Chương 14: Range

The phone went at twenty after five, in the middle of Abe's shift, while he was carrying a crate of hinges across the yard. He got it out with his good hand and saw JUNE on the screen and knew before he answered. She never called him. In sixteen years June had called her brother about four times, and every single one of them had been about somebody else.

"June."

"It's fine," June said.

"Don't do the voice." Her voice was doing something Abe had never heard it do.

"Where are you."

"I'm on the wall outside the laundromat on Gill Street." A pause.

"I sat down and now I'm being stupid about getting up, and it's getting dark, and I'd rather it was you than anybody."

"Ten minutes."

"Abe. Don't run." Abe put the crate down on the concrete and went and stood in the shop doorway, and Riddell looked at his face.

"Go," said Riddell. He ran. Gill Street is nineteen minutes from Riddell's yard if you walk it. Abe went up the Corn Road with his bag banging against his hip and one hand held against his chest. Somewhere around the second corner he reached for the still without deciding to. There was nothing there. Of course there was nothing there. He was scared out of his mind, and the still had never once opened for him while he was scared. He had fifty hours a day.

He couldn't spend one second of them getting to his sister any faster. His legs were the only part of him that was any use, and his legs were the ones he'd been born with. She was on the low wall outside the laundromat with her bag on her knees. She had her coat done up wrong. Abe saw that first and couldn't stop seeing it. June didn't do anything wrong with her clothes, ever, and the buttons were one hole out all the way down.

"You ran," she said.

"I walked very fast."

"You're purple." Abe sat down on the wall next to her, close enough that their shoulders were nearly touching, and left it at that. They sat there a while with the laundromat humming behind them.

"How long have you been here?"

"About an hour." Abe looked at the road.

"It went at the top of Gill Street," June said, in the flat voice of somebody reading out a list.

"Both legs, from about the knee down. It's not pain and it's not pins and needles. They just stop being interested."

"Right."

"I got about forty yards and then I sat down. A man asked me if I was all right and I said I was waiting for somebody. Then I actually was waiting for somebody, so that worked out." She laughed. It wasn't a good laugh.

"Can you stand up?"

"Yes." June didn't move.

"In a bit." They sat there another ten minutes while it got properly dark. Abe worked out four different ways to offer to carry her and didn't use one of them, because he'd known his sister for sixteen years. In the end she stood up on her own and took his arm. She'd never done that in her life, and it was worse than being asked to carry her would've been. They went home the long way, because the long way is flat. June counted it out loud as they walked.

She had always counted in her head before, where he couldn't hear it.

"Marley Street's fine. Marley to the Corn Road's fine. Corn Road to the block's fine if I stop at the bus shelter."

"June."

"The bottom of Salt Row went three weeks ago and that wasn't even my legs, that was the dogs." She wasn't crying and her voice was completely level.

"And Gill Street went today. So that's the laundromat, and the drugstore, and the good shop, and Nadia's."

"Nadia's is the worst one."

"Nadia's is the worst one," June agreed.

"She's got about forty marks of my stuff in her room."

"She hasn't."

"She's got a hairdryer and two tops and a book about horses." June thought about it.

"The book about horses is actually mine. She's had it since March. That's a whole separate problem and I'm dealing with it separately."

"You could get the bus."

"I could get the bus," June agreed.

"That's one more thing I couldn't do last month." Peg was on the late shift. Abe got June into the chair with the blanket and made her eat something, and she let him, which frightened him more than anything else that had happened all afternoon. Then he went and stood in the kitchen for a bit. The tin lived on the shelf over the kettle and it was where the dose money went. Abe had put two hundred and twenty marks in it eight days ago, at four in the morning, without saying one word to anybody.

Peg had found it there. She had not asked. The doses had turned up on the Friday, same as always. He got the tin down and looked in it and there was nothing in it now. He'd come home from that stairwell with three hundred and ten marks in his coat. It was the most money Abe Dolan had ever held in his life. Standing on the Corn Road at half past two in the morning, he'd honestly thought it was going to change something. If you spot this story on Amazon, know that it has been stolen. Report the violation.

Two hundred and twenty into the tin. The rest into a month of eating like three people, because a boy who trains fifty hours a day is a boy who is always, always hungry. He had about forty marks left. He was hungry standing there. He was hungry most of the time now, and when he was hungry he thought about the grocer's at the top of Marley Street, the same as he had since October, and the back door that still didn't shut. He had never gone back through it.

He had just kept knowing it was there, and knowing exactly what it would take, which was fifty seconds of being calm with somebody else's food in his hands. He couldn't have done that in October, but he could do it now, and that was the part he tried not to look at. Forty marks meant they would eat this week, but his left hand still hurt where the stairwell had broken it, and he already knew what it felt like to fix a money problem in the dark. Not yet, then.

He put the thought away in the same place he'd put it before. It was easier to put away this time. Abe noticed that, and it frightened him. The paper was on the wall by the window where it had been since Abe was fourteen. WHAT IT COSTS: 2, 000, 000 WHAT WE HAVE: 340 June's drawn face was still in the gap between the two numbers, sticking its tongue out at anybody who tried to do the subtraction. She'd put it there when she was twelve and had never let anybody take it down. Three hundred and forty.

Abe had killed a monster with a piece of scrap and nearly died in eight inches of black water, and that number hadn't moved by one single mark.

"Come and sit down," said June.

"You've been standing there doing sums." So he went and sat down on the end of the sofa, and June looked at him for a long time with the blanket up around her.

"How much sleep are you getting?"

"Enough."

"That's not a number."

"June."

"Abe, look at me." She waited until he did.

"I watched Mom get worse for four years. Now it's me. I know what it looks like better than any doctor in this city does." Abe didn't say anything.

"You look older," June said.

"I'm tired."

"No." She said it quite gently.

"I've been tired since I was nine. I know what tired looks like on a person. This isn't it. You look older, Abe, and I'm the only one who'd spot it, because I've had four years of practice." The room was very quiet.

"You looked eighteen four weeks ago," she said. Abe sat on the end of the sofa with his broken hand in his lap. His sister had been keeping notes on him for a month, the same as everybody in this family kept notes on her, and she had said nothing at all until today. And she knew what he did at night. She had known since the eighth of October. So June was the only person on the planet holding both of those facts at once, and Abe had no idea at all that she had started putting them together.

"What are you doing," June said.

"And don't tell me training." Somewhere a long way back in Abe's head, a man in a hall on Fenner Street said he was paying for this with something, and didn't know what. Abe heard it. He didn't do anything with it. It was half past nine at night and his sister couldn't walk up Gill Street anymore, and there was no room left in him for something a coach had said about bodies two Sundays ago. She was frightened. She had been frightened since four o'clock, and she was wrong about the reason.

That's what he decided, and he decided it straight away. What she didn't know was the rest of it. A chain off its post and eight flooded steps. What he had carried back up them, and who had bought it off him at half past two in the morning, and what had gone into the tin over the kettle. He had gone to tell her about nine times. In the kitchen twice. On the stairs.

Once standing in her doorway at one in the morning with his hand actually on the frame, and she had been asleep, and he had stood there a while and gone to bed. Every time, something stopped it. About half of those times the something was Abe. Tonight he was going to do it. He got as far as opening his mouth.

"If it's about money," June said, "I don't want to know." Abe shut his mouth again.

"June."

"I mean it." She was looking at the television and not at him.

"Whatever it is. If it's about the doses, or that paper on the wall, or me, then don't tell me."

"Why not?"

"Because then it's mine as well." She pulled the blanket up.

"And I have enough of my own, thank you." And there it was, out loud, from her, in her own kitchen. She had drawn that face when she was twelve, and she had been sticking her tongue out at those two numbers ever since. Abe had watched her do it for four years at every opportunity, and she'd just done it again, sitting in a chair she'd needed help getting into. She was also wrong, and Abe couldn't say that either. He would've been doing all of it if June had never been ill a day in her life.

There was a page of his own handwriting in the back of his father's book from last October, and his sister wasn't mentioned anywhere on it. The training was his. It had always been his, and it was the only thing he had ever owned that was. What was hers was the drain. The black water, and a length of scrap with an edge on it, and two hundred and twenty marks going into a tin at four in the morning.

He could have told her it was not all about her, and it would have been true, and then she would have asked what the rest of it was about. So he said nothing, and let her go on being wrong.

"Training," Abe said. June looked at him. Then she pulled the blanket up and turned her face to the television, and didn't say one word for the rest of the evening. Abe stayed where he was and couldn't think of a single thing to do about any of it. That was the second time he'd lied to his sister. The first had been on his birthday, sitting on the end of his bed at four minutes after midnight, telling her the Weave had given him a training one.

He'd taken that one back four days later, standing in a kitchen doorway with a plate in his hand. He used the same word both times. Peg came in at ten after ten and stood in the doorway with her coat still on. She looked at June asleep in the chair with the blanket up around her and didn't ask what had happened. She didn't have to. She'd come home to that chair before.

"How far did she get?"

"Top of Gill Street." Peg nodded slowly. Then she went and put the kettle on and didn't say one more word about it. Abe watched her get two cups down out of the cupboard, and then stand there for a second, and put one of them back. He went out to the yard at eleven thirty with the practice blade. Riddell had it in the back room among nine other things nobody had ever come back for. It was wooden with a lead core, the sort of thing a club buys forty of. Riddell had watched him put it in his bag and had said nothing.

Abe got quiet on the concrete, and the yard stopped, and he got to work. He had a shed door with a trash can lid propped against it. Four hours in, he couldn't hit the bin lid. That's not quite true. He could hit it. He could hit it standing still, from a measured distance, in a way that would've been extremely impressive to a nine-year-old. What he couldn't do was hit it the way Croft hit things. Abe had watched Miles Croft run the first form of his family's line twice a week for two months.

He knew what it looked like. He knew where the feet went, because he'd stood eighteen inches away from a frozen boy in a corridor and looked at his hands. He could see the whole thing in his head, perfectly, from four angles. His arms would not do it. He tried it once more with everything he had, and watched his own arms the whole way down. The start was right. He could feel it being right, the foot and the shoulder and the line of it.

Then somewhere past his own chest the movement stopped being the one he had watched Croft do and turned into something his arms had picked on their own, and the blade came down a foot wide of the lid with his wrist rolled over. He had not felt himself choose any of it. So he did the only thing he knew how to do. He changed one thing and went again. He tried more of it, nine hundred cuts and then two thousand, until his arms shook. He tried a different grip.

He tried the whole cut slowed right down, because slow had always worked before, for holds and squats and putting an edge on a chisel. He tried copying Croft out of his memory. Then he stood still for an hour and thought it through. None of it moved the blade an inch. Somewhere in the fifth hour he found himself thinking about Ellis Naylor, who'd hit him about thirty times in front of the whole year, and hadn't once been standing where Abe expected him to be.

Then he went back to the bin lid, because the bin lid was what he had. Somewhere around the sixth hour a screen came up. Swordsmanship · Novice Lv 3 (62 / 450) Abe stood in a stopped yard in the dark and looked at it with his mouth open. Three levels. In six hours. Then he turned around and swung at the bin lid and missed it completely. He tried again and hit the shed door. He stood there a while with the blade hanging down and Novice Lv 3 sitting in the corner of his head.

The number and the bin lid had nothing whatever to do with each other. Abe didn't have the faintest idea why. Something was missing. He could feel it missing and he could not have said one word about what it was. He worked until the edges of the world went soft and then he sat down on the step. Four days. He was out here because Miles Croft had asked the school caretaker where Abe went at lunchtimes, and the caretaker had promised to keep an eye out. There were no quiet corners left in that building now.

On Monday morning two hundred people were going to watch Nita Sowerby write his real numbers on that wall. It was going to be the best day of his life. Abe sat in a wet yard at four in the morning with a wooden sword across his knees, and the one thing he'd failed at for six hours straight sat there with him. Then he got up, and picked it up, and started again from the top.