The Arithmetic of Borrowed Time
The Vane estate ledger sat open on the rosewood desk, its pages yellowed and soft as old cloth. I had been staring at it for three hours, and the numbers were beginning to blur into a single, accusing smear. Outside the window, the afternoon light had shifted from gold to amber to the dull bronze of early evening, and I had not once looked up to notice the change.
Kaelen stood by the fireplace, arms crossed, watching me with the patience of a man who had learned long ago that silence was its own form of interrogation. He had not spoken in forty minutes. I found that I did not mind. Words were inefficient when the numbers were doing the talking.
“Your family’s accounts are remarkably clean,” he said finally, breaking the quiet.
“That is because they are not my family,” I replied, without looking up. “And clean is not the same as honest. Clean is just what you see on the surface. Honest is what survives an audit.”
I turned the page. The next entry was dated eleven years ago, a transfer of two hundred soul-credits from the estate of Seraphina Vane to the Imperial Treasury, marked *“voluntary contribution to the Crown’s Solvency Fund.”* I had seen this line before, in the original arrest warrant that had nearly sent me to the reclamation chambers. The warrant had listed it as evidence of treason—a noblewoman funneling her family’s wealth into the Emperor’s pockets in exchange for political favor.
But the ledger told a different story. The contribution had been made on the same day that Seraphina’s father, Lord Marcus Vane, had been found dead in his study. The official cause had been heart failure. The unofficial cause, according to the journal I had found in the hidden compartment of Seraphina’s wardrobe, was a glass of wine laced with nightshade.
I ran my finger down the column of figures. The contribution had been recorded twice. Once in the Vane estate ledger, and once in the Imperial Treasury’s receipt book. But the receipt book showed the credits as *“reclaimed from the estate of a deceased debtor,”* which was a very different thing from a voluntary contribution.
“Kaelen,” I said, my voice flat. “Come look at this.”
He crossed the room in three strides, his boots making no sound on the thick carpet. I pointed to the two entries. He leaned over my shoulder, close enough that I could smell the faint trace of cedar and ink that clung to his coat. He studied the numbers for a long moment, then let out a slow breath.
“Double-counted,” he said. “The same two hundred credits, recorded as both a contribution and a reclamation.”
“Which means the Treasury received four hundred credits’ worth of value from a single two-hundred-credit transaction,” I said. “The difference is pure profit. Minted from nothing.”
“Or the estate was charged twice,” Kaelen said. “Once as a contribution, once as a debt.”
I shook my head. “No. Look at the dates. Both entries are dated the same day. The contribution was recorded at nine in the morning. The reclamation was recorded at four in the afternoon. If the Treasury had reclaimed the credits as a debt, the estate would have shown a negative balance by the end of the day. It did not. The estate ledger shows a balance of three thousand, four hundred and twelve credits at close of business.”
Kaelen was quiet for a moment. Then he said, “So the Treasury recorded the same credits twice. Once coming in, once going out. And the going-out entry was marked as a reclamation, which means the credits were returned to the Crown’s general fund.”
“Which means the Crown made a profit of two hundred credits from a dead man’s estate,” I said. “And no one noticed because the estate ledger and the Treasury receipt book are maintained by different departments, and neither department talks to the other.”
“That is not an accident,” Kaelen said. “That is a design.”
I closed the ledger and set my hand on its cover. The leather was warm from the afternoon sun, and I could feel the faint embossing of the Vane crest beneath my palm—a hawk clutching a scroll, the motto *“Veritas in Numeris”* etched beneath it. Truth in numbers. The irony was not lost on me.
“We need to check my own balance,” I said.
Kaelen’s expression did not change, but I saw his jaw tighten. “Seraphina—”
“No,” I said, cutting him off. “I have been avoiding this for three days. Every time I try to access the Treasury’s records for my own account, I find a reason to look at something else. The Marrow investigation. The ghost citizens. The duplicate entries. But the one number I have not verified is the one that matters most.”
I stood up, walked to the window, and looked out at the Vane estate grounds. The gardens were overgrown, the hedges untrimmed, the fountain dry. Seraphina’s father had been dead for eleven years, and her mother had followed him six years later, leaving the estate to a daughter who had spent her inheritance on bribes and political favors. The house was a monument to decay, and I was its new caretaker.
“When I woke up in this body,” I said, “I assumed the execution warrant was a mistake. The math error in the debt line was too obvious to be real. But I never asked the question I should have asked.”
“Which is?” Kaelen said.
“Why was Seraphina Vane scheduled for execution in the first place?”
I turned back to face him. He was standing very still, his hands clasped behind his back, his eyes fixed on mine. He knew the answer. I could see it in the way he held himself, the careful stillness of a man who was about to deliver bad news and wanted to make sure he did not flinch.
“Her balance was negative,” he said. “Three hundred and twelve credits in arrears. The warrant was issued because the Treasury’s automated reclamation system flagged her account for immediate collection.”
“Three hundred and twelve credits,” I repeated. “That is a small debt. A rounding error, for a noble house. Why would the Treasury execute a debtor over three hundred credits when the estate itself is worth tens of thousands?”
Kaelen hesitated. Then he said, “Because the balance was not three hundred and twelve credits when the warrant was issued. It was three hundred and twelve credits *after* the estate’s assets were liquidated. The original debt was much larger.”
I felt a cold knot form in my stomach. “How much larger?”
“I do not know,” Kaelen said. “The records were sealed by order of the Chancellor’s office. But I can tell you this: the debt was not incurred by Seraphina. It was inherited.”
“Inherited,” I said. “From her father.”
Kaelen nodded. “Lord Marcus Vane died with a negative balance of forty-seven thousand credits. The debt passed to his heir. Seraphina spent eleven years trying to pay it down, but the interest alone was more than the estate could generate. She was never going to clear it. The Treasury knew that. They were just waiting for the balance to cross the threshold that triggered automatic reclamation.”
I sat down heavily in the chair behind the desk. The numbers were spinning in my head, rearranging themselves into patterns I did not like. Forty-seven thousand credits. That was not a debt. That was a sentence.
“Show me the records,” I said.
“I cannot,” Kaelen said. “They are sealed.”
“Then unseal them.”
“I do not have the authority.”
“Then find someone who does.”
Kaelen was silent for a long moment. Then he walked to the desk, pulled out the chair opposite mine, and sat down. He placed his hands flat on the surface, palms down, and looked at me with an expression I could not quite read.
“There is another way,” he said. “But it is not legal.”
I raised an eyebrow. “I am a dead woman living in a borrowed body, investigating a conspiracy that reaches the Imperial throne. I stopped caring about legal a long time ago.”
Kaelen almost smiled. It was the first time I had seen him do so, and it transformed his face in a way that was almost unsettling. “The Treasury maintains a secondary ledger. A backup, stored in the basement of the Imperial Archives. It is not connected to the main system, and it is not subject to the same sealing protocols. If we can access it, we can see the original entries for your father’s account.”
“And how do we access it?”
“We break in.”
I considered this for a moment. The Imperial Archives were guarded by a combination of magical wards and human sentinels. Breaking in would be difficult, dangerous, and almost certainly fatal if we were caught. But the alternative was to sit here, watching my own balance tick down toward zero, waiting for the Treasury’s automated systems to decide that I was no longer worth the trouble of keeping alive.
“What is the penalty for unauthorized access to the Treasury’s backup ledger?” I asked.
“Soul-reclamation,” Kaelen said. “Immediate and without appeal.”
“And what is the penalty for not accessing it?”
“The same,” he said. “Just slower.”
I stood up, walked to the window, and looked out at the dying garden. The sun had set, and the sky was a deep, bruised purple. Somewhere in the distance, a bell was tolling the evening hour, its sound carrying across the rooftops like a warning.
“We do it tonight,” I said.
Kaelen rose from his chair. “Tonight is not enough time to prepare. The Archives are warded. I will need to disable the alarms, and that requires a specific set of tools that I do not currently possess.”
“Then we do it tomorrow night,” I said. “But we do it. And in the meantime, I want you to find out everything you can about my father’s debt. Who authorized it. Who signed off on the interest rate. Who benefited from his death.”
Kaelen nodded. “I will do what I can.”
“And Kaelen,” I said, turning to face him. “I want you to check one more thing.”
“What?”
“My mother’s account,” I said. “She died six years ago. I want to know what her balance was when she died, and what happened to it after.”
Kaelen’s eyes narrowed. “Why?”
“Because my father died with a negative balance of forty-seven thousand credits,” I said. “And my mother died six years later. If the debt passed to her, she would have been paying it down for six years. But the estate ledger shows no payments to the Treasury during that period. No interest payments. No principal. Nothing.”
“So either she was not paying the debt,” Kaelen said slowly, “or the debt was not hers to pay.”
“Exactly,” I said. “And if the debt was not hers to pay, then it was not Seraphina’s either. Which means the warrant for her execution was based on a fraudulent claim.”
I walked back to the desk and picked up the ledger. The numbers were still there, still accusing, still demanding to be understood. But now I had a new question to ask them.
“Someone created this debt,” I said. “Someone inflated my father’s balance, drove him into bankruptcy, and then collected the interest from his widow and daughter for seventeen years. That is not a financial transaction. That is a weapon.”
Kaelen was quiet for a moment. Then he said, “You are asking me to help you investigate the death of your own father.”
“I am asking you to help me investigate the murder of a man I never met,” I said. “A man whose death was used to enslave his family for two decades. A man whose killer is still walking free, probably in the halls of the Imperial Treasury itself.”
I closed the ledger and set it aside. “I am not doing this for revenge, Kaelen. I am doing this because the numbers do not add up. And when the numbers do not add up, someone is lying. I intend to find out who.”
Kaelen looked at me for a long moment. Then he reached into his coat, pulled out a small leather-bound notebook, and placed it on the desk between us.
“My personal audit notes,” he said. “Everything I have found so far on the Marrow case, the ghost citizens, and the Treasury’s deficit. I was going to wait until we had more evidence before sharing it with you. But I think you need to see it now.”
I picked up the notebook and opened it. The pages were filled with Kaelen’s precise, angular handwriting, each entry dated and cross-referenced. I flipped through the first few pages, then stopped at an entry that made my breath catch in my throat.
*“Vane, Marcus. Died 11 years ago. Cause: heart failure. Balance at death: -47,000 credits. Creditor: House Vex. Interest rate: 12% compounded monthly. Total paid by estate: 0. Total paid by widow: 0. Total paid by heir: 0. Balance today: -47,000 credits. No payments ever recorded. No interest ever accrued. The debt is static. It has not grown. It has not shrunk. It has simply existed, unchanged, for eleven years.”*
I looked up at Kaelen. “The debt is frozen.”
“Yes,” he said. “It has been frozen since the day your father died. No interest. No payments. No activity of any kind. It is a number on a page, nothing more.”
“Then why was Seraphina scheduled for execution?” I asked. “If the debt was frozen, her balance should have been zero. She should have been solvent.”
Kaelen’s expression was grim. “Because the freeze was lifted three days before the warrant was issued. Someone unfroze the debt, applied eleven years of accrued interest, and triggered the reclamation order. They did it deliberately, Seraphina. They wanted her dead.”
I stared at him, the pieces falling into place with a sickening clarity. The math error in the warrant. The duplicate entries. The frozen debt that had suddenly become active. It was not a mistake. It was a trap.
And I had walked into it the moment I opened my eyes in this body.
“Who has the authority to lift a freeze on a noble’s account?” I asked.
Kaelen did not answer immediately. He looked down at the notebook, then back at me, and I saw something flicker in his eyes—fear, or maybe regret.
“Only one person,” he said. “The Chancellor of the Exchequer.”
Lord Vex.
I sat back in my chair, the weight of the name settling over me like a shroud. The Chancellor had summoned us once already, offering me a deal: drop the audit, and I would get my soul-credit balance restored. I had refused. And now I knew why he had made the offer in the first place.
He had been the one who had condemned me.
“We need to move faster,” I said. “Tomorrow night is too late. We go tonight.”
Kaelen opened his mouth to argue, then closed it. He looked at the notebook in my hands, at the frozen debt that had become a death sentence, and nodded.
“Tonight,” he said. “I will get the tools.”
He turned and walked toward the door, then paused with his hand on the frame. “Seraphina,” he said, without turning around. “Whatever we find in that archive, you need to be prepared for it. The truth is not always a comfort.”
“I have never found comfort in the truth,” I said. “I have only found clarity. And clarity is enough.”
Kaelen nodded and disappeared into the hallway, his footsteps fading into the silence of the dying house.
I sat alone in the study, the ledger open on the desk, the notebook in my hands, and the numbers spinning in my head. Somewhere in the basement of the Imperial Archives, the truth was waiting for me. It was written in ink and magic, in debits and credits, in the cold arithmetic of borrowed time.
And I was going to find it, even if it killed me.
Especially if it killed me.
Kaelen stood by the fireplace, arms crossed, watching me with the patience of a man who had learned long ago that silence was its own form of interrogation. He had not spoken in forty minutes. I found that I did not mind. Words were inefficient when the numbers were doing the talking.
“Your family’s accounts are remarkably clean,” he said finally, breaking the quiet.
“That is because they are not my family,” I replied, without looking up. “And clean is not the same as honest. Clean is just what you see on the surface. Honest is what survives an audit.”
I turned the page. The next entry was dated eleven years ago, a transfer of two hundred soul-credits from the estate of Seraphina Vane to the Imperial Treasury, marked *“voluntary contribution to the Crown’s Solvency Fund.”* I had seen this line before, in the original arrest warrant that had nearly sent me to the reclamation chambers. The warrant had listed it as evidence of treason—a noblewoman funneling her family’s wealth into the Emperor’s pockets in exchange for political favor.
But the ledger told a different story. The contribution had been made on the same day that Seraphina’s father, Lord Marcus Vane, had been found dead in his study. The official cause had been heart failure. The unofficial cause, according to the journal I had found in the hidden compartment of Seraphina’s wardrobe, was a glass of wine laced with nightshade.
I ran my finger down the column of figures. The contribution had been recorded twice. Once in the Vane estate ledger, and once in the Imperial Treasury’s receipt book. But the receipt book showed the credits as *“reclaimed from the estate of a deceased debtor,”* which was a very different thing from a voluntary contribution.
“Kaelen,” I said, my voice flat. “Come look at this.”
He crossed the room in three strides, his boots making no sound on the thick carpet. I pointed to the two entries. He leaned over my shoulder, close enough that I could smell the faint trace of cedar and ink that clung to his coat. He studied the numbers for a long moment, then let out a slow breath.
“Double-counted,” he said. “The same two hundred credits, recorded as both a contribution and a reclamation.”
“Which means the Treasury received four hundred credits’ worth of value from a single two-hundred-credit transaction,” I said. “The difference is pure profit. Minted from nothing.”
“Or the estate was charged twice,” Kaelen said. “Once as a contribution, once as a debt.”
I shook my head. “No. Look at the dates. Both entries are dated the same day. The contribution was recorded at nine in the morning. The reclamation was recorded at four in the afternoon. If the Treasury had reclaimed the credits as a debt, the estate would have shown a negative balance by the end of the day. It did not. The estate ledger shows a balance of three thousand, four hundred and twelve credits at close of business.”
Kaelen was quiet for a moment. Then he said, “So the Treasury recorded the same credits twice. Once coming in, once going out. And the going-out entry was marked as a reclamation, which means the credits were returned to the Crown’s general fund.”
“Which means the Crown made a profit of two hundred credits from a dead man’s estate,” I said. “And no one noticed because the estate ledger and the Treasury receipt book are maintained by different departments, and neither department talks to the other.”
“That is not an accident,” Kaelen said. “That is a design.”
I closed the ledger and set my hand on its cover. The leather was warm from the afternoon sun, and I could feel the faint embossing of the Vane crest beneath my palm—a hawk clutching a scroll, the motto *“Veritas in Numeris”* etched beneath it. Truth in numbers. The irony was not lost on me.
“We need to check my own balance,” I said.
Kaelen’s expression did not change, but I saw his jaw tighten. “Seraphina—”
“No,” I said, cutting him off. “I have been avoiding this for three days. Every time I try to access the Treasury’s records for my own account, I find a reason to look at something else. The Marrow investigation. The ghost citizens. The duplicate entries. But the one number I have not verified is the one that matters most.”
I stood up, walked to the window, and looked out at the Vane estate grounds. The gardens were overgrown, the hedges untrimmed, the fountain dry. Seraphina’s father had been dead for eleven years, and her mother had followed him six years later, leaving the estate to a daughter who had spent her inheritance on bribes and political favors. The house was a monument to decay, and I was its new caretaker.
“When I woke up in this body,” I said, “I assumed the execution warrant was a mistake. The math error in the debt line was too obvious to be real. But I never asked the question I should have asked.”
“Which is?” Kaelen said.
“Why was Seraphina Vane scheduled for execution in the first place?”
I turned back to face him. He was standing very still, his hands clasped behind his back, his eyes fixed on mine. He knew the answer. I could see it in the way he held himself, the careful stillness of a man who was about to deliver bad news and wanted to make sure he did not flinch.
“Her balance was negative,” he said. “Three hundred and twelve credits in arrears. The warrant was issued because the Treasury’s automated reclamation system flagged her account for immediate collection.”
“Three hundred and twelve credits,” I repeated. “That is a small debt. A rounding error, for a noble house. Why would the Treasury execute a debtor over three hundred credits when the estate itself is worth tens of thousands?”
Kaelen hesitated. Then he said, “Because the balance was not three hundred and twelve credits when the warrant was issued. It was three hundred and twelve credits *after* the estate’s assets were liquidated. The original debt was much larger.”
I felt a cold knot form in my stomach. “How much larger?”
“I do not know,” Kaelen said. “The records were sealed by order of the Chancellor’s office. But I can tell you this: the debt was not incurred by Seraphina. It was inherited.”
“Inherited,” I said. “From her father.”
Kaelen nodded. “Lord Marcus Vane died with a negative balance of forty-seven thousand credits. The debt passed to his heir. Seraphina spent eleven years trying to pay it down, but the interest alone was more than the estate could generate. She was never going to clear it. The Treasury knew that. They were just waiting for the balance to cross the threshold that triggered automatic reclamation.”
I sat down heavily in the chair behind the desk. The numbers were spinning in my head, rearranging themselves into patterns I did not like. Forty-seven thousand credits. That was not a debt. That was a sentence.
“Show me the records,” I said.
“I cannot,” Kaelen said. “They are sealed.”
“Then unseal them.”
“I do not have the authority.”
“Then find someone who does.”
Kaelen was silent for a long moment. Then he walked to the desk, pulled out the chair opposite mine, and sat down. He placed his hands flat on the surface, palms down, and looked at me with an expression I could not quite read.
“There is another way,” he said. “But it is not legal.”
I raised an eyebrow. “I am a dead woman living in a borrowed body, investigating a conspiracy that reaches the Imperial throne. I stopped caring about legal a long time ago.”
Kaelen almost smiled. It was the first time I had seen him do so, and it transformed his face in a way that was almost unsettling. “The Treasury maintains a secondary ledger. A backup, stored in the basement of the Imperial Archives. It is not connected to the main system, and it is not subject to the same sealing protocols. If we can access it, we can see the original entries for your father’s account.”
“And how do we access it?”
“We break in.”
I considered this for a moment. The Imperial Archives were guarded by a combination of magical wards and human sentinels. Breaking in would be difficult, dangerous, and almost certainly fatal if we were caught. But the alternative was to sit here, watching my own balance tick down toward zero, waiting for the Treasury’s automated systems to decide that I was no longer worth the trouble of keeping alive.
“What is the penalty for unauthorized access to the Treasury’s backup ledger?” I asked.
“Soul-reclamation,” Kaelen said. “Immediate and without appeal.”
“And what is the penalty for not accessing it?”
“The same,” he said. “Just slower.”
I stood up, walked to the window, and looked out at the dying garden. The sun had set, and the sky was a deep, bruised purple. Somewhere in the distance, a bell was tolling the evening hour, its sound carrying across the rooftops like a warning.
“We do it tonight,” I said.
Kaelen rose from his chair. “Tonight is not enough time to prepare. The Archives are warded. I will need to disable the alarms, and that requires a specific set of tools that I do not currently possess.”
“Then we do it tomorrow night,” I said. “But we do it. And in the meantime, I want you to find out everything you can about my father’s debt. Who authorized it. Who signed off on the interest rate. Who benefited from his death.”
Kaelen nodded. “I will do what I can.”
“And Kaelen,” I said, turning to face him. “I want you to check one more thing.”
“What?”
“My mother’s account,” I said. “She died six years ago. I want to know what her balance was when she died, and what happened to it after.”
Kaelen’s eyes narrowed. “Why?”
“Because my father died with a negative balance of forty-seven thousand credits,” I said. “And my mother died six years later. If the debt passed to her, she would have been paying it down for six years. But the estate ledger shows no payments to the Treasury during that period. No interest payments. No principal. Nothing.”
“So either she was not paying the debt,” Kaelen said slowly, “or the debt was not hers to pay.”
“Exactly,” I said. “And if the debt was not hers to pay, then it was not Seraphina’s either. Which means the warrant for her execution was based on a fraudulent claim.”
I walked back to the desk and picked up the ledger. The numbers were still there, still accusing, still demanding to be understood. But now I had a new question to ask them.
“Someone created this debt,” I said. “Someone inflated my father’s balance, drove him into bankruptcy, and then collected the interest from his widow and daughter for seventeen years. That is not a financial transaction. That is a weapon.”
Kaelen was quiet for a moment. Then he said, “You are asking me to help you investigate the death of your own father.”
“I am asking you to help me investigate the murder of a man I never met,” I said. “A man whose death was used to enslave his family for two decades. A man whose killer is still walking free, probably in the halls of the Imperial Treasury itself.”
I closed the ledger and set it aside. “I am not doing this for revenge, Kaelen. I am doing this because the numbers do not add up. And when the numbers do not add up, someone is lying. I intend to find out who.”
Kaelen looked at me for a long moment. Then he reached into his coat, pulled out a small leather-bound notebook, and placed it on the desk between us.
“My personal audit notes,” he said. “Everything I have found so far on the Marrow case, the ghost citizens, and the Treasury’s deficit. I was going to wait until we had more evidence before sharing it with you. But I think you need to see it now.”
I picked up the notebook and opened it. The pages were filled with Kaelen’s precise, angular handwriting, each entry dated and cross-referenced. I flipped through the first few pages, then stopped at an entry that made my breath catch in my throat.
*“Vane, Marcus. Died 11 years ago. Cause: heart failure. Balance at death: -47,000 credits. Creditor: House Vex. Interest rate: 12% compounded monthly. Total paid by estate: 0. Total paid by widow: 0. Total paid by heir: 0. Balance today: -47,000 credits. No payments ever recorded. No interest ever accrued. The debt is static. It has not grown. It has not shrunk. It has simply existed, unchanged, for eleven years.”*
I looked up at Kaelen. “The debt is frozen.”
“Yes,” he said. “It has been frozen since the day your father died. No interest. No payments. No activity of any kind. It is a number on a page, nothing more.”
“Then why was Seraphina scheduled for execution?” I asked. “If the debt was frozen, her balance should have been zero. She should have been solvent.”
Kaelen’s expression was grim. “Because the freeze was lifted three days before the warrant was issued. Someone unfroze the debt, applied eleven years of accrued interest, and triggered the reclamation order. They did it deliberately, Seraphina. They wanted her dead.”
I stared at him, the pieces falling into place with a sickening clarity. The math error in the warrant. The duplicate entries. The frozen debt that had suddenly become active. It was not a mistake. It was a trap.
And I had walked into it the moment I opened my eyes in this body.
“Who has the authority to lift a freeze on a noble’s account?” I asked.
Kaelen did not answer immediately. He looked down at the notebook, then back at me, and I saw something flicker in his eyes—fear, or maybe regret.
“Only one person,” he said. “The Chancellor of the Exchequer.”
Lord Vex.
I sat back in my chair, the weight of the name settling over me like a shroud. The Chancellor had summoned us once already, offering me a deal: drop the audit, and I would get my soul-credit balance restored. I had refused. And now I knew why he had made the offer in the first place.
He had been the one who had condemned me.
“We need to move faster,” I said. “Tomorrow night is too late. We go tonight.”
Kaelen opened his mouth to argue, then closed it. He looked at the notebook in my hands, at the frozen debt that had become a death sentence, and nodded.
“Tonight,” he said. “I will get the tools.”
He turned and walked toward the door, then paused with his hand on the frame. “Seraphina,” he said, without turning around. “Whatever we find in that archive, you need to be prepared for it. The truth is not always a comfort.”
“I have never found comfort in the truth,” I said. “I have only found clarity. And clarity is enough.”
Kaelen nodded and disappeared into the hallway, his footsteps fading into the silence of the dying house.
I sat alone in the study, the ledger open on the desk, the notebook in my hands, and the numbers spinning in my head. Somewhere in the basement of the Imperial Archives, the truth was waiting for me. It was written in ink and magic, in debits and credits, in the cold arithmetic of borrowed time.
And I was going to find it, even if it killed me.
Especially if it killed me.