Marmalade kept her minutes in a brass jar under the brake van of the Long Noon, in a cloth, in the dark where the sand could not get at them. She counted them every night before she slept. It took a while. Sixty minutes, in an hour-jar no bigger than a pickle bottle. Blue twine on the handle, four loops, because four was how many she was paid at a time. The glass hummed when she shook it, and it was not a loud hum. It was the hum of a kettle not yet on.

She had counted sixty minutes into it, a minute here and a minute there, since the day she was found, and then she stopped, because she had decided that sixty was the whole of the jar, and that a person ought to know where she stood. “Who pays you?” Nim Ferrous had asked her, once, on the west siding. “The cooks.” “Which cook?” “The arrangement.”

“There is no arrangement,” said Nim, who was thirteen and had a single copper braid tied off with blue twine. “There is an arrangement with a name on it. Things with names on them can be looked at.” Marmalade had considered this for most of her life, and her answer was that she did not know, and that this was the correct answer, and that everybody had lied to her about something, so the whole world was suspect, and she was nine, and she could count.

The far end of the Line was Kellvetch. It was a hundred and ten minutes from Emberwhistle Halt, and nobody had told her anything else about it, except that the air hummed there and smelled of hot iron and cut grass, and that the jars went down into the clay like corkscrews, four hundred deep. She had decided to go in the spring. She had sixty minutes, and a ticket to the far end cost a hundred and ten, and she knew that as well as she knew her own name, which was Marmalade, and which was on nobody’s book anywhere she had ever seen.

Coach Nine stood on a siding at Sirocco with a painted band round it, and the band said SEALED. ACCOUNTED. DO NOT OPEN OR MOVE. Nobody kept it. Everybody checked it. Twice a day a sign-writer came down the siding with white lead and went over the letters, and twice a day somebody walked the length of the train with a lamp, looked at the band, and went away. On the week Marmalade found it, the paint was fresh enough to put a thumb in.

The carriage had come apart into slow warm sand, and the sand leaked out under the doors in a low pale dune that weighed nothing. If you put your hand in and pulled it away, your hand was not dirty. It was only warm. “It is not a haunted carriage,” said the boy Toot, who worked the bacon stall and was eight. “People say haunted because they do not want to say the other thing.” “What is the other thing?” “A carriage whose hours were spent without being counted. So it is only sand. And sand goes downhill.”

It went downhill at eleven o’clock at night, with a sound like a long slow breath, and Marmalade was on the step and going, because she had watched it for nine nights from the end of the siding and could not stand there a tenth.

The sand inside the carriage was up to her knees, and it came up warm around her boots, the good one and the one a size too small with its cuff patched in cut tin. It settled over her ankles like flour on a table. It did not push, which was the thing nobody warned you about. Sand that pushes is sand you can fight. She took out the tin cup, shook the minute-jar, poured the sixty into the cup, and counted them out loud in the dark, because a number you have not said is not a number yet.

“One. Two. Three.” She got to nine before she had to hold the cup with both hands. At two in the morning the carriage came out on the open sand with the moon on it, and the gasbags of the Long Noon went over the ridge above her in a slow black column, enormous, every join of the canvas creaking as it cooled. Marmalade lay down in the warm sand, looked up at them going east, did not sleep, and counted the mast-heads as they passed. There were six. She counted them twice, because once is only seeing.

Nim Ferrous found the tin cup on the step at dawn, with sixty small round marks in the sand beside it where the minutes had been counted out and put back. She did not tell anybody. She wrote in the margin of her route sheet, very small, ONE PASSENGER, UNPAID, N. FERROUS, and rubbed the zero out, because a courier who is paid is a courier, and a courier who is not paid is a thing that happened to somebody. “If she is going to do it,” she said to nobody, “then somebody is going to be there at the end of it.”

Kellvetch came up out of the flat country in the second night: a smell first, cut grass and hot iron, then a hum in the ground like a wire, then a low orange light along the horizon where there was no town at all. Marmalade was awake for all of it. She stood out of the warm sand with the jar against her chest and forty-one minutes in her cup, because she had used nineteen getting through the night, and she was going to be careful now.

The Yards came up in the dark like a town made of nothing but walls. Rusted racks went down into the clay in corkscrews, aisle after aisle, and every jar handle in the place had a bright loop of blue twine on it, and in the cold they made a sound like rain that had not started. And the carriage came in on the siding above the second cutting, going slow, and it began, very quietly, to pour.

There were four men in the cutting, and Marmalade counted them before she understood what she was counting. A jar-packer called Hal Brack, with a waxed apron and a lamp on a hook, a signalman called Renn Duskin, and two Yard hands, at the bottom of the cutting on the night shift, which is when the racks are checked for a bad handle, because it is the only time the aisles are empty. She saw the sand take Hal Brack’s boots, and then his ankles, while he was still talking. She saw Renn Duskin look up at the coach, and then look back down at his own hands, and he did not shout, and she understood why, and it took her three days to say why out loud.

The reason is that it does not hurt. The sand is warm and weighs nothing and comes up round you the way water comes up round your knees in a river, and if a bad thing is happening to you, you are not frightened of it, and you do not call. Marmalade got down off the carriage into the cutting, and the sand came up to her waist, and the good boot went first, because the bad boot was the one that slipped.

“Hal Brack,” she said. “You are up to your chest. You are not up to your neck. Do not move, and do not go round, because it only counts one way.” “Marmalade,” said Hal Brack, in the voice of a man who is not frightened and is also not being stupid. “I would thank you for the compliment, but I have got a lamp in my hand and I would rather somebody took the lamp.” She worked it out on her fingers, and then she worked it out on the ground, and the second way was the one that worked.

An hour of spent time that was never counted does not belong in anybody’s rack, so it does not stay in the carriage. It goes out, and settles on the nearest warm thing that has not noticed. That is the law of Coach Nine, and the trouble with it. But a counted thing goes back where it came from. Not into a person. Back into the racks. Counted out loud, in order, and it goes back. “All right,” said Marmalade. “Then we count.”

She started at one and did not stop for a long time, counting out of the sand and into the jars Hal Brack could reach, one hour at a time, because the racks take hours the way a bucket takes a bucket. “Two hundred and eleven,” she said. “Two hundred and twelve. Two hundred and thirteen.” Renn Duskin took over at two hundred and fourteen, and got stuck on the same three numbers four times, and Marmalade waited for him every time, which is the only thing you can do for a person losing count in a warm place in the dark. “Mine is going faster than yours,” she told him, kindly, at some point. “It is not going anywhere,” said Renn Duskin. “That is my whole difficulty.”

Rell Ferrite came in on the crane engine with a lamp on the end of a pole and found two Yard hands up to their armpits passing jars up a chain, a nine-year-old girl in the sand with a tin cup, counting, a packer reading the numbers back at her, and a signalman lying down with his boots in the air.

“Right. Listen,” he said. “Nobody in this cutting is getting out by being clever. The sand has to be counted out of it. Every hour. And then, and only then, we pull the carriage back on its own wheels and let the racks have it.” “How many?” said Marmalade. Captain Ferrite looked at her for a while. There were three copper wires in his beard, and he had bent them in the last two hours, standing in the cold with a boy holding his lamp.

“Seventeen hundred and forty,” he said. “And I am not guessing. There is a Ledger that says seventeen hundred and forty hours unaccounted for in the eastern yards, and a night-shift check does not lie, and I would write it on the hood of this engine if there were a pen on it.” “Seventeen hundred and forty,” said Marmalade. “That is two hundred and forty-eight in sevens, and four left over at the end. I can do sevens.” “You count in sevens and I count in hundreds, and when the two of us meet we will have the right answer, because that is what counting is for.”

They finished it at twenty past three in the morning, and Marmalade did not miss a number, and she has never once claimed otherwise. There is not a great deal to say about the rest. The sand went back into the racks. Hal Brack sat down on a crate and slept sitting up. The carriage went back to the siding at Sirocco in the spring, the band repainted, and everybody checked it twice a day, which is what everybody did.

Captain Ferrite needed two hours of ballast light to get the crane engine off the clay, because a balloon lifts on hours and a crane engine is a very stupid one, and the yards had nothing to give him. “I can give you something,” said Marmalade. He looked at the cloth, and at the hour-jar inside it, and at the blue twine. “Twenty-nine,” she said. “That is what the two hours cost. I counted it in the ledger on the crane, there is a column for it, and it is mine, and I am not losing anything, because a minute I have been paid in is not a minute anybody took off me.”

Rell Ferrite was a long time before he answered. “Right. Listen. Never do that again without a grown-up, and never do it without saying it out loud, and not because of the danger. Because the minutes you give away and the minutes that get taken are the same size, and only one of them is yours, and nobody can tell them apart afterwards but you.” She saw the far end of the Line in the morning, and it was not what she had thought, and she was sorry about it for about an hour and then she was not. The Yards are not beautiful. Four hundred jars deep in dry clay, rusted racks going down like corkscrews, packers in shirtsleeves, the air humming, the ground white with salt, burnt hard as a stove.

But there are blue loops on every handle in the place, and when a girl walks down an aisle with a tin cup, the packers look at the cup first and then at her, and the second one to look stops what he is doing. Thirty-one minutes were left in the cup, which was what was left of the sixty after the two hours of ballast light, and she counted them in the aisle out loud, the way you do, and then the jar went back into the cloth against her chest.

Then a packer she had never seen before, an old woman in a green apron, took a loop of blue twine off her own belt, tied it to the handle of the minute-jar, pulled it tight, and did not ask one question about it. Septimus Vail was at the ridge office at midday with his hat on his knee and his sunglasses in his hand. “Seventy minutes,” he said, before she was through the door. “I would not take yours. But I have a buyer at Sirocco who has run out of afternoon, and he will pay eighty for a spare half hour, and you are a small person in a doorway holding a jar. Same again?”

“No,” said Marmalade, before he had finished the sentence, and then she said it again, out loud, on purpose, because she had worked out in the last nine days what her one fault was, and it was that she had always said yes before the question was finished. Vail looked at her for a second, and put his sunglasses on. “For your information,” he said, “I did not mean to insult your jar.” “The jar is mine,” said Marmalade, “because I counted it.”

The answer to the question she had carried since the first week of her life came to her on the west platform at Kellvetch in the afternoon, in the way answers come in the Basin: somebody says a number out loud. It was Nim Ferrous, on the wire from the west end, on a schedule that let her say nine words at a time. “Two hundred and six days,” said Nim. “A minute a day. Confirm the figure.” “What is two hundred and six days?”

“Since you were put under this brake van. The cooks have owed you a minute a day since the day you were found, and they have never once written it down, and they meant to go on doing it for sixty years.” Marmalade stood on the platform with the jar against her chest and the blue twine on the handle, and the arithmetic of it went up through her the way the sun goes up off the sand.

Two hundred and six. She had counted sixty. A hundred and forty-six more were in the jar, and she had carried them up and down the Line in a cloth without knowing it, and thirty-one of her sixty were still in the cup. Nobody had ever taken one of them off her. Nobody had ever written one of them down either. Both of those things had been true the whole time.

That is the arithmetic of it. An hour is only yours if you counted it, and a debt is only yours if somebody said it out loud. She was nine, and she had done the first, and somebody had done the second. At the far end of the Line, at four in the morning, a man with a white eyebrow burned to a stub chalked three words on a board for whoever came next. COUNT IT. I. T.