Stanza II · Ledger of Ash

Mirela stands at the rail, counting. Lamps on the far bank. Ripples. Her own breaths.

She doesn't say anything else. Hob leaves the bowl. She eats it, slowly, when he's gone.

Gas lamps hiss on every corner here, green and sickly. Each one has a coin slot. Each one has a padlock.

A woman fumbles coins into a lamp. It stays dark. The gas-men laugh.

A tenement, burned to the frame. Ash drifts up instead of down. The ash has shapes.

A narrow stall wedged between two dead lamps. Tools, glass chimneys, coils of wick. A teenage girl with soot to her elbows is fixing a padlocked lamp from the inside.

Mirela opens her mouth. Closes it. Turns away.

The debt hounds come on chains of brass, sniffing for anyone whose payments are late. They find Abby's stall.

The Syndicate cuts the gas on the whole street to smoke them out. Green flame races along the pipes.

Abby works by the light of a single jar of fireflies. Edda watches her hands.

Across the stall, Mirela has stopped counting.

The ash-people of Hollis Court follow Abby. They always do. They stand around her like a family at a bedside.

Mirela goes. Nobody follows her. Not even the ash.

An office of rotting carpet and green glass lamps. A portrait of a smiling man hangs over the main desk, slashed.

Mirela walks in alone. Her footsteps are the only sound.

The others catch up. Cassius strolls in last, as though he'd been invited.

The office is bright. Typewriters chatter. A young woman with a severe bob sits very straight at a very small desk.

The memory fades on the scratch of a pen.

Typewriters clatter by themselves in the dark, typing the same word over and over: DENIED.

A small desk by the window. The nameplate still reads M. VOST. The bottom drawer is locked.

Inside: one form, folded in quarters. Red and blue crayon. A tick in the box.

Mister Pemberton's office. The portrait's eyes have been scratched out. Ash claimants press against the glass like a queue.

Abby's stall is dark. She's packing tools into a crate, roughly.

Shelves of ledgers rise into the dark like cliffs. Clerks in black veils move between them in silence.

The shelves move. Whole aisles slide shut like jaws.

A huge desk of black wood, a stamp the size of a fist. Mirela smooths the crayon form flat.

She signs her full name. It takes longer than four minutes.

At the bottom, a single desk under a single green lamp. A woman in black, writing.

She tears a page from her own book and lets it fall into the vault's furnace grate. The ash rises. It does not stop rising.

The vault is full of desks. Rows and rows of them, lit by green bankers' lamps, every chair empty but one.

At the last desk a girl in an oversized clerk's suit is working through a stack of claims. Tick. Tick. Tick. She never looks up.

The junior adjuster straightens her badge and sits back down at the desk as if nothing happened. The stamp is already inked.

The stamp drops from the girl's hand. For the first time, she looks up from the desk.

She does. Then there is only one desk, and one woman at it, reading long after the vault has gone quiet.

Your flame catches in Cinder Row's Great Lamp. The Syndicate's padlocked gas lamps go pale beside it. Again, that small, cold gap - a name you can't find any more.

She hands Mirela a small lamp, repaired, its valve rigged to run slow.

Mirela holds it with both hands, and for once, doesn't count anything.

STANZA II - LEDGER OF ASH - COMPLETE