Instead, I nod. “Cool. Accountants are... important.”
“Yes. I perform audits on numerical integrity. For taxes.”
“That’s a hell of a line, Richard.”
He squints slightly, as if scanning me for subtext. “It is the truth.”
A silence stretches between us, thick with things unsaid. Behind me, Sammy presses her face to the window, her breath fogging up a little circle of glass. I don’t have to turn around to know she’s making the universal “ask him out” gesture with her fingers and eyebrows.
I clear my throat. “Well. I should probably head inside. Dinner and all.”
He nods once. “Yes. Sustenance protocol.”
I turn. Take a step.
And stop.
“Hey, Richard?”
He lifts his head like a soldier snapping to.
“Thanks. For, you know. Helping with the sprinkler.”
He tilts his head. “It was malfunctioning. It posed a potential hazard.”
“Still.”
Another long pause. Our eyes catch again, and I feel that same electric hiccup in my chest.
“Goodnight, Vanessa Malone.”
“Goodnight, Richard the Accountant.”
I step inside, and for a second—just one—I let myself lean against the closed door, heart thudding like a bass drum at apunk show. Through the curtain, I watch him return to his tools, slow and deliberate.
The man is not normal.
I don’t think I want him to be.
CHAPTER 7
RYCHNE
Human economics is an abomination.
The entire system runs on fragile variables and half-truths, strung together by invisible threads of assumed trust and outdated infrastructure. There are codes and identifications and paper bills, actual paper, printed with the faces of long-dead warlords. I stare at a dollar bill in the browser of my compad, turning it this way and that with a flick of my fingers, and cannot determine how this shredded tree carcass holds any intrinsic value.
Yet it does.
And I need it.
Strength means nothing on this planet unless it can buy groceries and plumbing repairs.
Fortunately, I am not without tools. The compad hums in my palm, softly pulsing against my skin like a second heart. It’s still cracked from the crash, the interface jittery, but the core systems are sound. I initiate a full decrypt on local municipal servers, skimming like a ghost through death records, digital tombstones etched in code. Hundreds of names. Dates. Coordinates. Details.
One, in particular, catches my eye.
Gregory J. Wilmont. Deceased. No surviving relatives. Retired civil engineer. Modest savings. A man who existed just enough to matter, but not enough to leave behind a paper trail that would raise flags.
