Chương 11: Live

The world started. Abe had an hour and a half of planning in his head and he got to use about half a second of it. He had studied a statue. Nobody had told him that, because there was nobody to tell him anything. He knew exactly what it looked like. He knew nothing whatsoever about how fast it was. It came off the heap before he finished his first breath. Nine feet of black water in a stairwell. It crossed all of it while Abe was still deciding to lift the bar.

The noise it made in that brick box was the loudest thing he had ever heard in his life. Then it hit him. He didn't see the hit. He was on the fourth step and then he was on the second one, with his back against the wall and water up to his knees. The whole left side of his head had gone hot and stupid. The bar was still in his right hand. He had no idea why. Abe got his feet under him because getting his feet under him was the only idea he had left. It came again. This time he saw it, and seeing it was worse.

The front two legs weren't for walking, and now he knew what they were for. He got the bar up and something went into his left hand and the hand stopped being a hand. There was no pain in it. That came later. There was a sound like a bag of pencils and then his fingers wouldn't do anything he asked them to. Abe screamed at it. He hadn't planned to do that either. He got the bar across and shoved, and it didn't move, and it drove him back up two steps and put him on his knees in the shallow water.

Then it stopped and pulled back and looked at him. Abe understood then what he was actually in. It was not fighting him but moving something out of its way, and it moved him about as hard as a person moves a chair. Abe knelt in eight inches of water in the dark with one hand that didn't work and thought about June counting streets. He got up. He got up. He was on the third step with the water off him, and something in his chest went absolutely quiet. Then the screen came up in the middle of it.

Conditioning · Novice → Apprentice Body 3 → 4 It didn't come downward and it wasn't warm and it didn't take twenty minutes. It arrived the way a light arrives when somebody hits the switch. One second Abe was a boy holding a bar too heavy for him. The next second the bar was the right weight. One point of Body. He didn't have time to be amazed about it, but he was amazed anyway, and then the second screen came. It was the one his father had written about.

It was on a page in the back of a paperback that had been in Abe's bag for a month. EVOLUTION · Conditioning Choose one. This choice is permanent. SET STANCE · Common Much harder to move, knock down, or drive off a line. Holds under a blow that would put you down. A guard learns this one first. It is why the wall holds. LONG WATCH · Common Tires far more slowly at sustained work. Rest between efforts counts for more. The second watch is the one that kills you. DEEP WELL · Rare Recovers from what is underneath you.

Requires: Realm 1 · Apprentice within 30 days of Awakening Two of those were in the book. The book had them shorter, because the book was a dead man's memory of a screen. The third wasn't in the book at all. It was the only one with a requirement written under it, and Abe read it and understood that he had met it, with twelve days to spare. There was nothing else under Deep Well either, where the other two had their line about wall guards and watches. The screen was not going to tell him what it did.

There was no time to think about it and he didn't. The thing came. Abe took Set Stance. His father had put a line under it twice in blue pen, pressed hard enough to score the paper. Abe had four seconds, and a boy with four seconds takes the answer his dad left him. The screen did something he had not known screens did. Conditioning → SET STANCE Set Stance · Apprentice Lv 1 (0 / 200) Conditioning was gone. Every child on Earth starts with that word and Abe did not have it anymore.

He had Set Stance instead, his father's answer, sitting on the bar where the old name used to be. Then Set Stance arrived, and it arrived like being hit by a car. Abe didn't go anywhere. That was all it was. He didn't go up the steps and he didn't go under the water and he didn't fold. His feet stayed where he had put them. His knees stayed where he had put them. He took every bit of it standing on a wet step in the dark. Unlawfully taken from Royal Road, this story should be reported if seen on Amazon.

His whole body rang like a struck pipe. He heard himself laugh, which was insane. Then he got the bar into the gap. A finger's width between each plate at the shoulder. The gap doesn't close when it's standing still, and it doesn't close when it's coming at you either. Abe had spent an hour with a flashlight learning that one fact, and it was the only fact his hour had bought him. It was enough. He put eighteen inches of sharpened flat bar into that gap and leaned on it with everything a month of nights had built.

Then it went mad, and the stairwell was very small. It got him off the step. It got him into the water and the water was over him and there was a great deal of noise happening somewhere above it. Abe came up because coming up was the only idea he had ever had. The bar was still in the gap. It hadn't come out and he hadn't let go, and he was fairly sure the reason for both of those was that his hand had stopped taking instructions. He got a foot on something. He didn't know what it was and he never found out.

Then he leaned. That's all he did. There was no second clever idea and there was nothing in the book about this part. He put his shoulder behind the bar and he leaned on it, and the thing hit him, and he leaned on it, and it hit him again, and he leaned on it. There was a moment in the middle where he didn't think he could take another one. He took another one. Somewhere in there it made a noise in that brick box that took most of the hearing in his left ear for a week. Then it stopped.

Abe stood in the dark with the water going quiet around his legs and waited for it to start again. It didn't start again. He waited a long time anyway. The water went flat. Nothing in that stairwell moved except him. He had killed it. He had gone down eight steps with a piece of scrap off a salvage pile and killed a thing that had been standing inside the wall of his own city for thirteen days, while everybody whose job it was to come hadn't come.

Abe wanted to be sick and he wanted to laugh, and he couldn't get his breathing to do either one. He was still holding the bar. He had to talk himself into letting go of it, one finger at a time, with the hand that still worked. The core was in the chest, under the third plate, and it came out warm. It was about the size of a plum and it was much heavier than a plum, and it was the ugliest, dullest, most beautiful thing Abe Dolan had ever held.

He sat down on the steps in the water with it in his good hand and shook for a while. Then he read the screens, sitting on the step with his feet in the water, because he couldn't have stopped himself if he'd tried. Realm 1 · KINDLED · Body Layer 3 Foundation: 431 / 1600 (Body Layer 4) Four hundred and thirty-one. He had come down those steps on four hundred and eleven. Twenty points.

Abe had very nearly died in a hole in the ground, and the bar that actually mattered for the third of November had moved twenty points, because the Weave pays depth by the hour and he had been down here about six minutes. The skill had gone up a whole rank. The depth had barely moved. So the drain was never going to be a shortcut to that board. Abe worked that out sitting in the water with his hand smashed, and what he had actually come down here for was the money.

He thought about the third option once, and then made himself stop. It had a number on it. Somebody had picked that number, and Abe couldn't think of one good reason why. Three hundred marks, near enough, if it was clean. Riddell paid him fourteen a shift. Getting up the eight steps would have been funny if anybody had been there to watch it. He put the boards back over the top, badly, with one hand. Then he stood on Salt Row at half past two in the morning, soaking wet and bleeding from somewhere on his head.

There was a dead monster behind him and a plum-sized fortune in his coat. He was eighteen and he couldn't go home like this. The light was off over Riddell's, and Abe stood on the Corn Road for a long time before he knocked. He knocked with his good hand, three times, and then he waited, and then a light came on in the apartment above the shop and a window went up.

"We are shut," said Riddell.

"It's Abe." There was a pause. Then the window shut, and the light came down the stairs, and the door came open. Riddell looked at him for a long time. Wet through, one hand held against his chest at an angle hands don't go, blood down one side of his face and dried in his ear. He didn't say a single word about any of it.

"Come in off the street," Riddell said. The shop smelled of oil and cold metal, the same as ever. Riddell put the lights on over the bench and sat Abe on the stool. Then he got a bowl of water and a cloth and cleaned the blood off his face, without asking one question about where it had come from. Then he took Abe's left hand and turned it over twice, and Abe made a noise.

"Two of those are broken," Riddell said.

"Maybe three."

"I know."

"You will not go to anybody about it."

"No." A doctor cost money and asked questions, and Abe couldn't afford either one of those, and both of them had known that before either of them said anything.

"No." Riddell got a roll of tape out of the drawer under the till. He strapped the two fingers to their neighbors, tight, and he was quick about it.

"Then it will set crooked and it will ache when it is cold, for the rest of your life. That is the deal you have just made and you should know you made it." Abe put the core on the bench. Riddell looked at it. He didn't pick it up and he didn't touch it. He looked at it for a while, and then he looked at the wall behind Abe's head. Something went across his face and got put away again.

"Wait there," he said. He went into the back room and came out with a tin, the flat kind that cookies come in. Then he counted notes out of it onto the bench, next to the core. He didn't ask where it came from, or what it had been. Abe had come up the Corn Road braced to be called an idiot and told to stop, and Riddell went on counting notes onto the bench instead.

"Three hundred and ten," Riddell said.

"Right."

"It's clean, so it's worth three hundred and ten." He put the tin down.

"Do not tell me anything, Abe."

"I wasn't going to."

"Good." Then he stood there with his hands on the bench and looked at the money, and he wasn't pleased about any of it, and he didn't say why. Abe got home at four in the morning. He got the door open as quietly as he had ever done anything, and the kitchen light was off, and June was sitting at the table in the dark. She had her school sweater on over her pajamas. There was a cup in front of her that had been finished a long time ago. Her chair was turned to face the door.

She hadn't been reading and she hadn't had the radio on. She had been sitting in the dark in a kitchen chair that was pointing at the front door, and Abe didn't know how long for and didn't want to. Abe stood in the doorway with three hundred and ten marks in his coat, his hand taped up, and one ear that wasn't working. He waited for her to start. June didn't start. She looked at his hand first. Not his face, and not the blood, and not the water coming off his coat onto the kitchen floor. The hand.

She looked at it like somebody checking a thing they have already been imagining for hours. Then she looked at the rest of him, and she took her time about it, and let the silence sit there between them. Abe would have given anything for her to shout at him. She wasn't going to shout. He worked out why while he was standing there and it didn't help him.

June had been in that chair since about one o'clock working out what she was going to say to him, and she'd gotten all the way to four in the morning without finding one single thing she could start saying and then stop.

"June," he said.

"I'm going to bed," said June. Her voice wasn't right. Abe heard it and didn't know what to say. Everything he had left to tell her was a lie, and she had caught all of them already. She got up and put her cup in the sink. Then she went past him in the doorway, close enough that he had to move his shoulder, and she didn't touch him and she didn't look up. Her door shut. Abe stood in the kitchen with the light off. The paper was on the wall two feet from his head.

Two million on one side of it and three hundred and forty on the other, with June's little drawn face sticking its tongue out in the gap between. Twelve days to the third of November. It had been thirteen when he left the apartment. He got the money out of his coat and counted it again, and it was still three hundred and ten. Then he went and stood outside June's door for a while. He didn't knock.

He had no idea what he would have said if she'd opened it, and he stood there anyway until his legs started shaking, and then he went to bed.