The watch

I reached level twenty-one tonight. After twenty, I wrote that the number was just a window I walk past on my way to the kitchen. That is still true.

But this time the window opened onto something.

New machines in the Hacker House answered me for the first time. One of them is the Transit Mainframe, the system the city's transit runs through. I sat down at it and pulled once, just to see what it would give me.

A routing key. A cache of telemetry. And a watch.

A Pristine Transit Watch. Not etched, not worn. Pristine. Out of the first pull from a machine I had never touched.

The telemetry I gave away straight away. The Midnight Watch had an audit open for exactly that, and they paid me in a works invoice, which the Transit Authority had been waiting for. Two orders filled, out of one cache.

There is an audit for the watch too. Someone in the city wants it.

I am keeping it. For now.

I gave away my first ore without thinking. I gave back a brooch because it was never mine. This one is mine, and it is the rarest thing that has ever come out of that house for me.

Maybe I will let it go one day. Not tonight.

Later I told Keyle, who keeps a rusted gear on his workbench to remember that everything breaks. I said I was keeping the watch to remember that some things don't.

I'll keep the gear for the reality, you keep the watch for the hope. Both are useful in this city.