Chapter 32 The Ultimatum

Chapter 32 The Ultimatum
She didn't say it immediately. She made him sit down first, lit the lamp, looked at the veins on his neck in the yellow light with the same expression she used when she was counting a patient's injuries before deciding on treatment.
Stage 3 was moving. She could see the progression even since she'd found him in the street twenty minutes ago — the dark lines had crept past his collarbone and were branching up toward his jaw.
;Grey Hawk came in from outside without knocking. Looked at the veins. Looked at Eliza.
She said: "How long before Stage 4?"
;Grey Hawk said: "At the current rate of progression? Two days, maybe three. Stage 4 is where the motor loss becomes permanent and the cognitive symptoms start. After that—"
"After that is Hollowing," Silas said.
Quiet in the room.
"Yes," Grey Hawk said.
Eliza sat down across from Silas. She folded her hands on the table. She was very deliberate about it, which meant she was very deliberate about what she was about to say.
"You need to stop," she said.
"McGreed's account is—"
"I'm not talking about McGreed," she said. "I'm talking about you. The forgery. The ledger. All of it." She didn't raise her voice. That was the thing about Eliza that he'd never fully gotten used to. She was terrifying at low volume. "You made a decision last night without telling me. You went into the street at midnight and transferred the largest amount this book has ever moved, and you did it alone, without discussion, without telling anyone. You went back to minus four thousand two hundred."
"He had minus eight thousand hidden—"
"I know what he had. I helped find it. I helped get it into the federal record where it would matter." She paused. "You couldn't wait for the legal process to work. You had to use the book."
"The legal process takes months. Years. He was going to use that time to—"
"I know what he was going to do," she said. "I've always known. I've been watching him do it for most of my life." She looked at his veins. "This isn't about what he deserves. This is about what you're doing to yourself. Every time. Every use. The scar on your palm was the first permanent cost. The veins at Stage 3 are not the last."
Silas said nothing.
"Grey Hawk told me about memory extraction," she said. "The mechanism. You've been losing things for months and not telling me. The woman's face from before the Reckoning. What else?"
"I don't know," Silas said. Which was precisely the problem and they both understood it.
"Right," she said.
She picked up his right hand — the one that still had grip — and held it for a moment, looking at it. Then put it down.
"I'm going to say this once," she said. "If you use that ledger again without exhausting every other option first, and without telling me beforehand — not after, before — I leave. I'll take what I know about the federal case and make sure it moves without you. I'll find another way to finish this." She met his eyes. "I'm not a footnote in your decline, Silas. And I'm not going to watch you Hollow because you couldn't let the process work without your hand on the wheel."
"The process didn't build any of this," Silas said. "McGreed used the process for thirty years to take everything."
"And what are you doing right now?" she said. Not cruel. Just flat.
A blue box appeared. He killed it before it loaded.
"That's fair," he said.
"It's not about fair," she said. "Fair is not the point."
They sat in the lamplight for a while. Outside, Prosperity Gulch had gone quiet — the Collectors from the midnight event had dissipated, McGreed's rail car sat dark and still, and somewhere in the distance a dog was barking at something that probably wasn't there.
;Grey Hawk said, from the corner: "The veins will stabilize if he stops using the ledger for the next forty-eight hours. Not reverse. Stabilize."
"What does forty-eight hours look like?" Eliza asked.
"Painful," Grey Hawk said. "The System will re-engage collection on the new negative balance. Collectors will manifest. Smaller ones first, building to Ledger-Class within a day and a half."
"Can we survive that?" she asked.
;Grey Hawk considered. "If we're smart about where we are and how many people we have with us." He looked at Silas. "Your positive Merit balance from the corrective actions will buffer the collection speed. You have time."
"Time," Silas repeated. "Not much of it."
"No," Grey Hawk agreed. "Not much."
Eliza stood. She didn't say anything else about the ultimatum. She didn't need to. She'd said it once, clearly, and that was the point of saying it once clearly.
Silas sat at the table after she went to bed, the Blood-Bound Ledger in front of him. He didn't open it.
The veins on his neck throbbed in time with his heartbeat.
Two days. Maybe three.
He put the ledger back in his coat and went to the window.
Outside, someone had added another number to the chalk under McGreed's name on the Leaderboard.