My Clocking In System

Chapter 6: Settling Debts

"How much, all in... ?" Danny said.

"Two months and whatever’s on top. And the late fees. The real ones, not the ones you’ve been pretending not to charge me."

Her eyes narrowed. That definitely wasn’t part of the script she expected. "I don’t know what you mean."

"You do." He held her gaze, keeping his eyes strictly on her face.

"You’ve been good to me, Adaeze. Better than I had any right to. I’m not going to let you knock the price down just to make me feel better. Full whack. What’s it come to?"

She studied him for a long second, something shifting behind her stern expression. Then she named the figure. The real one.

"Two thousand six hundred pounds," she said.

Only yesterday, the sheer size of that number would have closed his throat. Two grand and change for a tiny box on the estate.

"One sec."

Tap. Tap. Swipe.

He pulled out his phone, bypassed the new dark app, and opened his standard HSBC banking app.

He looked at his balance of £10,087.58 and authorised the transfer right there in the doorway.

It was, without a doubt, the most money that had ever left him at once in his entire life. The loading wheel spun for a heartbeat, and his new balance refreshed on the screen: £7,487.58.

Ping!

Adaeze’s phone in her coat chimed with a crisp, clear notification. She pulled her phone out, looked at the screen, looked up at him, and then looked back down at the screen.

For a rare second in her life, Adaeze Nwosu did not know what to do with her own face.

"It’s all there," Danny said smoothly. "We’re square."

"Daniel." Her voice was careful now, measured. "Where did this..."

"Picked up some proper work." The easy lie slid off his tongue. He was going to have to get good at delivering that line, he could already tell. "Sorry it was late. It won’t be again."

She scrutinised him, this young man she thought she had completely figured out and then did what people always did when the money was undeniably real: she decided it wasn’t her business.

"Right," she said, her tone softening.

"Good." She paused, casting a quick glance that took in his split jacket and worn-through shoes.

"Eat something. You’re too thin."

"Working on it," Danny said, and found he actually meant it.

She turned and walked straight down the corridor. As she moved, the heavy coat parted slightly, revealing the thin silk of her nightgown pulling tight against her body.

The sheer fabric clung perfectly to the heavy, swaying curve of her ass with every deliberate step she took.

She had a lush, mesmerizing figure, and watching that perfect, bouncing rhythm as she walked away was an entirely different kind of problem for his brain to handle so early in the morning.

Click. Clack. Thud.

Danny shut the door, put his back against the cold wood, and let out a long breath.

Phew.

Then, he let himself grin at the ceiling. He had just paid two months’ rent in full, dropped the biggest lump sum of his life, and his stomach hadn’t dropped once.

It was only yesterday that he had been a man with exactly thirty-seven quid and a refused parcel, standing shivering in the gutter.

Crunch. Crunch.

He ate two slices of dry toast because there was absolutely nothing else in the kitchen to put on them. That was a fix for later today.

He headed down to the estate’s communal garage.

Screeech.

The heavy metal fire door groaned as he pushed it open.

He stood between the two of them, the life he had and the life arriving, and his hand went to the Vespa. Then he stopped, because the old wariness caught up with him.

A brand-new scooter, in a bay that didn’t lock, in a garage half the estate had a key to. It’d be gone in a day. Stripped for parts by the weekend. He’d watched it happen to better-chained bikes than this.

It returns to the inventory when you are not using it, the phone offered, unprompted, as if it had heard the thought. As the car did. As the key did. Nothing of yours waits in the open to be taken, unless you leave it there.

Danny let out a slow breath. So that was how the clean tank and the zero miles worked.

The thing didn’t sit in the world getting older and emptier. It sat nowhere, and arrived new each time he called it.

"Right," he said. "Handy."

Then he stopped, frowning. Something was wrong with it.

Click.

He flicked the key. The digital trip computer flared to life. It showed exactly zero miles. Not low. Zero. A bike that had literally never been ridden. As the display booted up, the fuel needle swung hard to the right.

Whirrr.

It slammed against the "Full" marker.

A maxed-out tank in a scooter that hadn’t even existed yesterday. Danny sat there with his hands on the bars, feeling the back of his neck go cold. Real things had histories.

They had wear, a half-empty tank, or someone’s old service stickers. This thing had been spoken into being with a petrol station’s worth of fuel in it and not a single mile on the clock.

It was somehow far more unsettling than the ten grand in his bank. Money was just abstract numbers; this was a physical object that shouldn’t be this clean.

"Right," he said quietly to the empty garage. "Don’t think about it. Just ride it."

He left the Honda where it was, just in case. You didn’t throw away the bike you understood for the bike you didn’t. Not on day one.

Purrr!

The Vespa started on the absolute first touch of the ignition. No cough, no sputtering third attempt: just a clean, low, premium note the Honda hadn’t been capable of making since 2019.

He pulled out of the dark garage and into a hard, bright Wednesday morning, the biting cold coming straight off the river. He rode up through the estate and onto the high street, where the day was already spinning into motion.

Srrrrt.

A shopkeeper yanked the metal shutters half-up on the Turkish barbershop.

Swoosh.

A man hosed last night’s grime off the pavement outside the chicken shop.

A bus heaved past him, packed tight with blank faces pressed against the glass.

Hiss-roooar.

Nobody looked at the man on the green scooter. That lack of attention, which had been the depressing story of his entire life, felt entirely different today. Today, it was a perfect cover.

The ride itself did something to his posture. The Honda was a machine you fought with; this Vespa was a machine you merely steered. It went exactly where he looked.

He knew his destination. He had been walking past it without going in for the better part of a year.

Ding!