The Lockkeeper of Brackwater

Brackwater's lock is a small thing by the standards of the great canals, but for twenty years it has been Eddan Voss's. He rebuilt its northern gate after the flood of Year Twelve and oils its chains every tenday. His daughter drowned in it when she was nine, while he was at the winch and did not turn it fast enough, and ever since he has counted the turns of the wheel to keep the memory at bay.

Everyone else counts minutes. The System logs and charges every arrival and departure, and in the big ports on the Waypoint Chain, people say a late ship can cost a man a month of his life. Eddan has never seen the Chain and never wanted to. At noon on a good day, the canal goes dark, a buoy of black iron and cold blue light rises out of it with water spiraling upward off its sides, and a countdown hangs in the air. The lockhouse tears loose from its foundations with Eddan clinging to the winch.

He lands on cold, ridged metal in a station called Waypoint Alpha, where an amber notice has already opened his ledger: Arrival status: 3 minutes late. Toll due: 3 XP. He has none. So the System takes a year of his life instead, and he feels every morning of it drain away.

"That's how it starts," says the old merchant beside him, who has been paying for forty years and can no longer remember his wife's face. When his own toll comes due, eleven minutes' worth, he refuses to pay. The System collects anyway, and Eddan watches him wither into a drift of gray dust on the station floor.