She was a tall woman, lean in the way that people who move constantly tend to become lean, with close-cropped hair and a jaw that her mother had always called stubborn. She wore a recovery agent’s field coat — dark grey, with thermal lining and twelve interior pockets — and her badge was clipped to the inside lapel, not visible from the outside. Meridian agents in the field did not advertise. The coat had a slight iridescence to it in direct light, a faint blue-green sheen like the inside of an abalone shell, which was how you could identify one if you knew what to look for. Most people didn’t know what to look for.
She stood in the alley for a moment, consulting the anchor signal on the small reader clipped to her left forearm. The signal was clear and close. Within eight hundred meters. She had expected it to be harder than this.
Sherelle had been a recovery agent for eleven years. She had worked 340 cases. She told herself, as she always told herself at the start of a recovery, that this was a job. That the debt was real. That Meridian’s legal right to the anchor was upheld by the Temporal Commerce Accords of 2063, signed by forty-seven jurisdictions. That the borrowers had agreed to the terms.
She always told herself these things.
She did not always believe them by the end.
—
Keisha was calibrating a marine chronometer — a beautiful old piece, brass and glass, brought in by a fishing collective that used it as a backup to their digital systems — when the workshop door opened.
She did not look up immediately. Customers came in. Customers left. She was at the delicate point in the calibration where the escapement wheel needed to be held at exactly the right tension, and she had learned in four months that Vantara’s customers were patient people.
Then she felt it.
The anchor in her wrist pulsed. Once, sharply, like a finger snap against bone from the inside. She had read about this in the small print she had eventually, desperately, read after she’d run. A proximity alert. The anchor communicated with recovery agent equipment. When an agent came within range, the anchor sent a signal — and sent a response back to the borrower’s nervous system as a warning, or perhaps as a courtesy, or perhaps simply because Meridian’s engineers had thought it was elegant.
Keisha set down the chronometer with great care. Her hands were very steady. They were always steady, even when the rest of her was not.
She looked at the door.
The woman standing in it was tall, grey-coated, and was looking at Keisha with an expression that was not unkind. That was, somehow, worse than if it had been unkind.
“Keisha Toure,” the woman said. Not a question.
“Yes.”
The woman stepped inside and closed the door. She did not reach for anything. She kept her hands visible, which Keisha noted. “I’m Agent Prospere. Meridian Debt Recovery.” She paused. “I’m not here to hurt you.”
“You’re here to take me back.”
“I’m here to discuss your account.”
Keisha almost laughed. She looked down at the chronometer on her workbench, at the tiny ordered universe of its gears, and then back up. “My account is 1.2 million credits. I know what my account is.”
Sherelle sat down on the customer stool without being invited. She looked around the workshop — the shelves of movements and cases, the soft task lighting, the smell of machine oil and the salt wind coming through the cracked window. She looked like someone doing arithmetic in her head, or perhaps something more complicated than arithmetic.
“You’ve been here four months,” she said. “You pay your rent. You don’t draw attention. Your daughter — Amara — is she well?”
The question landed like a stone in still water.
“She’s fine,” Keisha said carefully. “The surgery worked. That’s why I took the loan.”
“I know.” Sherelle was quiet for a moment. Outside, the street noise rose and fell — a cart’s wheels on stone, two people arguing pleasantly about something, the distant hum of a transit line. “I’ve read 340 files. I know why people take the loans.”
Keisha watched her. “Then you know what Clause 7 means. You know that the anchor isn’t collateral on the money. It’s collateral on the time. If I can’t pay, they don’t just repossess the loan. They repossess the years.”
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