Location:The Terrace, Mid Realm
Date/Time:12 Scorchwind 9943 AZI, Restday
Realm:Mid Realm
The quarter had closed on the first of Ashbloom and Sharlin had made it by nineteen.
Nineteen. Not a comfortable number. A comfortable number is forty, or sixty, or the year she had come in over by two hundred and six and had walked about for a week afterward feeling like a woman who had solved something. Nineteen is the margin you get when you have spent the last four weeks of a quarter doing things you would not have chosen to do, and Sharlin had done four weeks of things she would not have chosen to do, and had made it, and had then had about ten days of not thinking about it before the new quarter's figure came up.
It was in front of her now.
It was on good paper because everything in that room was on good paper, in a hand she had employed for sixty years, and it said five hundred, which it always says, and underneath it said the running position, which was where the trouble lived.
