Mia woke with her goal in mind.

  That was different.

  Every other morning in Cinderwild, she’d woken with a problem, a deadline, a symptom, a gap in her knowledge she needed to close before someone noticed it existed.

  This morning, she woke with a goal, and the distinction felt important, but she didn’t examine why, because examining it meant asking what kind of person woke up feeling purposeful about that task.

  The ledger was in her hand before she was fully upright.

  She didn't remember reaching for it.

  POINTS AVAILABLE: 0

  She closed it and got dressed.

  ***

  The battlefield was a stretch of rocky ground. A battle was fought between two factions whose names she didn't know. That was odd. Usually, the Ravagers picked through the battles of the Second Division and whichever faction they faced.

  “Kerrik?” she asked. He had no obligation to answer, but she’d privately given him a discount on his rental of her territory this week. The carrot and stick approach had worked even though they both knew what she was doing.

  “Ah, it’s your first time on a field like this.” Kerrik hefted his axe over his shoulder. “This was an auctioned fight. Neither of these groups could afford a mage to put up a barrier, so they auctioned off the rights to a portion of the winning bounty and the right to loot the battlefield. They’re also groups that you can pay to put up a barrier.”

  It never ceased to amaze her how creative the economy of Cinderwild was.

  “Why would stronger groups bid on a battle?” Mia wasn’t the best judge of quality, but the men on both sides were ill-equipped for the battle they fought.

  Kerrik shrugged. “You’ll have to be a lot higher up if you want answers to that question. It didn’t make sense to me when I heard about it; it doesn’t make sense to me now.”

  Mia nodded.

  That was also very in line with the chaotic nature of Cinderwild.

  Mia turned to Dan. “I’ll…I’ll handle three myself and then use poison on the rest.”

  That was what she came up with in the dead of night.

  First, she needed to know how much each life was worth.

  Second, she needed to know if she had to make the kill by hand, like Molly had to cut off the limbs.

  Third, she’d use Mox’s ledger to check their stats and compare them to hers.

  She was not dawdling today.

  She lifted her feet, stopped, and turned to look at Nessa.

  They didn’t speak, hadn’t spoken since yesterday, but there was no disgust on Nessa’s face, just that look of resigned acceptance.

  Mia turned away.

  Dan didn’t comment when she took Mox’s ledger off the desk.

  Mia told Dan she was starting.

  Dan didn’t follow.

  The first man she found was on his back with a chest wound. There was a pool of blood on the ground beneath him that had gone dark. He was watching the sky with unfocused eyes. She crouched beside him. His eyes moved to her face.

  She did what she'd promised herself she'd do.

  She was quick about it.

  Then she sat back on her heels and opened the ledger.

  LIVES CREDITED: 6 POINTS AVAILABLE: 50

  Fifty points. She looked at the number.

  Fifty points per life. She'd understood from Nessa that one point was one drop of mana, that a point bought ten loaves of bread or four pints of beer. Fifty points was a week of comfortable eating, a basic field tool, a small pouch of medicinal herbs.

  Mia took up a stick and drew up the division table she’d learned and slowly worked it out.

  Her debt was hundreds of thousands of points. She’d have to ask for the word. What came after nine hundred and ninety-nine thousand? Five what? She didn’t know the word, but that was how many points she owed. But it was only a hundred thousand lives.

  A number neither big nor small.

  If she could only take fifty lives a month, she’d need twenty thousand months to pay it off.

  She’d need…

  Thirteen months in a year…

  The stick moved.

  She’d need one thousand five hundred and forty years to pay.

  If there were no limit…

  No.

  One step at a time.

  She thought about what Molly had said by the fire.

  It feels like something is sucked out of you when you pay the debt.

  The hollow feeling, the trembling, the air pulled from the lungs. She thought about mana. It was the currency of Cinderwild, the thing that made Imbued objects valuable and black mages dangerous, and the concentration of which was double here what it was anywhere else in the world.

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  She looked at the fifty points.

  The ledger was a container, not a source.

  The mana came from here.

  Each kill took a set amount of mana from her, and…deposited it to the ledger, just like the bank nobles used.

  She thought about it until she understood, or thought she understood enough. Every human had magic, Adeline had said…she ignored the spike of irritation that accompanied the name…it was the basis of why sacrificing humans corrupted dark spells, why foreign mana poisoned a mage's body. Every human was a vessel of sorts, carrying mana because they were alive.

  When they stopped being alive.

  She looked at the fifty points.

  Why did mana get taken from her and not the person she killed?

  The mana transferred.

  Death released it.

  The ledger caught it, converted it, and credited it to her account.

  But it came from the act of her killing.

  Mia wasn't trading lives to an Overseer in any mystical sense. They were harvesting what her body shed.

  They needed mana, and in return, she got to shop from the ledger.

  She stood up. Put the ledger away.

  Molly had to know that.

  Mox, certainly.

  Her lack of reaction after she killed…

  Alright.

  Next, she touched Mox's ledger to the man's chest.

  Information filled the page.

  More information than she’d ever seen about herself.

  More information than she’d seen about Nessa.

  A life stripped down to words and numbers.

  She skipped most of it, focusing on what she needed.

  Name. Age. Faction. Skills. Affiliation. Mana capacity. No debts. No ledger. Nothing Mox wouldn't have noted as low value.

  She'd check everyone she looted. Mia needed to know if any of them were ledger holders, whether that changed the credit, whether the Overseer's tithe applied differently to mages. Mia needed to compare her stats to theirs to know what to adjust and how.

  She was building a picture, and she needed accurate data.

  It was six bodies and twenty minutes later before she found him.

  The second man had crawled a significant distance from where he'd fallen. It said something about his will to live, if not his survival prospects. She followed the drag marks. He sat upright against a boulder with his hands in his lap and his eyes open, which made it harder than the first. He looked at her when she crouched. He said something she didn't understand.

  She was quick about it.

  LIVES CREDITED: 7 POINTS AVAILABLE: 100

  The third was easier. Easier to find. Easier to kill.

  Mia hated that.

  LIVES CREDITED: 8 POINTS AVAILABLE: 150

  She straightened up, looked at the field, looked at the remaining wounded that she could see from where she stood. There were at least five, possibly more.

  Mia made her first purchase, using her body to block the scroll as she tore it. The paper disintegrating in a puff of fire, and knowledge seeping into her bones.

  LIVES CREDITED: 8 POINTS AVAILABLE: 120

  She closed the ledger.

  Mia looted fifteen bodies. Only four of them were above average in Mox’s ledger. Most were below average. None were mages or ledger holders.

  She walked back to Dan.

  He was standing where she'd left him. He watched her approach with his usual expression, which was no expression. Then, for a second, something shifted just slightly when she stopped in front of him. It was gone before she could identify it.

  "I'm done," she said. The three kills she’d made were enough to buy everything on her list and leave change.

  He looked at the field.

  "I know the hour isn’t up," she said. "There are more... I'm done anyway. For the rest I’m going to use a fast dissipating poison, just to see…if it changes anything.”

  Dan nodded.

  She stood at the edge of her territory, the faint blue line brushing against her boots. His gaze was flat, nonjudgmental, maybe even a bit encouraging.

  Or she was seeing what she wanted to see.

  She took the vial out of her pocket. 4 pts in her ledger, 20 pts from the woman sitting at Mox’s table.

  Dan would report this to Mox. He'd report the timing, the pattern, possibly his guess at the reasoning. Mox would receive all of it by the end of day.

  There were probably other people watching and reporting.

  She'd accounted for that. She'd been accounting for it since she opened the ledger last night.

  Mia couldn't hide anything from Mox. The borrowed ledger saw everything she touched, and Dan saw everything she did, and she couldn’t stop using either. Trying to operate in secrecy from Mox was a losing effort, and she'd known it since the first week.

  What she could do was manage what he knew.

  She had a Life Ledger, but he didn’t know what she could or couldn’t purchase.

  He didn’t know if she had an upper limit.

  She tossed the poison and opened her ledger.

  Mia felt it, her stomach turning, her back trying to curl, and her face trying to contort, but like a hand covered in wax, her body didn’t move. Her expression stayed calm, and then shifted into…disappointment, her mind supplied. A marionette on a string. It was uncomfortable and unholy as she lost control of her body.

  Hide deception.

  That’s exactly what it did.

  LIVES CREDITED: 18 POINTS AVAILABLE: 570

  Every ten lives, fifty points were deducted.

  DEBT AMOUNT: 4,999,950 pts

  ***

  Mia heard Nessa before she saw her.

  Not her voice.

  Nessa was quiet today.

  It was her determined little footsteps, and then the soft scatter of something small hitting the inside of a bag.

  Nessa grabbed Mia’s hand and pulled Mia to her territory. She pressed another vile of poison into Mia’s palm. “You’ve got to get used to it.”

  Nessa must have seen the disappointment on her face and thought it was real.

  Mia stopped.

  She didn’t need the lives.

  It would be a new month soon, and these lives wouldn’t count to that total.

  Her fingers tightened around the vial before throwing it into the field of dying or dead.

  They stood together until the poison dissipated.

  Mia walked back to the table and placed her head in her hands, taking deep breaths.

  The spell she was under was silent.

  She didn’t need to deceive anyone now.

  Mia looked up, focusing on Nessa to keep the tears at bay.

  Nessa was crouched over a body on the edge of the field, her back to Mia, her shoulders set with concentration. Her bag was already half-full. She worked without looking away, without hesitating, without the frozen quality that gripped her during the first battlefield. The nausea, the tears, the refusal that had softened eventually into reluctant participation. She worked with determination.

  At some point Nessa had gone from one body to two, and now she worked until her bag was full.

  She hadn't asked Mia for anything. She hadn't asked to be in Mia's territory or to use Mia's pliers or to have her loot recorded first when she came to the table. She had simply found herself a body and gotten on with it.

  Mia watched her for a moment.

  Part of her wanted to trust Nessa. The part of her that still lived in her memories from the Duchy. That girl helped because she thought it was the right thing to do. That girl whispered secrets to friends and talked about the future. That girl died in the frigid waters of a turbulent sea.

  Mia, as she was, couldn’t afford to be trusting.

  There was definitely a ledger or magic out there that could make Nessa confess all of Mia’s secrets. For both their safety and well-being, she’d need to spend the points and get a secrecy contract.

  She pushed out a heavy breath.