# The Reckoning
## Chapter Two
The Bureau of Reckoning did not heat its lower floors. Vant had stopped resenting this in her third year; by her ninth she had learned to think of the cold as a kind of honesty. Warmth was an allocation. Down here, where the ledgers were audited and the dead were priced, no one had decided that clerks were worth the units.
She climbed the stairs because the lift was reserved for senior reckoners and the bereaved, and she was neither this morning. The stairwell smelled of dust and the faint mineral tang of recycled air, the same air the whole city breathed and rebreathed and paid for. Each landing held a window of frosted glass, and behind each window, the muffled sound of someone owing.
Her station was a desk, a stylus, and the ledger-glass that lit when she touched it. She touched it. The assignment from the night before was still there, because she had not been able to make herself clear it, and she did not look at it now either. That was a discipline. You could hold a thing in the corner of your eye for a long time if you refused to turn your head.
A man was waiting for her.
She knew the type before she knew his name — the stoop of someone who had been kept standing, a folder of physical paper held against his chest the way people held things they thought might be taken. Petitioners came down to the cold floors when the upper offices had already said no and they wanted to hear it again from someone who couldn't soften it.
"Reckoner," he said. "Hask. Eron Hask."
"That's not how this works." She sat. The glass warmed under her hand, the only warmth in reach. "You don't bring the death to me. The death finds its way to the ledger and the ledger finds its way to me. If you've come to argue an allocation, the petition office is on the fourth floor."
"They sent me here."
They had not. She knew that the way she knew the cold. But she pulled the record anyway, because refusing would have cost more thought than complying, and because some small unaudited part of her wanted to see what he was carrying.
His wife. Three days dead. The Reckoning had run its arithmetic — it always ran clean, that was the whole terrible elegance of it — and priced her at a sum that left the household water short of two. A daughter. Him. The instrument had decided, in the cold grammar of units, that the dead woman's allocation could not stretch across the living she'd left behind. One of them would have to be unmade from the books.
"I'm not asking you to break the law," Hask said. "I'm asking you to read it again. There's a mistake somewhere. There has to be."
"The Reckoning doesn't make mistakes." She said it the way she said most true things — flatly, because the truth needed no help. "It was built to be merciful. When the water failed, someone had to decide who drank, and they decided not to dec
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