Chương 12: The Spar

The tape came off on Thursday night. Abe put it back on in the school toilets on Friday morning, tighter, with his sleeve pulled down over it. Two fingers, strapped to their neighbors. Riddell had done it in a shop at three in the morning and the swelling had gone down about enough to pretend. It hurt in a way that had settled in and made itself at home. Abe had spent two days finding out how many things a person does with a left hand. Bags. Doors. Buttons.

Getting a bowl down off a shelf without letting anybody see which arm did it. Peg had it out of him before she left for work on Wednesday morning. He told her a crate had come off the stack in Riddell's yard and caught his hand against the wall. It was a good story. That happens to somebody on the salvage run about twice a year, and it explains a face as well as it explains a hand. Peg looked at him over the top of it for a long moment.

Then she said she'd call Riddell about it, and Abe said fine, and she didn't call Riddell. They both noticed that she didn't. June was in the kitchen doorway for all of it with her school bag already on her shoulder. She had watched him come through that door at four in the morning with the water running off his coat. She knew the crate story was a lie before Peg had finished hearing it. She put the plate down in front of him and went back to the sink. She'd stayed quiet about it all week.

It was Friday now, and the silence had stopped being about his hand and started being about something else, and Abe couldn't work out what. The corridor was loud because it was Amrit's birthday. He had turned eighteen at some point in the night. That meant he had Awakened, and on Monday he would go across the pad and the board would get written out again. Everybody wanted to know what he got. Amrit was telling people he didn't want to say, in the voice of somebody who very much wanted to say.

Abe went past the board on the way to registration. DOLAN, A. · Layer 1 · Body 1 · Mind 1 · TOP 10 BY NOV 3 in the corner, in green, going furry. Everything on that wall was about to move except his line. Nita would rewrite the whole year around him on Monday night. His row would sit there under the ruled line, saying the same four things it had said since the sixth of October. Ten days.

Abe went to registration with a broken hand up his sleeve and the deepest foundation in the building and nothing whatsoever to show anybody. Cultivation class was the last two hours.

"Mats," said Tench.

"Bouts. Unarmed." The groan that went up was nothing like the groan the settle got. This one had a happy noise inside it. Abe's face went hot. He couldn't do this. He had a hand that didn't work, and he had never been taught to fight in his life. The whole room was about to watch him find that out. Then he thought about it properly. There was no getting out of it, and some small part of him wanted to do it anyway, and he decided he would look at that part later.

Tench started pairing people off, and Abe put his hand up and asked to go and get a drink. The corridor outside the gym doors was empty, because everybody in the year was inside the gym. Abe put his back against the cold tiles and shut his eyes. It took about fifty seconds. The school stopped, and he had that corridor and as long as he wanted in it. He didn't know who he was fighting yet, but it didn't matter much.

He was going to lose to whoever it was, and the only question worth an hour was how to lose without two hundred people seeing his left hand. So he stood in a stopped corridor and worked it out, slowly, twice, with the water fountain humming nothing beside him. Then he let the world go, and got his drink, and went back in, and Tench said, "Dolan. Naylor." Ellis Naylor was two months Awakened.

He had a coach on Wednesdays, and a method with a name in it, and he had spent those two months learning where to put his feet. He was also having a very good week, and he came out onto the mat grinning.

"Don't break him, Ellis," Amrit said, and about nine people laughed, and it wasn't even unkind, just the funniest pairing Tench had made all afternoon. It got funnier. Abe swung at Ellis Naylor four times in the first minute and hit air every single time. One of them was so bad that a girl near the front made a noise like she had trodden on something. The fourth one nearly put Abe on the floor without any help from Naylor. The gym loved it.

Sam Ottley at the back started calling out advice, like you do at a dog that can't get up a step.

"Dolan, he's on your left," he shouted. Then, when that didn't help, "Your other left." About forty people were openly enjoying themselves. Abe would have enjoyed it too, honestly, if he'd been sitting down. He had spent a month getting strong. Not one person alive had ever shown him what to do with it, and the whole year was finding that out at the same time he was. If you come across this story on Amazon, it's taken without permission from the author. Report it.

Then Naylor put three strikes and a step together, exactly as a coach on a Wednesday teaches it, and every one of them landed. Abe didn't go anywhere. That was the first small silence. Then the laughing started again, because a boy standing still isn't obviously interesting. Naylor came back and hit him properly, four times, in the places you are taught to hit. Getting hit in the head isn't like anything else.

It's loud on the inside, and Abe's mouth filled up with the taste of a penny, and he stayed exactly where he was. Then Naylor went for the hold. He got underneath, and he got a grip, and the grip he got was Abe's left wrist. Everything in Abe went white. Two broken fingers, two days old, in the fist of a boy who was pulling for all he was worth.

The pain came up his arm and into his teeth and took the gym away with it, and somewhere on the far side of that Abe understood, very clearly, that he was about to make a noise. He didn't make the noise. He never worked out how. He stood in the middle of two hundred people with his eyes streaming and his jaw locked shut and the whole world gone to a white hum, and he didn't make one single sound. Naylor let go of the wrist to change his grip. Abe got the hand behind his back and put it there and left it there.

"He's rocked," said somebody near the front, delighted, and about six people agreed, and Abe could have kissed all of them, because a boy who has been hit hard in the head looks exactly like a boy who has just had his broken hand pulled. Nobody in that gym saw the tape. Nobody ever did. Then Naylor went to put him on the mat, which is how a bout ends. He was very good at it. He had the grip and the turn and the drop and he had done it to people all term, and it went off exactly as it was supposed to.

Abe didn't move. He didn't brace and he didn't counter, because he didn't know how to do either of those things. His feet simply stayed where he had put them. Set Stance. Much harder to move, knock down, or drive off a line. A guard learns it first, and it is why the wall holds, and Ellis Naylor had just run into the one line Abe's father had underlined twice in blue pen. Naylor tried it again. Then he tried it from the other side.

Then he stopped, and stood back, and Abe watched a boy his own age arrive at the thought that he had nothing left to try. That was when the hall went quiet properly. Nobody announced it. The laughing stopped and the talking stopped and the boy at the back stopped calling advice, and two hundred people worked out together that they were no longer watching something funny. Abe saw Croft once, over Naylor's shoulder, in a gap between one thing and the next.

He was standing at the edge of the mats with his arms folded and he wasn't saying anything to anybody. Miles Croft had a comment for every single thing that ever happened in that gym. He didn't have one for this. Naylor came again, because he wasn't a quitter either. There was a stretch in the middle where Abe genuinely didn't know if he could take another one.

His legs had gone strange and the noise in his head was very loud, and somewhere underneath all of it a small clear voice was pointing out, quite reasonably, that he could sit down now and every single person in this room would understand. Abe thought about nine feet of black water and a thing that had crossed all of it before he finished a breath. He took another one. Then Ellis Naylor's hands came down about four inches, because the rest of him was finished. So Abe did the only offensive thing he knew how to do.

He walked into him, got hold of him with one arm, and put him on the mat. Naylor had run out of ideas. Abe had only ever had one idea, and he used it. But the gym had never seen Abe Dolan win anything before. Tench blew the whistle. Abe stood in the middle of the mat with one hand behind his back. His ears were ringing and there was blood coming out of his nose onto the floor of the gym. The gym did not make a sound.

Then Ottley said a word loudly enough that Tench sent him out for the rest of the lesson, and the whole place came apart at once. Naylor got up off the mat and came over and put his hand out. His family had raised him properly and he was going to do this bit right if it killed him. Abe shook it with his right hand and hoped nobody wondered why.

"What are you on," Naylor said. Quietly. Just to him.

"The board's got it."

"Do not."

"Ellis, the board's got it." Naylor held the look, and then he went and sat down, and that was the last decent thing he did about that business. Tench took his little black notebook out of his back pocket. He wrote one line in it and put it away and didn't look at Abe, and told everybody to get the next pair up. Abe went and sat on the bench and put his head back against the wall bars. He had won. In front of the whole year, on the mats, against a boy with a coach and a method and two months on him.

Then he checked, because he checked about twenty times a day now. Set Stance · Apprentice Lv 3 (1, 050 / 1800) It had said nine hundred at lunchtime. A hundred and fifty points, for four minutes on a mat. He had put three nights into that bar in stopped corridors and it had never jumped like that. Abe sat and looked at it. Something in that was important and he was far too happy to work out what. He wanted to laugh so badly that he had to bite the inside of his cheek.

There was nothing he could do with any of it on his face, because a boy who wins one bout and grins about it is a boy who thinks winning one bout is a big deal. So he sat there and looked at the ceiling with his nose bleeding and was happier than he had been in about a month, and not one person in that gym knew. Ada Bewley caught him at the water fountain afterward. She was small and quick and she had a Band-Aid on one knuckle.

She was tenth on the board and had been since September, and she got there by going into the school hall every single evening on her own.

"That was brilliant," she said.

"I got hit a lot."

"You got hit a lot and you didn't go down. Do you know how hard that is?" Ada Bewley wiped her hand across her mouth.

"I've been doing this since September and Naylor puts me down in about a minute."

"He's good."

"He's very good, and you made him look like he was pushing a wall over." She said it with her whole face and then went pink about having said it, and she was already turning to go. Then she said, "See you Monday," and went off to her lesson, and not one person in that corridor thought about what a week from Monday was going to do to Ada Bewley. Abe didn't think about it either. The theories started at lunch.

Abe was at the end of the long table with a plate he was working through slowly, because chewing had opinions now. The talking was two tables over and nobody was troubling to keep it down.

"He's on something," Ellis Naylor said.

"That's all it is. My cousin does it. You can get it off the water crews."

"He doesn't have any money," Nell Mott said.

"You don't need money, you need somebody with a permit." Lena Ward was at that table and she had a better one, because she had gotten hers from an adult.

"Danforth's coach stopped a session over him," she said.

"The one on Fenner Street. Stopped it dead in the middle and told him something was wrong."

"Wrong how."

"That's what I'm saying. A man who does that for a living looked at Abe Dolan and said it doesn't work like that." Abe put a forkful of potato in his mouth and chewed it very carefully on the right-hand side. That was Sunday. Six days ago, in a hall with three people in it. It had come across town and up a set of stairs and into a lunchroom, and not one person along the way had meant any harm by it. Danforth was at that table. He heard all of it and looked down at his plate.

Abe watched him not correct it, and couldn't tell whether that was Danforth being kind or Danforth not knowing what the true version even was. Croft was at the other end of the lunchroom, eating with his back half turned to all of it. Abe kept coming back to that afterward. Miles Croft talked in every lesson and every corridor in that school. He had talked at Abe in front of a board in the first week of October, and again in a scrap shop on the Corn Road eight days ago.

He had opinions about everything and no reason on earth to keep any of them to himself. He sat at the far end of that lunchroom with his food in front of him and listened to two people explain Abe Dolan. He did not join in. He did not laugh. He did not correct them either. He had stopped asking. Abe went to the corridor behind the music rooms in the last free period. His face had come up badly and he wanted forty minutes where nobody could look at it.

He got quiet on the floor with his back against the radiator that was never warm. He did the holds, badly, one-handed. He came out somewhere around the middle of the afternoon and picked up his bag and went to the end of the corridor. Miles Croft was standing at the corner where it turned. He was not doing anything. He had his bag over one shoulder and he was looking down the corridor at Abe. There was no music on a Friday. There was no reason for any human being to be at that end of the building.

He stood there with his bag on one shoulder and waited for Abe to come the length of the corridor to him. He looked at Abe for a long moment. Then he turned around and walked off toward the stairs. Abe stood in a dead corridor and understood that it had stopped being dead.