Chapter 26 A Pound of Flesh

Chapter 26 A Pound of Flesh
He found the scar in the morning.
He'd known something was wrong when he woke up — the black veins on his arm looked the same, but there was a tightness at the base of his left palm that hadn't been there the night before. He turned his hand over in the early light and saw it.
A mark, roughly half an inch long, scored directly through the skin — not a wound. No blood, no rawness. It looked like someone had pressed a heated wire against him while he slept. The shape of it was irregular, organic, like a line of text in no alphabet he knew.
He touched it. No pain. That was the unsettling part. The black veins burned all the time, but this mark had no sensation at all. Just the scar, sitting in the skin, permanent and quiet.
He went to Grey Hawk.
;Grey Hawk looked at it for a long time without speaking. He turned Silas's palm over twice, examined the mark from different angles. Then he sat back.
"That's a collection mark," he said. "The counting spirit sometimes takes payment in kind when it can't recover the full balance numerically."
"It took skin?"
"It took something stored in the skin," Grey Hawk said. "Memory, usually. The book you carry — when you use it too many times, the System finds its own payment. It takes something you didn't consciously offer."
Silas stared at the mark. "What did it take?"
;Grey Hawk said nothing. Which meant he either didn't know or thought Silas should figure it out himself.
Silas thought about it. Ran through the last few days. Recent events were clear. He went backward. The Collective camp. The canyon fight. The ride from Prosperity Gulch. He could track all of it.
He tried to go back further.
There was a woman's face. Someone important, from before the Great Reckoning. He knew she'd been important. He could feel the shape of the absence, the way you run your tongue over a missing tooth. But the face itself was gone.
He sat with that for a moment.
;Grey Hawk waited.
"Someone from before," Silas said. "I don't know who."
;Grey Hawk nodded slowly. "The counting spirit takes what it calculates as equivalent value. Whatever that person meant to you — that weight is what it extracted."
A blue box appeared. Soft. Almost apologetic, which was worse than the usual mockery.
───
\[Debt Forgery — Accumulated Side Effect: Stage 1 Memory Extraction.\]
\[One personal memory removed from long-term cognitive storage.\]
\[Content: \[REDACTED BY SYSTEM\]\]
\[Permanent. Non-recoverable.\]
\[Physical marker applied: Collection Scar, left palm.\]
\[The System notes: Every ledger has a cost column, Deadbeat.\]
\[You've been filling the wrong one.\]
───
Silas closed the box.
He sat on the edge of the cot in the early morning light and looked at the mark on his palm. It sat there without apology, which was its own kind of communication.
Eliza found him there when she came in with coffee from the boarding house kitchen. She looked at his hand. He showed her the palm.
She sat down beside him without saying anything. They drank the coffee. Outside, Redemption Falls was waking up.
"Today's the session," she said finally.
"I know."
"Are you ready?"
Silas looked at the scar. Someone important, from before. The shape of an absence where a face used to be.
"Ready enough," he said.
She didn't ask about the mark again. She'd seen enough of what the ledger cost to understand that questions sometimes reopened things that wouldn't close back up. He appreciated it.
Holloway knocked on the door at seven. He came in, looked at Silas's hand, and didn't say anything either. Maybe he'd seen his own version of this. The man had thirty-one forgeries behind him and both arms veined to the elbow. He'd paid something, repeatedly. He just hadn't stopped yet.
Silas looked at Holloway's arms and thought: there but for the grace of a woman with green eyes and a deputy's badge.
He thought it clearly and filed it and didn't examine it, because there wasn't time.
;Grey Hawk was waiting downstairs with the documents in a sealed oilskin pack, coffee untouched beside him, rifle across his knees.
"Harcastle's session opens at nine," he said. "We should go."
"The compound will have sent word to McGreed by now," Eliza said. "He might have someone at the courthouse."
"Hale," Silas said. "But Hale doesn't have McGreed's leverage on Harcastle anymore. We burned it last night." He looked at the group. "If Harcastle is clean, these documents carry themselves. If he's not—"
"He's clean enough," Holloway said. "I've watched him for three days. He doesn't do favors. He doesn't like owing people. He'll read whatever's put in front of him."
"Then we put these in front of him," Eliza said.
They went.
Silas kept his left hand in his coat pocket where the scar was hidden.
The mark didn't hurt.