One idea in. A finished novel out.

The ring had hung above Atalio for four hundred years and in all that time nobody had thought to ask what it was for. It was simply the sky's furniture.

Sena knew every street of the city and could draw them blind, which was the only reason the Cartographers' Hall tolerated her. She was not gentle, she was not political, and she had never once been wrong about a distance.

That morning the aurora came in low across the ice, and the light fell through the gap in the ring, and it wrote three letters of her name on the roof of the Hall before it faded.

Before you quit anything you need one number: the smallest amount of money that keeps your life running for a month. Not your salary. Not your ideal. The floor.

Most people never work it out, which is why leaving feels like a cliff instead of a step. In this chapter we calculate it in three passes, then cut it by a fifth without touching anything you actually enjoy.

The rule: you are not buying freedom, you are buying months. Months are cheaper than you think.

Panel 1, wide. A corridor on sublevel two. Twelve fluorescent tubes, eleven of them lit. The twelfth ticks, patient as a clock.

Panel 2. MARISOL, night custodian, mop in hand, head tilted. Nine years on this floor. She knows the hum of the building the way she knows her own breathing. This is not the hum.

Panel 3. Close on the drywall: a hairline crack, a bead of something yellow, and a sound coming through it in a key that has no name.