A novel · Book One
The Second Number
A boy who could read a whole field never got to see the play that beat him. Now he can.
At eighteen, Marcus Ellison signed a plea in a room with a humming light, because he wanted to go home. He went home that night. He never really got free again. Then a school bell rings, and he opens his eyes on graduation day on the West Side of Dayton, with a body that doesn't hurt yet and a new way of seeing: the second number in every deal, the one nobody ever offered his mother.
The payday loan, the refinance, the rent-to-own couch, the "we buy houses" letter. Every trap in the book is real. Marcus can see them all now. The question is what he does with that, and what it costs him not to become the thing he's reading.
SECOND
NUMBER Read the machine.
Wake the block.
Don't become it. Lamont Ragland II
In Book One
- Part One: The FloorChapters 1 to 13. Delmar Avenue, the block, and the first deals Marcus learns to read, and to teach.
- Part Two: The ClimbChapters 14 to 29. The offers get bigger, the Broker gets closer, and the block learns to cover its own.
Then play it
The Second Number is also a cooperative board game for 1 to 5 players, set on the same blocks. Read every deal through red, amber and blue glasses, teach your neighbors to read them, and drag the one machine behind them all into the light. Its four-chapter Book One campaign follows the novel's story.
The real-life version
What Marcus can see, you can learn. The Third Option is the Civic Armor method for your own job: recognize it, document it, prove it.