Chương 34: The Slave Market

Eight o'clock came and Domrek was already at the corner. He'd traded his arena clothes for something plain and had left his shield somewhere. He was still the most recognizable person on the street, because there was no arrangement of clothing that made Domrek Ironhide unrecognizable, but at least he wasn't carrying an eight-hundred-weight piece of reinforced metal. He looked at Kaito when he arrived, checked something in his expression, and turned south without saying anything.

The entrance was where Kaito had been told. Blue marks on the door frame, the specific shade of blue that the Compact used for officially-unofficial venues — not registered, not illegal enough to close, just marked so the right people knew what it was. The guard at the door had the posture of someone professionally not paying attention. He stepped aside when Domrek approached without either of them acknowledging the other. They went in. The first level was commercial. That was the part Kaito hadn't expected.

Offices. A records counter with two clerks behind it, one handling a ledger and one at a System terminal. A board on the wall with entries that read, in the System-layer, as standard commerce: acquisitions, holdings, transfer values, maintenance costs.

The language was the language of inventory management, which Kaito knew because he had written the inventory management system for Eirath Online in his fourth year at Olympus Games, sitting next to his lead designer who said the world needed economic texture to feel real. The language had felt abstract then. He'd been proud of how efficient it was. He read the board now and recognized every term. The categories he'd chosen. The value tiers he'd assigned. The transfer protocols.

All of it running exactly as designed, forty feet underground in a city he'd built, on real people, in real time.

"Second level," Domrek said. They went down again. The second level had people in it. It wasn't what Kaito had built it as in his head, in the years he'd thought about it as a game mechanic. In the game, the pits were a backdrop — a system that existed offscreen, something that gave the world its texture, something adventurers could interface with as a quest hook. In his mental model they were a set of numbers and a logical flow.

In practice they were a long low room lit by System-powered lamps, with stone floors and a row of partitioned spaces along one wall, and people in those spaces. Not chained. Not obviously restrained. Just there, with the knowledge that leaving without the paperwork being processed was something the System itself would flag, and that the System's flag would bring people with significantly higher levels than anyone currently in this room. About forty people. Maybe fifty.

Kaito counted by reflex and stopped at forty-two. The room had the particular quiet of a place where people had learned that making noise didn't accomplish much. A few of them looked up when Domrek came in. Some of them knew him. A man in the third partition raised his chin in something that wasn't quite a greeting and Domrek raised his back, and kept moving. No one looked at Kaito with anything beyond a brief assessment and then nothing. He was another person who'd come down here and would go back up.

Domrek moved through the space. He knew people here. He stopped at the third partition and said a woman's name and she looked up and said his, and they talked for two minutes, low, practical, about a pending transfer. Domrek had been trying to negotiate her buyout. The number wasn't resolved yet. He'd come with a new offer. She said she'd heard the operators had moved the number again, that the number kept moving, and Domrek's face didn't change, but something in how he held himself went slightly more still.

"This is the one I told you about," he said to Kaito, after. They'd moved to the far end of the room, away from the partition.

"Six months. I've offered fair market twice. They keep adding a premium I can't account for — the numbers don't connect to her System stats. She's a good fighter, not exceptional. Her values should put her in a certain range."

"But they're not pricing her at her values," Kaito said.

"No. They're pricing her at what specific buyers have paid to see her specifically. A different calculation." Domrek looked at the room.

"I don't have a way to argue against a number I can't verify." Kaito did. He read her thread from across the room. Mortal tier, Level thirty-one, class notation that matched a mid-range combat specialization — nothing that justified a premium over standard pit rates. The pit operators' System ledger had her listed at three thousand and forty gold. The value her stats actually justified, by the calculation Kaito knew because he'd designed the calculation, was twelve hundred at the upper end.

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"They've got her listed at three thousand," he said.

"Her actual value to the System is twelve hundred." Domrek looked at him.

"I can read the ledger from here," Kaito said, because that was simpler than explaining.

"And I can read what her stats actually justify. There's a difference of eighteen hundred."

"If I can show them the actual number—""You can't show them. You can know it and negotiate from it." Kaito looked at the board on the near wall, where the operational values ran.

"If you know what the System actually says a person is worth, you know their floor price. You know when an operator is inflating. You know when they're overextended and pressured to move someone." He paused.

"That's different from what you had before." Domrek was quiet for a moment. Looking at the room the way he looked at everything — directly, attending, giving it the full weight of his attention.

"How many of the twelve I've been targeting could you read tonight," he said.

"All of them if they're in this room. Most of what I need is in the administrative ledger on the wall."

"Eight of the twelve are currently held here."

"Give me ten minutes." He went to the wall. He read the ledger with his Sight while appearing to look at nothing in particular, and Domrek stood at his shoulder and Kaito told him the values, low, without breaking his apparent stance of bored inspection, and Domrek absorbed the numbers without writing them down because he had the kind of memory that didn't need to write things down. Six of the eight were priced above their System value by between thirty and sixty percent.

One was priced under value — an error in the operators' calculation that Domrek could exploit in the other direction. One was priced exactly at value, which meant the operators knew what they had. Ten minutes.

'This is what you made useful,' Sable said. She hadn't spoken since they came down.

'I know,' Kaito thought. He wasn't sure if she meant his Sight or the lore he'd written. Maybe both. They went back up through the first level — the records counter, the clerks, the board with its inventory language — and up through the door with the blue marks and into the Solara night, and Kaito breathed the air that wasn't underground and didn't say anything for a block.

"The difference in her price," Domrek said.

"Eighteen hundred gold."

"Roughly."

"I fight at seventy to one-fifty per session. Twice a week if the circuit is running." He did the math out loud, not for Kaito's benefit — just doing it.

"Eight months to cover the gap. If prices don't move again."

"If they move again you need new information."

"Yes."

"Then I come back with you when you need it." Kaito said it plainly.

"That's what I can do. You fight for the money. I tell you what the numbers actually are." Domrek looked at him sideways. They were walking and Domrek's stride was even and unhurried the way it always was.

"You said you agreed to help the fund."

"I agreed. This is how." Domrek nodded once. The way he nodded when something was settled. They walked another half a block in silence. The commercial district was quieter at this hour, the stalls closed, the crowd thinned to people moving between late venues and people doing the work that happened when fewer people were looking. Kaito's side had stopped pulling — the burn had finished healing sometime in the last week without him marking when.

'Kaito,' Sable said.

'I know.'

'You almost used it. In there. On the administrative ledger.' He'd felt it too. The [Improvised Solution] skill, sitting in his interface, half-activating when he read the way the pit's administrative values were running. The ownership records were wrong in a way the System could see — not in a moral sense, but in a technical one. The registration chain had a gap that had been papered over forty years ago and never properly closed.

The skill had recognized the gap the way it recognized any broken process and wanted to patch it. He'd pulled it back.

'If I'd let it run,' he thought.

'Every person registered in that ledger would have temporarily de-listed from the ownership records,' Sable said.

'The System would have read them as unregistered assets. No owner. No value. Legally unbound for as long as the patch held.'

'How long would the patch hold.'

'Minutes,' she said.

'Maybe less. [Improvised Solution] fixes broken processes, it doesn't rewrite them. It would have snapped back.' A pause.

'But if someone with legal standing was present when they de-listed, and registered a claim during the window—''It's not big enough for that,' Kaito said.

'The window's too short, the bureaucracy is too slow, and the System would log the patch attempt and flag the ledger for inspection.' He thought about it.

'But if the skill could hold a window longer. If it could be made to do something more than patch—''That's not [Improvised Solution],' Sable said.

'No,' he agreed.

'It isn't.' He thought about what it would be. What a skill that could do that would have to look like, in the System's own language. What it would cost to evolve something toward that shape.

'You're thinking about the evolution path,' she said.

'Yes.' She was quiet for a moment.

'Show me what you're thinking,' she said.

'I want to see if the math works.' He was still working it through when Domrek said good night at the corner and went his own way, and Kaito went out through the old wall gap to the space outside the city where Red was, and sat down in the dark with the problem and didn't sleep.