Chương 1: The Last Birthday

It was raining in the yard, and none of the rain was falling. Abe Dolan stood in the dark with a wooden sword in his hand and his arms burning, and the drops sat still in the air all around him, hundreds of them. The city made no sound at all. Nothing in it moved except him. He did the drill again, and again, and one more time after that, until his legs shook. It was two in the morning, and it was going to stay two in the morning until he let go. He was eighteen years old. His hands had stopped looking eighteen.

None of it existed yet. The sword, the rain, the stopped city, all of that was still weeks away. First there was a Thursday, and a pot of soup. There were three kids in Abe Dolan's class who hadn't woken up yet. By Friday there would be two. That's how the last year of school worked in Calder. You woke up on your eighteenth birthday, and everyone else in your year was already ahead of you. Abe's was Friday. Third to last out of two hundred people.

He got home at half past four on Thursday and the apartment smelled like soup. That meant Peg was back from the school kitchens ahead of him, and it meant she was worried. Peg cooked when she was worried, and she had never in her life said so out loud. Aunt Peg had moved in the week after Abe's mother's funeral and had never once called it a favor. She put a bowl in front of him before he had his coat off.

"Tomorrow," she said.

"Tomorrow." June was at the kitchen table with her homework spread out in a fan. She was sixteen, two years below him at the same school, and she'd been sharper than him since she was about nine. She looked up at him.

"You've got the face on," she said.

"I haven't got a face."

"You've got the face you get when you're trying to be normal at something. It's worse than the other faces. Sit down and eat." On the wall by the window there was a sheet of paper with two columns on it in June's handwriting. The left column said WHAT IT COSTS and had two million marks under it, with every zero written out. The right column said WHAT WE HAVE and had three hundred and forty. In the gap between the two columns June had drawn a small face sticking its tongue out.

Two million marks was what the real medicine cost. The medicine in the brown bottles by the sink was two hundred and twenty marks a month, and it only held June exactly where she was. Abe ate his soup and didn't look at the wall. Afterward he sat on his bed and took his father's book out of his bag, a paperback with a green cover and a coffee ring on it.

His father had been a wall guard, and he'd carried this exact copy up onto Calder's sea wall for eleven years, writing in the margins the whole time in small square capitals. There was also a folded page at the back with nothing printed on it. Abe didn't open the book. He knew what was in it. He only checked that the folded page was still there, like he did every night, and put it back in his bag. Nobody in Calder slept on the night before their birthday.

That's a fact, like the tide bells at six or the price of bread. The Weave came at midnight, wherever you were and whatever you were doing, and it was never a minute late. At eleven fifty Abe sat down on his bed with his back against the wall. At eleven fifty-eight June came in without knocking and sat on the end of it, feet tucked up.

"I'm not talking," she said.

"I'm just going to sit here. Because you'd sit in the dark on your own waiting for a magic screen, and then you'd come out weird, and I'd have to live with you." Abe laughed. Then his heart started going hard, and it would not stop doing it.

"June. What if it's nothing good." June didn't tell him it would be fine.

"Then it's nothing good," she said, "and you'll still be here, and I'll still be here, and Peg will still burn the toast. And we'll work out what to do about it on Saturday."

"I work on Saturday."

"Then Saturday night, you idiot." His phone said 11: 59. He watched the last minute go one number at a time, and he thought about his father, who'd woken up at eighteen with something small and useful, and had taken it up onto the wall, and had died up there when the monsters came over. Then it was midnight, and the Weave arrived. It didn't hurt, which he had not expected. Everything went quiet, all at once. It was the kind of quiet you get when a machine you'd stopped noticing switches off.

Abe could hear his own blood moving. Then something huge moved inside his chest, slow and heavy. A light came up inside his head, even though his eyes were open and the room was dark. Abe forgot to breathe, but he didn't care. It was the most wonderful thing that had ever happened to him and it was still happening. The narrative has been taken without permission. Report any sightings. Then there was a screen hanging in the middle of his own head, as clear and as ordinary as a page held up in front of his face.

ABE DOLAN · Age 18 Talent: [Stillpoint] While you train, the world holds still. Time within flows for you, and you alone. Measured effect on the world: none. Grade: F He read the top part and didn't understand it at all. Then he read the bottom part, and he understood that one completely, all the way down. The Weave had looked at everything he was and decided that none of it did anything. Then it gave him the lowest letter it had. He'd spent a year getting ready for this.

There was a page of his own handwriting folded into the back of a paperback four feet away, laying out exactly what he meant to do with whatever he got. The Weave had looked at all of that and written none. Nobody else could see it. Your Talent and your grade were yours, and nobody found out unless you told them.

"Well?" June said. She was trying so hard to sound ordinary that it came out wrong.

"It's a training one," he said. That was true. What he left out was the F, and the line underneath it, and that was the first time in his life he had lied to her.

"A training one," June repeated.

"Is that good?"

"I don't know yet."

"Huh." She thought about it, then stood up and yawned like a cat.

"Well, you're still an idiot, and you've still got work on Saturday. Be unbearable about it tomorrow. Tell everyone twice." Then she went to bed. Abe waited until he heard her door. Then he got down on the floor of his room and did push-ups, because push-ups were free and nobody could take them off him, and they were the only way he knew how to test anything. While you train, the world holds still. The world didn't hold still. The fridge hummed.

A car went by outside and its light swung across the ceiling and kept going. He did forty. He read the screen again with his arms shaking. Nothing on it had changed. At school on Friday everybody asked, and Abe said it was a training one and watched their faces do the polite thing. Nobody pushed him. Everybody knew there was a demonstration on Monday. He spent the weekend hunting for whatever he was doing wrong.

On Saturday he worked his shift at Riddell's, which sold and sharpened tools and took whatever came off the salvage trucks, and between loads he tried it in the yard, push-ups on the wet concrete with his coat off. He tried very hard to be calm. It didn't work. His heart banged, his jaw stayed locked, and nothing in him let go. A gull screamed at him from the roof of the shed. By Sunday night he had run out of things to change.

He read the two lines at the top over and over, until the words came apart and stopped meaning anything. Somewhere in there, he started to believe it. Cultivation class ran for two hours every afternoon in the old gym, and on the first Monday after your birthday it was all anybody in the building talked about. The room was a ladder you could see from the door. Down one end were the July and August birthdays, who'd been awake for two months and moved like it.

Miles Croft was running a practice sword through a form his family had been teaching for sixty years, and the sword left a thin silver line hanging in the air behind it that faded slowly, like a finger drawn through fog. People stopped to watch him without meaning to. By the wall was mat four, blue rubber, worn pale in the middle, where Abe did push-ups because push-ups were what he had. Mr.

Tench walked the room with his hands behind his back, old and gray, with a bad left hand he kept out of the way and never explained. Five weeks ago he'd stopped at mat four and told Abe to tuck his elbows in, and that was still the most useful thing anybody had said to Abe in that room all term. At half past three Tench blew the whistle and everybody sat down along the wall.

"Two of you," he said.

"Mott first." Nell Mott went out into the middle of the floor with her hands in her sleeves. She was small and freckled, and she'd turned eighteen on the Wednesday. She crouched down by the end of the bench, got one hand under it, and stood up. The bench came with her, a steel-framed gym bench held off the floor with one arm like a broom, and her face went from terrified to delighted so fast that the whole room laughed and then cheered.

"That's a working Talent," Tench said.

"In four years somebody is going to pay you money for it every day." Nell sat down with her ears bright red and about eleven people hit her on the shoulder as they went past.

"Dolan," said Tench.

"Pad." The pad was a gray rubber square by the wall bars, wired to the screen where the basketball scores used to go. Abe stood on it. It took four seconds. DOLAN, A. · Layer 1 · Body 1 · Mind 1 Layer 1, Body 1, Mind 1 was what every human being in history woke up with, so nobody reacted. The numbers weren't what the room had come for.

"What did you get?" Tench said.

"A training one, sir."

"What sort of training one." Abe had thought about this for three days and hadn't found a word that was both true and sayable.

"It works while I train," he said.

"Then show us." So Abe Dolan walked out into the middle of the gym floor in front of two hundred people, got down on his hands, and started doing push-ups. Somewhere behind his ribs he was still absolutely certain that this would be the time. He reached for the feeling from midnight, the huge slow thing moving in his chest, and pulled at it with everything he had.

"One," he said.

"Two." Nothing happened. The fluorescent tube over the wall bars kept buzzing. He did twenty. He kept his elbows tucked in. By thirty the room had gone quiet, and it was the wrong kind of quiet. It was two hundred people waiting for a thing to happen and starting to understand that the thing wasn't going to happen.

"Is this it?" Ellis Naylor said, from the back, loudly. Nita Sowerby turned around and told him to shut up. Nita Sowerby had decided to be sorry for him, and Abe minded that more than the laughing. At forty somebody laughed. Abe didn't look up to find out who, because he had a rule about that, and the rule was that looking up only ever made it worse. By fifty the laughing had stopped. Nobody was even enjoying it anymore, and that was much worse.

He did sixty push-ups on the floor of the old gym while the whole senior year watched, and his arms went from burning to shaking, and nothing anywhere came to help him.

"That's enough, Dolan," Tench said. Abe got up. The blood banged in his ears. He sat back down against the wall and nobody said one word to him, and Tench looked at him a second longer than he needed to and moved on to the drills. It was Croft who put a word to it, out by the racks, cheerful as anything and loud enough for the room.

"F-tier," Miles Croft said, and he was laughing while he said it.

"Boys. We've got an actual F-tier." Croft had not seen his grade. Nobody ever saw anybody's grade, because a grade was a private thing. F-tier was only a word off the forums for a build that does nothing at all, and Croft had reached for it out of the air and got it exactly right. Abe got his bag and fled. He felt ashamed, all the way down, in a way that was completely new to him. The worst part was that he thought Croft was right. He sat upstairs at the back of the bus with his father's paperback in his lap.

He brought the screen up in the middle of his head and read the top two lines again. While you train, the world holds still. Time within flows for you, and you alone. He tried them forward and backward, as a promise and then as a joke. They still didn't mean anything. And underneath them, where it had said the same thing since midnight on Friday, it still said none. Abe put his head against the cold window and reached for it again, as hard as he possibly could. Nothing came.

Somewhere past the bridge he gave up, because he was tired and his arms hurt and there was no point in it. Then the bus went quiet. The engine, the wheels, a man coughing behind him, all of it gone at once. The woman across the aisle, halfway through turning her page. A dropped ticket hanging in the air under the seat in front. Then the noise came back, the page turned, the ticket landed.

Abe sat up so fast he cracked his head on the glass, and he spent the rest of the ride trying to do it again, as hard as he possibly could.