The neighbor's name was Old Hamu, though he wasn't old so much as worn, the way certain men get worn down early by work that never quite pays enough to stop doing.
He lived two houses down and kept books for a handful of small businesses in lower Ashwick, the kind of quiet, unglamorous bookkeeping that occasionally brushed up against people who didn't want their numbers looked at too closely. Ren had known him his whole life the way you know a neighbor, a nod on the street, a name you use without ever really wondering what the man actually did all day.
It was his mother, of all people, who gave Ren the opening.
"Hamu needs someone to help him carry his ledgers to the Nassar place tomorrow," she said one evening, tired and only half paying attention to what she was saying. "Says his back's been bad. I told him you'd do it if he paid you something."
Ren didn't let his face show anything, though it took real effort. "Sure. I can help."
He didn't sleep much that night, running through everything he knew about Nassar, which wasn't much, a name on old paperwork and a reputation as someone who moved between the gang's business and the city's more ordinary business without ever quite belonging fully to either. He didn't have a plan beyond simply being in the room. He told himself that was enough for now. Being in the room was further than he'd been three days ago.
---
Nassar's office wasn't what Ren expected. No armed men at the door, no signs of the world it quietly served. Just a cramped room above a currency exchange, stacks of paper everywhere, a ceiling fan turning too slowly to do much good against the heat.
Hamu did most of the talking, the kind of small, practiced talk men like him used to keep meetings pleasant and short. Ren stood near the door with the ledgers, saying nothing, doing exactly what he'd been told to do, which was nothing at all.
Then Nassar, going through a stack of receipts with the distracted air of a man doing arithmetic mostly by habit, said a number out loud without really meaning to say it to anyone.
"That can't be right," Ren said, before he'd fully decided to say it.
The room went quiet. Hamu shot him a look that said several things at once, none of them good. Nassar looked up slowly, the way a man looks up when he's more curious than offended, though it was hard to tell yet which one would win out.
"Excuse me?"
"The total," Ren said, already regretting it and pushing forward anyway, because some habits were stronger than his fear of a stranger's temper. "You added the second column as if it compounds monthly, but three of those entries are quarterly. If you run it monthly across all of them, you're overcounting the interest by almost a full point."
Nassar didn't say anything for a moment. He looked back down at the page, ran a finger along the numbers Ren had pointed at, and did the math again himself, slower this time.
"He's right," he said, mostly to himself, sounding faintly annoyed and faintly impressed in roughly equal measure.
Hamu opened his mouth like he wanted to apologize for Ren speaking at all, but Nassar waved a hand before he could get the words out.
"How old are you?"
"Fifteen."
"And you caught a compounding error in ten seconds that took my clerk two days to make in the first place."
"I like numbers," Ren said, which was true and also the smallest possible version of the truth.
Nassar studied him for a while, the kind of look that wasn't unkind but wasn't warm either, the look of a man deciding whether something in front of him was useful or merely interesting, and whether those were even different things. "What's your name?"
"Ren."
"Ren," Nassar repeated, like he was filing it away somewhere. "You want work? Small things. Checking figures, nothing that requires you to know whose figures they are."
Ren's pulse picked up, though he kept his face as still as he could manage. This was the door. Smaller than he'd hoped for, and further from what he actually wanted, which was information about a specific debt tied to a specific dead man's operation, but a door all the same.
"I'd like that," he said.
"Come back Thursday. Bring him with you again if his back's really that bad." Nassar nodded once toward Hamu, already turning back to his papers, already moving on to whatever came next in his day.
---
Outside, Hamu let out a breath he'd clearly been holding the whole meeting. "You shouldn't have spoken like that. Men like him don't like being corrected."
"He didn't seem to mind."
"This time." Hamu shook his head, though there was something almost like respect underneath the warning. "You're either very smart or very foolish, and out here those two things get people killed at about the same rate."
Ren didn't answer that. He was already thinking ahead to Thursday, to the stack of other people's numbers he'd be allowed to touch, to how many of those numbers might, if he was patient and careful and lucky, eventually lead him back to the one debt that actually mattered to him.
It wasn't access to Corin Aldis. It wasn't even real proof of anything yet.
But it was a job inside the machine that owned his family, and that was more than he'd had a week ago.