Chương 58: Chapter 57: Supply and Demand

I found them when I got back, in the patch of ground behind the house. Bill was tracing circles. He sat cross-legged on the stone with one finger pressed to it, drawing the shape so slowly it barely moved, his whole attention down in that one line. Ella sat across from him, watching. Every now and then she'd reach over and move his hand a centimeter, and he'd start again. He didn't see me. She did. She looked at me for a second, then went back to his hand. I stood there longer than I meant to.

Last night it had been the engineers, talking to her in a shorthand I couldn't follow. This morning it had been Mara and Lukas, pulling her toward the field. Now it was Bill, learning to draw a circle on the ground like a student. I'd known for months that this was what she wanted. What I hadn't known was what it would feel like from this side — all of them around her like that, all of them needing what she knew, and me standing outside it, watching. I didn't interrupt. I went on.

Andrej and Julien caught her before lunch, with the questions they'd been saving since the night before. I didn't stay for that either. Whatever she told them, it was hers to tell. They came back to the village and shut themselves in the study, and the door was still closed when I passed it later, the two of them bent over the table. They had a name for it by then — a translator — and they'd already started building it. Meanwhile, Sofia had her list ready.

She was in the cottage she'd claimed, one of the ones near the bathhouse, with the truck's medical supplies already sorted into rows across her table. She'd written the list that morning and rewritten it since, and she'd called me over to give it to me.

"Everything we don't have," she said.

"Well, it's not really all of it. Just the urgent stuff." I read it, muttering each item to myself.

"Antibiotics. Broad spectrum, IV and oral. Sutures. Syringes, assorted gauges. Trauma dressings. Burn kits. Splints." She watched me, arms crossed, not moving.

"Portable ultrasound." The page turned.

"Magnetic resonance imaging." I stopped.

"MRI," I said.

"It's fine." It came out fast — faster than anything she'd said since I'd met her.

"If you can't get one, it's fine. I know what I'm asking. It's a machine the size of a room, it costs more than a few houses, and it needs a whole lot more power than we have. I know." This content has been unlawfully taken from Royal Road; report any instances of this story if found elsewhere. She stopped herself. Uncrossed her arms. Crossed them again.

"Everyone would be safer if we had one," she said, quieter now, and flat again, but the flatness was doing work.

"No one here can tell me what's bleeding inside someone's head. If it's happening, I want to see it before it's too late. That's why it's on the list." A beat.

"If it can't happen, it can't happen. But it's on the list." I looked down at the page, at the word sitting there like it hadn't just asked for the impossible.

"And since it's on the list, and since I've said yes to every request so far..." I said. Her eyes brightened.

"Does that mean—""I'll see what can be done." I folded the list and put it in my pocket.

"I'm not sure where we'd even procure that kind of equipment. It's not a photolithography machine from ASML, but that's still one hell of a request." I left before I had to watch her decide whether that counted as a yes. And I was busy for most of the day after that, handling requests from our new villagers. Weapons for Marek and the security team. Translation requests from Daphne. Tools for Tomas and Nadia. Spare parts. Medical supplies. Computing equipment.

At one point, Andrej and Julien were joking about whether they were eventually going to have to ask me for the forbidden stuff from ASML. Apparently they'd met Sofia today. Speaking of which, Ella had gone to the gate with them to give them a rough explanation of its inner workings. By the time I crossed the village again, the light was already going amber, and I was doing the math I'd been avoiding since Sofia handed me that page. Compute. Server-class, whatever Andrej had spec'd. Julien's power plant.

Mara's machinery — tractors, maybe, and everything that came with them. And the list in my pocket, with a word like MRI sitting at the bottom of it. We had a room full of gold. I kept thinking about that. Cubes stacked in rows that went back into the dark. Bags of coins. Gems. More wealth than I'd ever seen in one place in my life. And still, walking there that evening, what I kept coming back to was whether we could afford any of it. Gold isn't money.

Bill had told us that, and even if Léon was helping us turn it into cash, he was doing it slowly, in pieces small enough that no one on the other side would ask the wrong questions. Money isn't machines. And the machines aren't here. Every step between the vault and the village was too slow. The list, on the other hand, kept growing with each passing hour. We needed to find a way to fill the gap before we ran out of time, and turn that profit curve upward before the vault was empty.

The bathhouse was at the end of the street. Someone was cooking as I passed — oil and garlic, someone who actually knew what they were doing. The light spheres were waking in the cottages one by one. It would have been a good evening. I just wasn't having one. I went in the way I always did, towel over my shoulder, head still on the gold. I was through the changing room and into the steam before I realized there was already steam in there. Someone was already in the bath. It was Daphne.

She was in the bath with her arms resting on the far rim, her shoulders out of the water and her hair pinned up on top of her head. The light spheres were on low, and steam was flying everywhere around us. I registered all of it in the single second before she turned her head. She didn't gasp. She didn't sink lower. She looked at me, bright and unhurried and completely unafraid, and one eyebrow went up.

"Oh," she said.

"Hello." I made a sound. I want to say it was a word. It wasn't a word.

"The door," she said, "exists. You're supposed to knock on it."

"I—" I said.

"This is—I didn't—" She watched me back toward the door with her chin resting on her hand.

"We'll have to work out a schedule," she said, as I found the handle behind me.

"Good ni—" Flap! I closed the door. The night air hit me on the other side, and I stood there on the stone with my towel over my shoulder and my heart going. Somewhere behind the door, water moved, unhurried. The list was still in my pocket. The gold was still in the vault. For one reason or another, I wasn't thinking about either of them anymore.