Chương 18: Five Days

Peg had left a plate under a bowl and gone to bed. Abe ate it standing up at the counter, with the four books on the table behind him. June's paper was on the wall two feet from his head. Two million for the medicine on one side of it, three hundred and forty in the tin on the other. He opened the first one with a fork still in his other hand. It was the one Tench had turned around on the desk. Abe put the fork down.

Then he went and found a pen, because Tench had told him that afternoon to read with one in his hand. Forty years old, printed in a city Abe had never heard of, stamped by two schools that had both decided they were finished with it. The spine had been broken and mended with tape by somebody who cared about it more than either school had. It went further than his father's paperback went. The paperback had one crossing written out properly and a list of names after that.

This one had four, in order, with the options at every one, and a man arguing with himself about each of them in handwriting he had gone back and added to for years. Abe read the first page and then read it again. He knew what he was looking at, because a man in a cultivation office had spent six minutes telling him, and Abe had not moved the whole time. He read for about two hours without getting up. Somewhere in the second hour a screen came up. Study · Novice Lv 1 (0 / 50) Abe laughed out loud in a dark kitchen.

Study. The commonest Mind skill in the country. Half his year had registered it inside two weeks of waking up, because school makes you revise whether you want to or not, and it is the first thing most people get. Abe had been Awakened thirty days and had spent every one of them on a concrete yard. It took a dead diver and a pen to make him sit down and read properly. Tench had told him that would happen. Abe had taken it for a teacher being encouraging. It came true inside two hours. The dullest name it owned.

It had done that to him twice before, and both times the dull name had turned out to be a road. There were things in that book that were not on the internet. He had read the whole free tier twice in the year before he Awakened, but this was not on it. The chapter on the third crossing ran four pages of the man being certain. Then there was a line at the bottom of the fourth, in different ink. I was wrong about this and I want anybody reading it to know how long it took me to find out.

Abe put his hand flat on that page and left it there. Then he got to the end and found the problem, and it was exactly where Tench had said it would be. Every route in that book had been walked by somebody who broke at seven or eight, because everybody breaks at seven or eight. The man who wrote it had assumed his reader would be gone by then. He had written it for somebody sensible. Nobody in these four books had ever been where Abe Dolan was going. Nobody had ever had a reason to go there.

It was still the best thing he had ever held in his hands. Then he went out to the yard. He took the book and the folded page and a pen, because everything he wanted had to be in his hands before he started. Abe got quiet on the concrete in the cold. It took him about fifty seconds. The yard stopped. He sat down on the step with his back against the wall and unfolded a piece of cheap paper. THE PLAN, across the top, underlined, by a boy who was seventeen. Two hours a night. Assume you get two hours a night forever.

Pick the cheap one. You do not get to be wrong. Six days ago he had sat in a library and tried to write a new one. He had gotten as far as the underline and then sat with the pen not moving, because he did not know enough to put down a single line. He knew enough now. Abe turned the page over and started on the back of it, in a stopped yard, at midnight, with a forty-year-old book open on his knee. It took him a long time and he loved every minute of it.

He wrote the diver's chain out first, the whole thing, in the order Tench had walked him through it. Conditioning → Long Watch → Bull's Back → Stone Shoulders → (Master. He never stood at it.) Under two of the four he put what the man had gotten wrong, and why, in the man's own words. Then he wrote his own underneath, and it was two rungs long and then it stopped. Conditioning → Set Stance →? His father's blue pen had an answer for that question mark.

The guard's road goes Set Stance into Hold the Line, then Dead Weight, then Iron Body at Master. A man who walks all four of them is a man the sea cannot get off a wall. Abe wrote that chain out too, in his father's order, and looked at the two of them sitting on the same page. The diver had been wrong twice and had written it down. His father had been wrong at least once, on the first crossing, about a boy who was never going to stand on a wall. He had gone into the water without ever finding out. Adept next.

The doors will not be theirs. Write down what they are. Mind is half of depth and almost nobody trains it. Train it. Support the creativity of authors by visiting Royal Road for this novel and more. Then he wrote down what he would need and did not have, which was most of it, and then he stopped, because the page had run out of road. Seven or eight. Every book in that cupboard, every route in the country, and a whole city that had never needed to write down what happens after. Abe looked at that for a while.

Then he wrote one more line under it, small and careful, the way his handwriting goes when something matters. Find out what is past it. Then, at the very bottom, where there was hardly any paper left: The summer exam. Stop knowing about it and start aiming at it. He read the page back twice. A boy with two hours a night could not have written one line of it. Then he folded it and put it in the back of his father's book, where the other one had lived for a year.

Then he read the screens, all of them at once, because a boy who has just written a road wants to see where he is standing on it. Realm 1 · KINDLED · Body Layer 4 Foundation: 388 / 2500 (Body Layer 5) Realm 1 · KINDLED · Mind Layer 3 Foundation: 214 / 1600 (Mind Layer 4) Meditation · Novice Lv 2 (44 / 200) Set Stance · Apprentice Lv 4 (2, 120 / 3200) Sharpening · Novice Lv 6 (470 / 1800) Swordsmanship · Novice Lv 3 (280 / 450) Study · Novice Lv 1 (36 / 50) A month ago every line on that screen had a one in it.

Then he did the one sum the screens had left him, because the screens are exact and it was his to do. Body Layer 5 was two thousand one hundred and twelve points away. Layer 5 would post him at seven. Seven was the number Danforth had called a generational year. Seven was two off the city record, and the record had stood for twenty-six years. The board across town still said six. It would not find out about any of this until December.

Abe sat in a stopped yard with the cold coming through his coat and grinned at a screen like an idiot. The bin lid was still propped against the shed door where he had left it on Thursday. He had five days. He had more hours in those five days than Miles Croft would get in a year. He had a cupboard that was not locked anymore, and four books nobody in his family had ever been allowed to open. He had a page of road with his own handwriting on it. And he had the top line of that board.

He had wanted it since he was fifteen, and it had sat in his chest all evening like something swallowed whole that would not go down. None of it was going to teach him how to hit a trash can lid, and he knew that standing there. He lifted the blade. Somewhere across town there was a wall with his name at the top of it and an empty box beside it where everybody else has a word. On Saturday about two hundred people were going to come and find out what it was actually good for. Abe swung at the bin lid. He missed.

That was Monday. Tuesday he read two more of the books, in the library, at the table by the window, in a room where nothing moved. That is the only way anybody gets through two of those books between one bell and the next. From the outside he was a boy sitting very still, and Mrs. Ashe found a great deal of shelving to do at that end of the room. She did not ask him a single question either. He worked it out somewhere in the second hour.

She and Tench had talked, and neither of them was ever going to mention it to him. Abe kept his head down over the book and found he was grinning at a page about shoulder work. He looked for Ada Bewley twice and did not find her. She was in the school hall every evening of her life, and he knew exactly where to find her. He had not looked very hard, and he knew it while he was doing it. June had the best week of her life and Abe found out about it from somebody else.

A girl in the year below stopped him on the Wednesday to say that his sister had shown her the clip four times, and that June had a speech about it now. The speech, as far as Abe could work out, was that she had known. Not how. Just that she had known, since October, and had said so out loud, and nobody had listened. She had. She had sat on the end of his bed at four minutes after midnight on his birthday and never asked him to prove a thing. Abe went to his next lesson and did not stop grinning for about an hour.

Piers Danforth caught him on the stairs and asked him what he was reading. Abe told him, because there was no reason on earth not to, and Danforth said his coach had a copy of that one and had never rated it. Then he said, "Marek's wrong about it, though, isn't he," and went off to his lesson. Abe stood on the stairs and worked out that Piers Danforth had been thinking about him a great deal more than he let on.

The clip was still going round, and it had stopped being only their school's, and Abe still had not watched it. He did none of it at school. There was nowhere left in that building where Abe could be on his own, and Croft had done that with one question to a caretaker and still had no idea he had done it. So it was the yard. Every night, from about eleven until the sky went the wrong color, in November, on wet concrete, with a shed door and a trash can lid.

He stopped each night when his legs stopped holding him up. Wednesday he worked the same cut for something like sixty hours, and stopped counting somewhere in the middle, which had never happened to him before. He tried it slowly, and then with his eyes shut, and then he stood still and thought about it for an hour. The cut was exactly as bad at the end of Wednesday as it had been at the start. He had a shift on the Thursday and he nearly did not go.

Riddell put a chisel and the stone in front of him at about six and went back to the ledger. Abe had done four hundred edges in that shop and could do them without thinking. He ruined it. He sat and looked at what he had done to a perfectly good chisel, with his hands working properly for the first time in two weeks.

"Leave it," said Riddell.

"I can fix it."

"You can fix it Tuesday." Riddell did not look up.

"Whatever's going on with you, it's on your face and it's in my chisels." Abe put the stone down.

"There's a thing on Saturday," he said. In two years he had never told anybody in that shop one single thing about his own life.

"Mm."

"I'm going to be very bad at it in front of about two hundred people." Riddell turned a page in the ledger.

"Then be bad at it," he said.

"You've been bad at things in front of people before and you're still here. Go home, Abe. You're no good to me like this." Abe got his coat. Riddell put fourteen marks on the counter and went back to the ledger. Fourteen marks is a shift. Abe had done about ninety minutes of one and ruined a chisel. Neither of them said a word about that. There was nothing to say that would not have made it worse. Abe walked home up the Corn Road working it out. Mr. Tench. Mrs. Ashe. Riddell.

He had gone eighteen years without one adult quietly doing something for him. He had now had three of them in five days, and all three had arrived the moment his name went up on a wall. Thursday night he finished the last book. There was nothing in the four about how to make his arms do what his head could already see. No book had it, because it wasn't the kind of thing a book could hold. He needed a person standing in a room, correcting him, and he didn't have one.

By Thursday night he had stopped believing that another hour was going to fix it. That was new. He had believed it about everything since the seventh of October, and he had been right every single time. This was the first thing in his life that had not moved when he put hours into it. He got the plan out and read it in the dark. Every line on it was still true. Not one of them was any use before Saturday.

On Friday night he read the screens instead, because five days had gone and he wanted to see what five of his days looked like from the outside. Realm 1 · KINDLED · Body Layer 4 Foundation: 928 / 2500 (Body Layer 5) Realm 1 · KINDLED · Mind Layer 3 Foundation: 664 / 1600 (Mind Layer 4) Meditation · Novice Lv 2 (46 / 200) Set Stance · Apprentice Lv 5 (3, 240 / 5000) Sharpening · Novice Lv 6 (512 / 1800) Study · Novice Lv 6 (886 / 1800) Swordsmanship · Novice Lv 6 (0 / 1800) Everything on it had moved.

Body had put on more in five days than it had in his first three weeks awake. Set Stance was up a whole level. Body Layer 5 was down to one thousand five hundred and seventy-two. Swordsmanship was up three levels. Most of his year would not manage three levels all term. And Study had not existed on Monday at dinner time. It had come all the way up and sat down next to Swordsmanship like it had always been there. Abe looked at those two lines sitting side by side for a long time.

Three hundred hours had gone into that week, near enough, and every number on that screen said the week had worked. The bin lid said otherwise. He could take it off the shed door four times out of five now, from further away and from worse angles and with the wrong hand, and the lid had never once tried to be somewhere else. Three levels, and he could not have told one single person what the difference was. Saturday morning he went up to the school early.

He had told June there were five days and not four, and he had meant it. The hall would be empty for four hours before anybody else in Calder thought about getting out of bed. It was cold and not quite light. The gates were open, as they always were. Abe came past the science block with the practice blade in his bag and looked up at the hall windows on the second floor. The lights were on. He stood on the path in the wet with his breath going out in front of him, and did not go in.

Miles Croft had not thought of Saturday morning this week. He had thought of it every week of his life.