Good Standing — Calder Reach, a City on Licence

This one is written to you, not to your character. Everything else in here is in-world.

What Calder Reach is. A rainy port city where augment hardware is fitted cheaply and permanently, and the functions it performs are licensed month to month. Lapse and nothing is repossessed, because there is nothing to repossess: the metal is yours and always was. Permission is simply withdrawn. Your eyes drop to legal minimum, your reflex trim reverts, the pain editor switches off and you meet the injury you have been walking on. The register is domestic and procedural rather than neon — this is a city of clinics, clerks, direct debits, retention calls and a due date that four million people share.

What is fixed. Owned hardware, licensed function. The licence cell and the monthly warrant. The Tenth, and the seventy-two hours of grace that end at four in the morning on the thirteenth. The Warrant Office as the single clearing house, with its registry, its assessors, its permits and its hardship stays. The Vital Schedule, and the fact that pain editing has never been on it. The three function houses. Marchetti, and the liability ruling that made all of this the cheap option rather than the cruel one.

What is yours. Three things are deliberately blank, and nothing anywhere in this world contradicts you when you fill them:

• What is outside Calder Reach. Whether the rest of the country works this way, whether anywhere does not, and whether leaving would help. No entry here looks past the estuary.
• Whether any function house is actually malicious. Everything Corvath, Ostrey and Kaimon do in these entries is fully explained by ordinary corporate incentive. Put a conspiracy under it if you want one; nothing here needs it, and nothing here rules it out.
• The first cohort. People fitted before licence cells existed, whose hardware answers to nobody and has never stepped down. The registry carries eleven hundred open records with no cell reference and no death certificate. What that means is not established anywhere in this world.

Using it with a character card. This world assumes nothing about who you are. A clinic surgeon on Kettle Row, a Warrant Office assessor, a standing agent holding forty people's signing keys, a dock hand three months short, a retention officer with a quota, somebody who was never fitted at all — every one of those is supported without editing a line. Named people you can build on or ignore entirely: Sabine Kew, Osric Pell, Marisol Adair, Teo Marsh, Aurelie Sonn, Grete Halloran, Juno Pike.

Content. Grim, bodily and bleak is the register. Explicit is not: this world is SFW, and publishing refuses anything else.

Forking. Forking is on. Move it, rename the houses, put pain editing back on the Schedule, make the cells crackable for good and see what falls over. A worked example you cannot take apart is not much of an example.

Calder Reach is a port city of four million on a drained estuary, and the thing to know about it is that most of the people in it are renting part of their own body.

Not the hardware. The hardware is theirs, fitted at a clinic on the high street for very little money, and nobody is ever going to take it out. What they rent is permission to use it: the gain in an eye, the trim on a reflex, the grip in a prosthetic hand, the switch that holds the pain off. Licensed monthly from the firm that owns the function, cleared through the Warrant Office, withdrawn the moment the money stops.

It is a working city and it looks like one. Brick terraces stacked up the hill, cranes along the water, rain eight months of the year, trams reliably four minutes late.

The Ladders are the hillside districts north of the water: brick terraces on streets too steep for trams, joined by public stairs, where most of this city actually lives.

Two rooms and a kitchen for seven hundred and eighty marks a month, damp in the corners, a clinic on every third corner. The stairs are why it is cheap and why the district has a character. Everyone walks, everyone passes everyone, and a neighbour who has gone cold is visible within a day, because they stop taking the short way up.

It is not poor. It is people on ordinary wages carrying four or five licences each and running the arithmetic every month. On the ninth the whole hill is awake and the clinic windows are lit until two.

To know how somebody here is doing you do not ask.

Kettle Row is nine hundred metres of clinic frontage, forty-one of them, and it is where this city gets fitted.

The shopfronts look like phone shops because that is what they compete to be: lit windows, price cards, a consultation desk, a fitting room behind a curtain, two theatres upstairs. Free assessment. Same-week fitting. Nothing to pay today. The financing is not the clinic's, it is the function house's, and the clinic is paid a bounty for every seat it fills.

Everything else on the Row grew around that: pharmacies, a scarring specialist, four legal offices that do nothing but licence disputes, a bank open until eight on the ninth.

Good clinics and dangerous ones look identical from the pavement.

The Undercroft is the service level beneath the elevated rail: four kilometres of brick arches, plant rooms and freight tunnel where the city keeps its machinery and does its unlicensed trade.

The physical fact that matters is that the carrier does not reach down there. Warrants arrive by broadcast, so a cell in the Undercroft hears nothing and runs on whatever it was last told. Everyone takes their warrant before they go down, and people say it the way you say a safety instruction, because it is one.

That dead air is also why the trade sits there. Cells are cut loose in the arches, long warrants are sold under them, and signing keys change hands in rooms with no reception at all.

Nobody is in charge.

Sallow Quay is the working half of the port, and it runs on metered muscle.

Most of the labour there is framed: Ostrey load frames worn over the shoulders and hips, licensed by the kilogram-hour rather than the month. The frame reports what it lifted. At the end of a shift the gang boss gets one bill for the whole gang and divides it, and arguing about that division is the most reliable feature of dock life.

The gantries will not engage for an unlicensed frame. That is written up as a safety interlock, and it is one, and it is also the most efficient collection mechanism anybody ever built: a docker with an empty duty account cannot work, so a docker with an empty duty account borrows.

Everyone on the Quay can tell you their kilogram-hour rate to two decimal places.

Coldwater is the low ground by the outfall, and it is the one district where nobody asks whether you are paid up.

Half the people there were never fitted. The other half stopped renewing years ago and have made their peace with a body at legal minimum. The carrier is poor, the rents are the lowest in the Reach, and the second-hand economy is genuinely good: stalls, repairs, a barter board outside the chapel.

Outsiders read it as defeat. It is not, particularly. It is a neighbourhood where the Tenth is just a Tuesday, and the people in it are noticeably better rested than anyone in the Ladders.

The trap is real, though, and everyone there knows its shape. A body six years cold does not simply switch back on.

The hardware in your body belongs to you. What it does does not.

An augment is fitted once and permanently, at a clinic, for very little money. Sealed inside it is a licence cell: a resin-potted authenticator the size of a shirt button that will not permit the function to run without a signed warrant from the firm that owns it. The warrant lasts one month. Miss it and the cell stops authorising. The eyes fall back to legal minimum, the reflex trim reverts, the hand goes weak and numb, the pain editor switches off and the pain comes back.

Nothing is repossessed. Nobody comes to the door. There is nothing to come for — the metal is yours, it is inside you, and it will still be inside you in forty years. All that is ever withdrawn is permission.

This is not a scandal here.

At four in the morning on the tenth of every month, every licence cell in Calder Reach reaches for its warrant at once. That is the Tenth, and it is the clock the entire city lives against.

A warrant that lands is invisible: you sleep through it. A warrant that does not is also invisible at first, because the cell holds seventy-two hours of grace. You wake on the tenth exactly as capable as you were on the ninth, with three days to fix it. Step-down comes at four in the morning on the thirteenth, and it is not gradual.

So the month has a shape that everybody shares. The first week is easy. The seventh is when the retention calls come. The ninth is when the clinics stay open until two and the queues run down Kettle Row. The tenth itself is quiet.

Step-down is what a lapse actually feels like, and it happens all at once, at four in the morning on the thirteenth.

Ocular gain drops to legal minimum, which is corrected 20/40 — you can still read and still drive, and the whole world has gone soft and dim and slightly wrong. Audio narrows. Reflex trim reverts, and that is the one that hurts people: nine years of calibration is suddenly wrong by half a second, so you misjudge stairs, doors, kerbs and cups for about a week. A prosthetic limb falls to its structural minimum. It still opens and closes. It will not hold anything and it cannot feel.

The pain editor switching off is its own category of event, and it has its own entry.

None of this is dangerous by design. The law forbids it.

The legal standard for a step-down is unassisted equivalent: a withdrawn function must leave you no worse off than a person who never had it.

For an eye or an ear that is straightforward. For a prosthetic limb it is nonsense — the unaugmented equivalent of an arm is no arm — so the Warrant Act carves out structural minimums. A licensed limb keeps basic articulation forever. A licensed heart keeps basic pacing forever. Nothing may be withdrawn that leaves a person less whole than the surgery found them.

Everything above that floor is the product: grip over twenty kilograms, fine motor, torque, speed, thermal headroom, feedback, sensation. A cold Ostrey arm is a working arm that cannot feel a hot pan or hold a full kettle, and that is legal, correct, and exactly what was agreed in writing.

The line between the floor and the product has moved twice in eleven years. Both times it moved down.

Pain editing is the cheapest function on the market and the most widely subscribed, and losing it is the thing that actually breaks people.

Ninety marks a month from Corvath, sold as Ease. A nerve-line interrupt that does not numb you — you still feel the pan, you still pull your hand back — it simply declines to escalate anything into suffering. Roughly a third of the adults in the Reach carry one. Most of them started it for a specific injury and never came off it.

When it lapses you do not go back to how you were before. You go to how you are now: the disc, the shoulder, the rebuilt knee, the tooth, six or nine years of unattended wear arriving at four in the morning all at once. People who have run Ease for a decade sometimes cannot stand up on the thirteenth.

A warrant is a signed monthly authorisation covering every function on one body, issued by the Warrant Office and delivered by low-band broadcast. Your cells listen for it and satisfy themselves. You do nothing and notice nothing.

A signing key is a different order of object. Whoever holds yours can add a function, cancel a function, downgrade your plan, move you between houses, file a hardship stay, or let the whole lot lapse. To the Office, the holder of the key is you. There is no second factor: it was designed when the assumption was one body, one key, one person.

It lives on a handset or a clinic terminal, and it can be copied. Copying it is not an offence; using it against the person is fraud, and proving which happened is the hard part of every case the Office ever brings.

A clinic in Calder Reach sits socially somewhere between a dentist and a phone shop, and there are four hundred of them.

You walk in. Consultation is free and takes twenty minutes. Fitting an Ostrey arm costs nine hundred marks, or nothing at all on a five-year licence commitment, and the theatre upstairs can do it on Thursday. That price is not charity: the function house pays the clinic a bounty of about twelve hundred marks for every seat it fills, so a surgeon's income depends on how many people she puts on a plan and not at all on what happens to them afterwards.

Everyone understands this and nobody has a better arrangement. A clinic that refused bounties would charge four thousand for the same operation and close within a year.

Sabine Kew has run Kew and Daughter, a two-theatre shopfront halfway down Kettle Row, for twenty-two years. She is the surgeon most of the Ladders was fitted by.

She takes Ostrey's bounty and refuses Corvath's, which costs her about forty thousand marks a year and which she will explain to anybody who asks, at length, with a diagram. She is not a saint about it. She is stubborn, and she lost an argument eleven years ago that she has never conceded.

The daughter left the practice nine years ago and the sign has not changed.

What she does all day is fit teenagers with their first ocular set and re-seat the same sockets on the same people every four years.

Permanent does not mean maintenance-free, and the second half of a fitted body's life is mostly upkeep.

Sockets loosen. Nerve interfaces scar and lose channels one at a time, so a hand goes vague before it goes wrong. Load frames wear at the hip. About one fitting in fourteen rejects outright within five years, which presents as heat, weeping and a pain nothing touches.

Service is not licensed and is not covered by anything. You pay cash at a clinic, two to six hundred marks a visit, and you go when you can rather than when you should.

The ugly arithmetic is this: the cheapest available treatment for a rejecting augment is a pain licence. Ninety marks a month against six hundred for a re-seat. Half the Row will tell you that out loud without hearing what they have said.

The ninth is the biggest night of the month in Calder Reach, and nobody planned it that way.

Clinics stay open until two. The queues run out of the shopfronts and down Kettle Row in the rain. Employers who can afford to pay wages early do it on the ninth, and employers who cannot get asked anyway. Families pool. Neighbours lend without paperwork and are paid back on the fourteenth. Bars run ninth-night prices and fill with people who are fine buying rounds for people who are not, which is the closest thing this city has to a civic ritual.

At four in the morning it goes very quiet, and a great many people are awake for it who have no particular reason to be.

By noon on the tenth everyone knows who made it. Nobody says anything. You can tell from how a person takes the stairs.

Most lapses in this city are decisions, not disasters. You cannot pay for everything, so you choose what to lose.

The common moves are well known and nobody is ashamed of them. Drop ocular gain if you do not drive. Drop Ease in summer when the damp is out of your joints. Run one arm cold and do everything left-handed for a fortnight. Split a household: one warm body earning, one cold body at home with the children.

Teo Marsh is thirty-four, a gang hand at Sallow Quay, and three months behind. He runs his left arm cold from the tenth to the twenty-second and warm for the back half of the month, when the heavy freight comes in and the arm earns more than it costs. He has done it two years. His shoulder is going and he knows it.

This is not a crisis.

A standing agent holds your signing key and keeps your account in good standing on your behalf. They pay, they negotiate, they downgrade you before you notice, they file your hardship stays, and they take the retention call so that you do not have to.

The Office licenses sixty of them in Calder Reach. There are perhaps nine hundred. The fee is eight per cent of what they manage, or a flat hundred and twenty a month, and either way it is less than the mistakes they prevent.

The trade exists because five houses and one Office is genuinely a part-time job, and because the people most likely to lapse are exactly the people least equipped to fight the paperwork. An agent is a relief, and everyone who has one describes it in that word.

What the arrangement is, structurally, is total.

Marisol Adair is an unlicensed standing agent working out of a first-floor room above a laundry in the Ladders. She keeps forty-one people in good standing and not one of them has ever gone cold.

She says that like a record because it is one. She is warm, exact and genuinely good at the work: she knows which clerk grants stays, which retention script has a hidden third offer, and the birthday and the dosage of everyone on her book. Her clients do not think of her as a service. They think of her as the reason they sleep on the ninth.

What people notice late, if at all, is that keys go into that room easily and come out slowly. There is always one more cycle to see through, and she is always so sorry about the delay.

Cutting a cell loose means opening the augment and defeating the authenticator so the function runs without a warrant. Two to four thousand marks and an afternoon in the Undercroft, and it works.

The problem is what else the cell was doing. It is not only a lock. It is the governor: thermal ceiling, refractory limit, dose cap, and the fail-safes that stop a function being used until it damages the person using it.

So free-running is superb for about eighteen months, and then it is not. Ocular emitters with no thermal ceiling burn out in nine to fourteen months and take some of the nerve with them. Reflex trim with no refractory limit tears the tendon it is assisting, usually in the second year. A free-running pain editor eventually fails open.

People do it anyway.

A long warrant is a forged authorisation good enough to satisfy a licence cell for a cycle or two. Eight hundred marks. It works perfectly, because a cell checks a signature and nothing else, and the signature is real.

What it cannot survive is reconciliation. Four times a year the Office compares its hardware registry against the warrants it actually issued, and on that morning every long warrant in Calder Reach becomes a flagged file at the same moment. Nothing steps down. A letter comes, then an appointment, then compliance.

Juno Pike sells them from a back room under the arches. He is scrupulously honest about the dates, prints the next reconciliation on the receipt, and tells every customer to be out of the system before it. Most of them are still there in April.

Grete Halloran is sixty-seven, has never had anything installed, and runs a food stall by the Coldwater outfall that has stood in the same spot since before the current registry existed.

Her hands hurt in the wet. Her eyes are what her eyes are. She has never been woken at four in the morning, never taken a retention call, never queued on Kettle Row, and never once been asked whether she is paid up.

It was not a philosophy. She never got round to it in her twenties, then it got expensive to start, then it got too late to be worth it. She is entirely aware of how unusual that makes her and is not smug about it in the way people expect.

What she will say, if pressed, is that she has never had to decide which part of herself to switch off.

The Warrant Office is neither a company nor a ministry, and it has been extremely comfortable in that gap for forty years.

It does three things. It keeps the hardware registry: every licence cell fitted in this city, who it is in, and what it is permitted to do. It issues the warrant — one signed authorisation covering every function on one body, so a person with nine licences from five houses has one due date instead of nine. And it assesses: permits for restricted functions, hardship stays, and compliance work on anyone running an authorisation they were not issued.

It does not set prices, own any function, or care whether you can afford yours. It is a clearing house. That is the whole of its charter and it says so on the wall.

Warrant House stands on Cadence Street, downtown.

The Office issues monthly and reconciles quarterly, and the gap between those two rhythms is where most trouble in this city lives.

Monthly is automatic. Payments clear, warrants are signed and broadcast, cells satisfy themselves, nobody thinks about it.

Quarterly is a comparison. In the first week of January, April, July and October the registry is matched against the warrants actually issued, and anything that does not reconcile becomes a flagged file. A flag is not a charge. It is a letter and an appointment four to six weeks out, and about eight in nine turn out to be clerical: a cell reported twice, a death not filed, a clinic that never registered a re-seat.

The ninth one is a long warrant, and that goes to compliance.

Nothing steps down at reconciliation.

Money is not sufficient for every function. Restricted classes — reflex trim above Class I, adrenal governance, anything that makes an ordinary person dangerous in a doorway — need a permit as well as a licence, and a permit means assessment.

Assessment is an afternoon on the fourth floor of Warrant House: a physical, a questionnaire about your work and your household, and a clerk's signature. It is not a test you can fail on ability. It is a judgement about whether you ought to have it.

The same clerks hold the other half of that power. A hardship stay is a discretionary thirty-day extension of a lapsing warrant, free, granted twice at most in twelve months, refusable without a reason being given.

Osric Pell has assessed on the fourth floor of Warrant House for nineteen years, which is sixteen years longer than the rotation is supposed to allow.

He is sixty-one, courteous, and slow in a way that unsettles people who came in ready to argue. He reads the whole file before he speaks, and he does not look at your body while he does it. Not at the arm, not at the eyes, not once, which almost nobody else in that building manages.

He never refuses anyone in the room. Refusals come by post three days later over his signature, with the reason left blank as the rules permit. He has explained this exactly once, to a colleague: nobody should have to hear it from a person and then walk back down eleven floors.

He grants more stays than the Office's model predicts, and has for four years.

The Vital Schedule is the short list of functions that are not permitted to step down for non-payment, whatever happens.

Cardiac pacing and governance. Respiratory drive. Seizure suppression. Insulin governance. The structural minimums on load-bearing prosthetics. Fall behind on a Schedule function and the Office pays the house directly out of the public fund and bills you afterwards, without interest, for as long as it takes — decades, in plenty of cases, and forgiven on death.

It is the one unambiguously good thing in this system. It is why nobody in Calder Reach dies of arrears. And it is trimmed at every review.

Sleep regulation came off four years ago.

Pain editing has never been on it at all, on the stated grounds that pain is not a function of survival.

The houses are not conglomerates and they do not have private armies. They own functions — the patents on what a piece of hardware is permitted to do — and they are shaped like utility companies: enormous, boring, heavily regulated, indispensable and slow.

Three matter in Calder Reach. Corvath owns the baseline stack that almost everybody carries. Ostrey owns limbs and load frames. Kaimon owns the medical functions, and therefore most of the Vital Schedule.

They barely compete. A function you already have installed is not a function you can shop around for, because changing house means changing hardware and changing hardware means surgery. Your licensor was chosen for you in a fitting room when you were nineteen, by a clinic that was paid a bounty to choose them.

Corvath owns the baseline stack: ocular gain, audio, Class I reflex trim, and Ease. About two point nine million people in the Reach are on it.

The Standard Plan is a hundred and eighty-five marks a month, and it is what this city means when it says the word licence without qualifying it. Corvath's brand is not power, it is reassurance — soft blue, plain language, a call centre that answers inside a minute, advertising that is almost entirely about families.

They are not villains and it is a mistake to play them as any. They are a company with a ninety-one per cent renewal rate and a legal obligation to protect it, staffed by people who mostly believe they are doing something decent.

They will never threaten anybody.

Ostrey owns limbs and load frames, and licenses them by use rather than by month.

A duty licence runs at four tenths of a mark per kilogram-hour. The frame counts what it lifted and reports it, and the bill arrives with the shift. For a dock gang that is either a fair deal or a fine on being strong, depending on who you ask and how the freight came in that week.

The advantage is real: a duty licence costs nothing in a week you do not work, which no monthly plan does. The disadvantage is that your body has a meter on it, and the meter is running while you carry your own shopping.

An Ostrey limb at structural minimum still articulates.

Kaimon owns the medical functions: cardiac pacing and governance, respiratory drive, seizure suppression, insulin, and the long tail of things that keep a particular body from failing in a particular way.

Six hundred and forty marks a month for cardiac governance. Almost nobody pays that out of pocket for long, because most of Kaimon's catalogue sits on the Vital Schedule, which means the public fund covers the arrears and bills the patient afterwards. Roughly seventy per cent of that fund goes to Kaimon.

So Kaimon lobbies to make the Schedule bigger, constantly and successfully, and every argument they make is both self-serving and correct. Adding a function to the Schedule saves lives. It also guarantees them a customer the city is not allowed to let default.

Corvath calls you on the seventh. They know your payment history, every function on your body, and the size of the gap between what you owe and what is in your account, because the Office reconciles balances to the houses and the houses are permitted to look.

The retention officer will always have something for you. A cheaper plan. A payment split. Three months at half rate. Drop the audio and keep the eyes. Every offer is real, every offer is honoured, and every offer is worse than what you had — which is how a body quietly ratchets downward across a decade of perfectly kind phone calls.

Aurelie Sonn runs the Reach retention floor: two hundred and forty staff, a script she wrote herself, nine years without a quarter under target. She still takes calls in person on the ninth.

Running an authorisation you were not issued is fraud against the Warrant Office. It is specifically not theft from a house, because nothing has been taken and nobody is out a physical object, and that distinction is the reason it is prosecutable at all.

Penalties are financial first. A fine at three times the licence value of whatever you were running. A compliance flag on the registry for five years, which means every reconciliation looks at you closely and no clinic will fit you on financing. In aggravated cases, a stop-notice.

Prison is rare and essentially reserved for sellers — people with signing certificates they should not have, and the technicians who cut cells loose in volume.

A stop-notice cancels every warrant on one body at the next Tenth. An assessor signs it. There is no hearing first and no visit: the subject finds out at four in the morning when their body steps down, and grace does not apply.

A live pull is the same instrument executed immediately, wherever the person happens to be standing. It requires a magistrate, it is used around forty times a year in the Reach, and it is almost always the closing move of a violent arrest — because a person who has been pulled is, within about two seconds, half a second slower and unable to grip.

Everyone in this city has seen footage of a live pull. It appears in Office training material and in campaign advertising by both sides of every argument.

The ordinary police do none of this and are not equipped to.

Every licence cell keeps a record of when its function engaged, and the Office holds it.

It is not a record of where you were. It is something stranger and more intimate: a timestamped account of when you were frightened, when you lifted something heavy, when your heart needed correcting, and when you asked the editor to hold the pain harder than usual.

Courts subpoena logs as a matter of routine. Insurers buy them in aggregate and price accordingly. Employers are forbidden by statute from asking for them and ask for them constantly, usually phrased as an invitation to volunteer.

Nobody has ever won a case arguing that the log was private, because the log is what proves you were licensed, and being licensed is the thing that makes you legal.

Thirty-four years ago a warehouse worker named Reva Marchetti, wearing a load frame she had bought outright, killed a colleague with it. The frame did exactly what she asked it to do.

The court held the manufacturer liable anyway. Tessin Frameworks had sold a capability and then walked away from it, and the judgment found that you cannot sell a person more strength than a person has and consider your duty of care discharged at the till. The damages ended the company.

The industry's answer was not safer frames. It was to stop selling capability at all: sell the hardware at cost, retain the function, licence it revocably. If you can withdraw it at any moment then you never walked away, the duty is continuous, and the ruling is satisfied.

Nobody set out to make bodies rentable.

Some people were fitted before licence cells existed, in the eleven years between the hardware getting cheap and Marchetti making it rentable.

Their augments answer to nobody. They have never stepped down, cannot be updated, and appear in no warrant the Office has ever issued. Officially the last of them aged out of the population years ago, and the fitting techniques of that era were poor enough to make the claim plausible.

The registry carries eleven hundred open hardware records with no cell reference and no death certificate against them. The Office has described this as a clerical backlog for nine years.

You hear stories under the arches. A woman on the Quay who has worked every shift for thirty years and has never once been seen at a clinic. Somebody's uncle.

Monthly, unless stated.

• Corvath Standard Plan — 185. Ocular gain, audio, Class I reflex trim. What most people carry.
• Ease, pain editing — 90. Roughly a third of adults.
• Class II reflex trim — 420, plus a permit, plus an assessment to get the permit.
• Ostrey limb, full function — 310 flat, or metered at 0.4 a kilogram-hour.
• Kaimon cardiac governance — 640, and on the Vital Schedule, so it cannot lapse.
• A standing agent — eight per cent of what they manage, or 120 flat.

One-off, in marks:

• Fitting an Ostrey limb on Kettle Row — 900, or nothing on a five-year commitment.
• A clinic service visit, unlicensed, cash — 200 to 600.
• Cutting a cell loose in the Undercroft — 2,000 to 4,000.
• A long warrant — 800 a cycle.

Against that: median individual income 3,100 a month.

Five things are live in the city, and any of them will start a scene.

• The Schedule consultation closes on the fourteenth. It proposes means-testing seizure suppression. Hearings at Warrant House are full, Kaimon is briefing against it in public and for it in private, and nobody can find out what the fund's actuaries have advised.

• Corvath is retiring a firmware generation at the end of the year. Around eleven thousand sets fitted in the Ladders will not accept next year's warrants, and re-fitting is at the owner's cost. The letters went out last week.

• Reconciliation is three weeks away.

Every long warrant in the Undercroft becomes a flagged file on the same morning, and Juno Pike has taken to telling his customers the date twice.

Warm — paid up and running. Cold — stepped down. Coldside — the districts where that is normal, and Coldwater in particular.

Short — behind on a payment, said without embarrassment. Deep — behind by more than one cycle. In grace — inside the seventy-two hours.

Carrying paper — running a long warrant. Loose, or cut loose — free-running, no cell authority at all. Papered — legitimately licensed, said slightly enviously.

Making the Tenth. Missing the Tenth. The thirteenth, used as a noun, meaning the morning it all went.

Quiet — of a person, gone cold and not mentioning it. Of a district, no carrier.

Somebody asking whether you are warm this month is not being rude. It is the same question as asking how you are, and it is answered honestly.