Ray sat on the bench in the antechamber and watched Dale count the bars for the third time. Dale's hands moved the same way they always did—slow, methodical, like he was trying to convince himself the numbers would be different this time. They weren't. They never were.

"Five hundred short," Dale said.

"Or five hundred extra," Ray said.

Dale looked up. His face was the color of old paper. He was fifty-one, but some days he looked sixty. Some days Ray felt sixty himself.

"It doesn't matter," Dale said. "Short or extra, it's wrong."

"It's always wrong."

They had been guarding this vault for seven years. Seven years of sitting in a room that used to be part of a factory before the factory closed and the government bought the building for storage and the vault became theirs to watch. Not theirs to touch. Not really. Just to watch. To make sure nobody took anything. To make sure nothing disappeared.

Except it did. Or it didn't. The numbers went up and down and up and down and neither man could figure out which direction was lying.

Ray stood up. His knees cracked. He walked to the locker and took out his coat. Dale was already doing the same. They stood in the antechamber, putting on their shirts, their jackets, their boots. The fluorescent light overhead flickered the way it always did, like it was thinking about giving out and deciding not to.

"We should tell Henderson," Dale said.

"We told Henderson."

"He didn't do anything."

"He's going to do something. He always does. Or he doesn't. It's the same thing."

Ray was right about that much. Mr. Henderson was coming tomorrow. He was the auditor—the guy whose job it was to look at the numbers and decide whether they meant something or meant nothing. Henderson had been doing this job for thirty years. He was close to retirement. He had the tired eyes of a man who had seen every kind of dishonesty the world could offer and found them all equally uninteresting.

When Henderson arrived the next morning, he looked exactly as Ray expected him to look: gray suit, gray hair, gray expression. He carried a clipboard and a thermos and the air of a man who had already lived through worse days and was not looking for drama.

"Morning," he said.

"Morning," Ray said.

"Let's see the vault."

They went through the motions. Outer door. Inner door. Antechamber. Ray and Dale removed their jackets, their coats, their belts. Henderson watched them with the detached interest of a man watching insects through a microscope. Then they entered the silver chamber.

Henderson opened the ledger. He flipped through the pages slowly, the way you flip through a phone book when you're looking for a number you're not sure exists. He counted the bars. He wrote something on his clipboard. He counted again.

"Your tally is off," he said.

"Ours is always off," Dale said.

Henderson looked at him. "Is that a problem?"

Dale shrugged. "Depends on who's counting."

Henderson made a note. He didn't smile. He rarely smiled. "How long have you two been working here?"

"Seven years," Ray said. "Together. Five before that separately."

"Seven years and you can't keep the numbers straight."

"We can keep them straight. They just—" Ray stopped. He wasn't sure how to finish that sentence. They just change? They just don't mean anything anymore? They just lie the way the ground lies when you walk on it and don't feel the rocks beneath?

"Go on," Henderson said.

"Nothing," Ray said. "It's fine."

Henderson nodded. He made another note. He looked at the silver bars, the iron shelves, the concrete walls. He looked at Ray and Dale standing there in their undershirts, cold despite the heat, waiting for a verdict that would probably never come.

"How much is missing?" he asked.

"We're not sure it's missing," Dale said. "Some months it's extra. Some months it's short. It goes both ways."

"That's not how accounting works."

"We're not accountants. We're guards."

Henderson closed the ledger. He stood there for a moment, looking at the vault the way a doctor looks at a patient he doesn't want to diagnose. Then he opened his thermos and poured coffee into the cap and drank it standing up.

"I'll file a report," he said. "That's all I can do. File a report. What happens after that is somebody else's problem."

"Whose problem?" Ray asked.

Henderson looked at him. For the first time, there was something in his eyes that wasn't tiredness. It was almost sympathy. Almost. "Everybody's problem. Nobody's problem. Same thing."

He packed up his clipboard. He put on his coat. He walked out of the vault, through the inner door, through the antechamber, through the outer door, and up the stairs to the surface where the sun was shining and the world was busy pretending that numbers meant something.

Ray and Dale stayed in the vault for another hour. They sat on the bench in the antechamber and said nothing. The fluorescent light buzzed. The silver bars gleamed in their iron cages. Five hundred bars short. Or five hundred extra. It didn't matter. It never mattered.

When they finally left, Ray drove home in silence. His house was small, the roof leaked in the kitchen, and his ex-wife had custody of his daughter on weekends. He saw her every other Sunday at the diner on Main Street, and she always asked how he was and he always said fine and she always looked like she didn't believe him.

Dale went home to a wife who was sick and a hospital bill that was bigger than the vault's discrepancy. He sat in his kitchen and stared at the wall for three hours and then went to bed early.

Nobody filed a report. Or maybe Henderson filed one and it got lost in a drawer somewhere, the way reports get lost in drawers. Nobody cared enough to check.

Ray continued to guard the vault. Dale continued to guard the vault. The silver continued to appear and disappear, to grow and shrink, to do whatever it was that silver does when nobody is watching.

Sometimes Ray woke up at night and thought about those five hundred bars. Not where they were or who took them or who put them there. He thought about the feeling of standing in that vault, naked except for an undershirt, listening to a man who didn't care enough to care. And he couldn't sleep.

That was all. That was everything.

OTMES v2: DR-1987-OH-SLV-4ACT-1250W-NO-SUP-PER-1PL-LIM