bread doesn't sell. You start before dawn and finish when the shutters close."
Ten bits, I thought. About fifty thousand rupiah a day. That's well below minimum wage.
Plus housing.
Plus MEALS.
"I accept," I said.
I said it so quickly that Brenna blinked at me.
Employment status: hired. Position: bakery assistant. Salary: ten bits. Benefits: bread.
It was the first agreement I had made in this world with full knowledge of the terms and conditions. I was very proud of it.
Holt's Bakery opened before sunrise, and by the time the first light touched the river, there was a crowd at the half-door.
Dockworkers. Washerwomen. Children with coins clutched in their fists. They pushed, they shouted their orders over each other's heads, and whoever had the loudest voice or the sharpest elbows got served first. Brenna handed out loaves and took coins as fast as she could, doing the change in her head, and getting it wrong about one time in five.
On my first morning, I watched.
On my second morning, I did something about it.
I had spent the evening before cutting small squares from the kindling pile and scratching a number into each one with the tip of my ballpoint pen. When the crowd gathered at dawn, I stood at the door with my hands folded and handed them out, one by one.
"Good morning. Welcome to Holt's Bakery. Here is your number."
The dockworkers stared at the little wooden chips in their huge hands.
"What's this for?"
"When I call your number, it's your turn."
"And if I just push to the front?"
"Then I won't call your number," I said, and smiled.
He looked at my smile for a long moment. Then he went to the back of the line.
By the third morning, nobody pushed at all. The dockworkers grumbled about it, and then, I noticed, started arriving earlier to get low numbers, and then started bragging about them.
Queue management, I thought. The foundation of civilization.
The children were harder.
"Good morning," I said to a very small, round-cheeked girl with two crooked pigtails and a single copper bit in her hand. "Welcome to Holt's Bakery."
She looked up at my face. Her lower lip began to tremble.
"Are you angry?" she whispered.
"No," I said. "I'm smiling."
She studied me with great seriousness. "...Why does it look like that?"
In four years of customer service, I thought, I have been asked many things. Never that.
But I learned. By the fourth day, I knew every regular by name and by order. Master Tobin, a barrel-chested, red-faced boatman with forearms like mooring posts: two rye loaves, and a honey bun for his daughter on market days. Old Widow Marsh, tiny and bent like a question mark: the smallest loaf, cut in half, because her teeth were bad. The tanner's apprentices: six of anything, as long as it was cheap and as long as it was fast.
"Two rye, Master Tobin? And it's market day, so one honey bun?"
Master Tobin stared at me like I had read his mind. Then he bought two honey buns.
At the end of that week, Brenna stood in the doorway of an empty shop at noon, looking at her bare shelves.
"We sold out," she said. "Before noon. Three days running."
Customer retention and a little gentle upselling, I thought. Very basic.
I did not say this out loud. I was, after all, being paid ten bits a day.
On the fifth morning, a loaf disappeared from the cooling rack by the side window.
I saw it go. A thin arm, a flash of straw-colored hair, and then nothing but an empty space on the rack and the sound of bare feet running into the alley.
I went after him. I did not run, because I was wearing a pencil skirt, and also because I have never run anywhere in my life if walking quickly would do. I found him three alleys over, crouched behind a rain barrel, tearing into the bread like it might try to escape.
He was about ten. Skinny, sharp-eyed, with a scrape on one knee and a shirt that had been made for someone much larger.
"Excuse me," I said.
I used my counter voice. Calm, pleasant, impossible to argue with. It is the voice you use on a customer who is about to walk away without signing the last page.
The boy froze, his mouth full.
"What's your name?"
He swallowed. "...Fenn."
"Fenn," I said. "Was it good?"
He blinked. "...What?"
"The bread. Was it good?"
"...Yeah?"
"Thank you for your feedback," I said.
Customer satisfaction survey: complete.
He stared at me as if I had grown a second head. "Are you calling the Watch on me or not?"
"I'm not going to call the Watch," I said. "I'm going to offer you a job."
His eyes went narrow and suspicious, which I respected.
"Holt's Bakery delivers bread to the Copper Kettle and the tannery every morning," I said. "Right now, I carry it, and I keep getting lost. If you carry it, you get one loaf a day. You won't have to steal it."
"What's the catch?"
"The catch is you have to come back every day."
Fenn thought about it with the full seriousness of a merchant prince.
"Two loaves."
Negotiating, I thought. Good. That's good.
"One loaf," I said, "and a honey bun on market days."
"...Deal."
When I brought him back to the bakery, Brenna looked from him to me and folded her floury arms.
"You hired a thief."
"I hired a delivery boy," I said, "who used to be a thief."
Fenn turned out to know every street, every back door and every rumor in Corrinford. Within a week, he knew mine too.
"Everyone says you're an envoy," he told me cheerfully, on his first day.
"I'm not."
"That's what an envoy would say."
It's a whole town, I thought. A whole town has rehearsed this line.
On the sixth afternoon, the Scale Brotherhood came to Bakers' Lane.
I didn't know who they were at first. I only saw a man in a well-cut grey coat walking down the street. He was slim, middle-aged and neatly groomed, with a narrow, clean-shaven face, thin lips and pale eyes that moved from shop to shop as if pricing them. A small brass scale was pinned to his collar, and two very large men walked a step behind him. The street went quiet as he passed. Doors closed. Brenna, at the counter beside me, lowered her eyes to her ledger and kept them there.
The man in grey stopped at the cobbler's shop next door.
The walls between the shops were thin. I heard every word.
"Master Pell. Six marks borrowed at midsummer. A fifth a month. It's been three months." Papers rustled. "You owe ten marks and eighteen bits."
"I borrowed six!"
"And you've had the use of it for three months, Master Pell. That's what the fifth is for."
I did the math before I could stop myself.
A fifth a month. Twenty percent. Compounding monthly. Six marks becomes seven point two, becomes eight point six four, becomes ten point three six eight. Ten marks and eighteen bits. His numbers are right.
His numbers are right, and they're monstrous. That's nearly nine times the loan in a single year.
Back home, there were apps that lent money like this, and the government kept shutting them down.
"Scale Brotherhood," Brenna murmured, without looking up. "Moneychangers. Moneylenders. Don't look at them."
I looked anyway.
The man in grey came out of the cobbler's shop a few minutes later, tucking a small purse into his coat. As he passed Brenna's half-door, his eyes slid over the bakery and landed on me, and stayed there. They went to my blazer, my folded hands, my lanyard.
I gave him my Service Smile.
He gave me a thin smile back. "You must be the envoy."
"I'm not."
"Of course not," he said, and touched the brim of his hat, and walked on.
Behind me, through the thin wall, I heard the cobbler crying very quietly.
That night, I lay by the oven with my eyes half closed and listened to Brenna lock up.
She bolted the half-door. She checked the shutters, then checked them again. She blew out every lamp but one. Then she carried the last lamp to the corner by the flour bins, knelt down with a small grunt, and pried up a floorboard with the edge of a knife.
I held very still.
Beneath the board was a cloth pouch. Brenna took the day's takings from her apron, a small handful of copper and silver, and added them to it. Most of what was already inside glinted gold: every few months, she changed her silver for gold crowns at the moneychanger's, because gold was smaller and easier to hide. Then she poured the whole pouch out onto the floor and counted it.
Once.
She looked toward the shutters and listened.
Twice.
She looked toward the shutters again.
Three times.
It was exactly the scene Lumeth had shown me, down to the flour on her sleeves and the way the lamplight caught the side of her square, tired face. Seeing it for real was worse. On a screen, it had been sad. In the same room, close enough to hear the coins click, it was frightening.
Brenna tied the pouch, laid it back in the hole, and reached for the floorboard. Then she paused, and turned her head, and looked straight at me.
"Thought you were asleep."
"...I'm sorry," I said.
She was quiet for a moment. Then she sighed, sat back on her heels and rubbed her face with a floury hand.
"Fourteen crowns," she said. "That's what's in there. Took me six years."
Fourteen crowns, I thought. Fourteen thousand bits. Seventy million rupiah.
In a cloth pouch. Under a floorboard.
I didn't say anything. In customer service, you learn when silence is the best question.
"My Tam died six winters ago," Brenna said. "Fever. This was his bakery, and his father's before that. But the building belongs to Master Corley, and every spring, Master Corley raises the rent." She looked down at the floorboard. "He says he'll sell me the building for twenty crowns. If I can get to twenty, nobody can raise my rent ever again. Nobody can take Tam's bakery away."
"And if someone finds it?" I asked softly.
"Nobody knows it's there." She pressed the board down with the heel of her hand until it sat flush. "Except you, now."
She looked at me. It wasn't a question when she said it.
"You won't tell."
"I won't," I said.
She nodded once, blew out the lamp and climbed the stairs to her room. And I lay in the dark with the weight of what she had just handed me.
I thought of my mother.
Of the biscuit tin behind the rice sack, and the way she counted the shop's cash into it every night while the television murmured in the next room. Of how she always counted twice. Of how, when I got my first job at the bank, she had looked at my new uniform and said, That's nice, Sekar, and then gone right on using the tin.
Every family has a floorboard, I thought.
I wanted to tell Brenna it wasn't safe. That fourteen crowns under a floorboard is one bad night away from zero crowns under a floorboard. But then what? Where else could she put it?
The Guild wouldn't take her. She wasn't a member. The Scale Brotherhood would charge her to hold it, if they didn't simply lend it out at a fifth a month and lose it. There was no bank. There was no vault. There was no one at all in this whole kingdom whose job was to keep a baker's savings safe.
There's nowhere, I thought. There's literally nowhere.
I couldn't sleep. So I did what I always did at the end of a working day: I sat up, took out my pocket notebook and my pen, and wrote my daily closing by the glow of the oven.
Day 6. Rye loaves: 112. Honey buns: 30. Takings: 6 marks, 14 bits. Customer complaints: 0. Children frightened by my face: 2.
Then, out of pure habit, the way I had done at the end of every single day for four years, I signed at the bottom of the page, the same quick officer's signature I had put on every closing report, and pressed my stamp over it.
The ink glowed gold, and my signature glowed with it.
It shone for a moment, soft and warm, like the ink on Lumeth's form, and then it sank into the paper and settled into an ordinary golden stamp over an ordinary golden signature.
I looked at it. Then I noticed a tiny smudge where my hand had brushed the numbers, and reached to tidy it with my pen.
The pen wouldn't write.
It didn't skip or smear. It simply slid across the page as if the paper were glass, leaving nothing behind. I tried again, on the line below the stamp. The pen wrote perfectly. I moved back up to the stamped lines. Nothing.
I pinched the corner of the page and tugged, very gently, to see if it would tear.
It didn't. It didn't even crease.
...Huh, I thought.
I looked at the golden stamp for a long time. Then I closed the notebook, lay back down by the warm oven, and tried very hard not to think about what it meant, because I had absolutely no idea.
Three nights later, I woke to a sound that didn't belong.
It was small. A soft metal scrape, like a knife sliding between a shutter and its frame. Then a click. Then a breath of cold night air moving across the floor.
I opened my eyes.
The shutter by the flour bins stood open. Moonlight spilled through it in a long white stripe, and in that stripe, two figures were crouched on the floor, one thin and wiry, the other thick-necked and heavy. One held a dark lantern. The other was already working a knife under a floorboard.
The right floorboard. The first time. Without searching.
They knew, I thought. They knew exactly where it was. Someone has been watching her count.
Then, all at once, my brain caught up with my eyes.
Thieves.
Thieves. THIEVES. There are THIEVES in the bakery. Okay. Okay. Think. Customer-service procedure for—
There is no procedure for this. There is no SOP for this. The training module on robbery says to press the silent alarm and comply. THERE IS NO SILENT ALARM.
I did the only thing my body knew how to do.
I stood up. I smoothed the front of my spotless blazer. I folded my hands. And I stepped into the stripe of moonlight with my Service Smile perfectly in place.
"Good evening," I said. "Is there anything I can help you with?"
Both figures went rigid.
I cannot say exactly what they saw. A woman in strange, perfect clothes, standing absolutely still in the moonlight, smiling a smile that did not reach her eyes, in a calm and pleasant voice, in the middle of the night. One of them made a sound like a kettle.
"It's her," he hissed. "The envoy—"
"That's no envoy," the other whispered. "Look at her face. That's a ghost."
They ran.
The one with the knife had already pulled the pouch halfway out of its hole. He yanked it as he bolted, and the cloth caught on a nail and tore. Coins burst across the floor in a bright, ringing spray. He snatched a fistful without stopping, and then they were through the shutter and gone, and the night swallowed the sound of their feet.
I stood there for a long time.
My face did not move.
I'm going to be sick, I thought. I am going to be extremely sick. My legs aren't working. Why aren't my legs working?
Then the stairs thundered, and Brenna came down them in her nightgown with a rolling pin raised over her head, roaring like a bear.
She saw the open shutter.
She saw the floorboard.
She saw the coins.
The rolling pin lowered, slowly, until it hung at her side.
We lit the lamp. We gathered every coin we could find, from under the flour bins and behind the oven and in the cracks between the stones. Then Brenna knelt down and counted them.
Once.
Twice.
Three times.
"Five crowns," she said. "And some silver."
Nine crowns were gone.
Forty-five million rupiah, I thought. Gone in one fistful.
She didn't cry. I think it would have been easier if she had. She just sat back on her heels, with the lamp light on her tired face, and said, very quietly:
"Six years."
Sergeant Dorran came in the morning. Fenn had run to fetch him at first light.
He looked at the shutter. He looked at the floorboard. He wrote something in a small book and asked Brenna a few questions in a voice that was gentler than I expected.
"Nine crowns, you say?"
"Nine."
"If we found the men," he said, "could you tell which coins were yours?"
Brenna stared at him. "...They're coins."
Sergeant Dorran closed his book with a sigh.
"Then there's nothing to find, Mistress Holt. Coin is coin. Once it leaves your hand, it belongs to whoever's holding it." He turned to me. "Miss Sekka. You saw them?"
"Two men," I said. "It was dark."
He nodded slowly. "I'm sorry," he said, and I believed him. Then he left, because there was nothing else for him to do.
Coin is coin.
I stood in the middle of the bakery and thought about my world.
Back home, if someone steals your passbook, they've stolen a book. Your money is still in the bank. It's written down under your name. There are records, signatures, a vault. And if the bank itself collapses, there's a government agency that guarantees your deposit up to two billion rupiah.
Here, there is nothing. Money that's gone is just gone.
I looked at Brenna, sitting at her kneading table with five crowns and some silver in a torn pouch in front of her. I thought of the man sifting through ash with his bare hands. The merchant beside his overturned cart. The cobbler crying through the wall.
Nobody promises to keep it, Lumeth had said, because promises about money always break.
Then someone, I thought, has to make one that doesn't.
"Brenna," I said.
She looked up.
"If there were a place," I said, "where you could leave your money, a place that would write down exactly how much was yours and give it back whenever you asked, even if thieves came in the night... would you use it?"
Brenna laughed. It was a short, tired, bitter sound.
"There's no such place."
"Not yet," I said.
She stopped laughing. She looked at my face for a long moment, the way people look at a sky to decide whether it will rain.
"You say that," she said slowly, "like you mean it."
She was quiet for a moment, turning the torn pouch over in her floury hands.
"If a place like that ever existed," she said, "and I saw it with my own eyes, keeping other folks' coin and handing it back whole... then maybe." She set the pouch down. "Maybe."
I do mean it, I thought. I have absolutely no idea how. I have ten bits a day, a pen, a notebook, and a stamp that makes paper refuse to tear. But I mean it.
I started a list in my head, the way I would for any new branch opening.
Capital. A building. A vault. Customers who trust me. Rules for lending. Someone who knows how coins are weighed and counted in this world, and how the law works, and how a moneylender thinks.
I know how to bring money in. I've done that for four years.
I don't know how to keep it from going out.
From the doorway, a voice said, "You want someone who knows about money?"
Fenn was leaning against the frame with a loaf under his arm, having clearly heard everything.
"Do you know someone?" I asked.
"There's a drunk at the Copper Kettle," said Fenn. "Sits in the back corner every night. They say he used to count coins for the king."
"Why did he stop?"
Fenn grinned.
"They say he counted too well."
Counted too well, I thought.
That sounds like exactly the kind of person who would be terrible with customers.
Perfect.