The quarantined one-hundred-dollar Bureau banknote lay motionless between the strips of black electrical tape on the counter.
Julian Vance’s gloved hands remained wrapped around the ribbed rubber handles of the Master Lamination Seal, his knuckles white as four-hundred-degree heat shimmered off the brass roller.
Three feet across the counter, pinned behind the jagged aluminum frame of the shattered sneeze-guard, the Actuary of Zero-Hour watched him with its single remaining grey eye.
The left half of the entity’s head was a raw hemisphere of grey-white Clause-Pulp oozing crimson drops of carminic ink. The right half still wore Julian’s stolen mirror-profile, its mouth curved in a cold smile.
“You are thinking about the seven-o’clock bell, aren’t you, Julian?” the Actuary whispered, lacing Julian’s stolen baritone with the fragile cadence of childhood memory. “When the Zero-Hour Ledger closes at dawn, every un-indexed nineteen ninety-six remnant dissolves. Peel the rest of this countenance off my skull, and you sever the last paper trail keeping your father in this world.”
Julian’s chest tightened beneath his work apron.
For six months behind Register 1, every drop of sweat he had given to this store had been aimed at one goal: bringing his family safely into the morning.
