Chương 20: The Arrival

The clip found him on the bus before school did. Somebody three seats back was watching it with the sound up. The roar of the gym came out of the phone speaker, tinny and small, like a crowd shouting inside a matchbox. Then a freshman turned all the way around in his seat, looked at Abe, looked at the phone, and looked at Abe again.

"It's him," the freshman said, to the bus, in the voice of somebody spotting a rare bird. Abe looked out the window and let his ears go hot. Sixty hits from Croft on Saturday, and it turned out none of them landed like that one sentence on the 41 bus. The board had a crowd at it when he came in, like it did every morning now. Nobody was checking their own row anymore. They were standing back from it, the cluster of them, looking at the top line like people reading a headline.

The board would read them all again in three weeks, and until then that wall was the only version of him the school had. Nobody had said anything about the hall on Fenner Street, and Sunday had come and gone with nothing in it. Abe had spent it in the yard with the practice blade and hadn't thought about it twice. At roll call his homeroom teacher got to the D's, said "Dolan," and paused, because the whole room had gone quiet on purpose to watch him say it.

He said the rest of the register like a man walking on ice. And on the stairs, a boy he'd never spoken to in his life stopped him and said it was his party on Friday and Abe could come if he wanted.

"Maybe," said Abe, and the boy went off looking pleased. Abe stood there a second, because as far as he could remember, nobody at this school had ever needed to know his plans before. History was third period, with Mrs. Farrant, who had been teaching the Arrival to this school since before anybody in the room was born. She came in carrying a wooden box, put it on the desk, and stood there while the noise died on its own. In her room, it always did eventually.

"The Arrival," said Mrs. Farrant, "is the only interesting thing that has ever happened to this planet. Every year I say that sentence, and every year I watch two hundred of you yawn at it." She took the lid off the box.

"So this term you're going to teach it to each other. There's a topic on every slip in this box. You'll each take one, you'll find out everything a person can find out about it, and you'll stand up here and give it to the class. One or two of you a lesson, between now and the end of term." The room made the sound two hundred years of students have always made about homework, and Mrs. Farrant let it wash past her like weather.

"Front row first." The box went along the rows, and the room got louder with every slip. It turned out drawing your fate out of a wooden box was more fun than anybody wanted to admit. Ellis Naylor drew the satellites and was delighted, out loud, for the wrong reason.

"They fell out of the sky," he told his whole table.

"Burning. It's the only topic in the box with explosions in it." Nita Sowerby drew the Arrival night itself, the actual night, and made a small fist under the desk. By the end of the lesson she had already ruled three lines in a fresh notebook, because there was a right way to do things and Nita knew all of them. The highways went to Lena Ward, whose great-grandmother had been on one the day it happened, and farming went to Nell Mott, who looked like somebody who'd dodged something.

Amrit drew the drowned districts and groaned.

"It's just wet houses," he said, to nobody in particular.

"How am I meant to make wet houses interesting." Then the box came to Abe, and he drew pre-Arrival sewage, and it was genuinely about drains. The kid next to him drew the sea wall, read his slip, and let his head fall back like a boy who'd been shot.

"We did the wall in eighth grade," he said.

"We did it in sixth grade. Everyone always does the wall. It's a wall."

"Swap you," said Abe. The kid looked at him. Then he looked at the word DRAINS, and did the swap fast, before Abe could come to his senses, and spent the rest of the lesson telling his table he'd won. THE SEA WALL. The noise of the room went on around Abe, and for a moment none of it reached him. He put the slip in his shirt pocket and kept his hand flat over it.

His father had stood on that wall for eleven years, there were things Abe knew about it that no library had, and the most boring famous thing in Calder had just crossed a classroom to find him. Then Mrs. Farrant taught, because the reports were for later and the period was still hers. You might be reading a stolen copy. Visit Royal Road for the authentic version. She taught the first tide. Spring, in the 2020s, and not one wall anywhere on Earth, because no place had ever needed one.

The sea came in wrong one morning, and there were things in it, and there was no word yet for what the things were.

"Here's the part I want you to sit with," said Mrs. Farrant.

"The phones all still worked that year. So the oldest clips we have of the end of that world are steady. Thousands of people, holding their phones nice and level, filming the water coming in." She let that sit.

"Because in the whole of their lives, up to that morning, nothing had ever once come out of the sea to hurt them." Nobody in the room had a phone out anymore. She did the Wall Years next. The cities that held mostly held because of stone somebody's grandfather had already put there, and the ones that went under were mostly unlucky about where the water came from.

"Calder was one of the lucky ones," she said.

"Ask me why and most of you will get it wrong."

"The breakwater," said Ottley, loudly, before she had finished asking.

"The breakwater is why there is anything left," said Mrs. Farrant.

"It is not why we were lucky. We were lucky about the hill." Old Calder had been down at the water, all of it. Nearly all of it was down there still. What held was the long rise behind it, up by the standing stones, high enough and far enough back that the water stopped two streets short of the top. The breakwater was already curved around the old harbor. Finishing it was a short job by then, because what was left to put a wall around was small.

"Everybody who could walk went inland," she said.

"They kept going until they could not smell it."

"That is why the big cities are the ones a long way from the water," she said.

"Calder is not a big city." Abe knew the top of it. Everybody did. The bells that rang the tide at six hung in the Bell House, up past the stones, and that was the one building old Calder had built to be enormous. It had been a cathedral. Everybody knew that, because there were photographs of it online with two thousand people sitting in rows inside it. Now it held eleven hundred crates of salvage and a weighing floor, and the far end of it was dark. Mrs.

Ashe at the library had shown him one of the photographs once.

"Same room," she said.

"They had it for singing in." Abe sat very still through that part, with a slip of paper in his shirt pocket. Somewhere in the middle of the Wall Years, a phone two desks over started roaring. Tinny gym noise, and a little screen with a board on it, and the boy holding it froze like a rabbit while the whole class turned to enjoy his death. Mrs. Farrant crossed the room, held out her hand, and watched the whole clip through before she gave the phone back.

"Mr. Dolan appears to be busy this term," she said.

"The rest of you have no excuse." The room fell apart, and Abe put his face in his hands, and even he was laughing by the time she got them quiet. At lunch a girl from the other form sat down opposite him without asking, and that had never once happened either.

"Settle a bet," she said.

"Saturday. How many did you actually get on Croft?"

"Three."

"Three," she repeated, over her shoulder, and somewhere behind her money changed hands and somebody said a word that would have gotten him sent out of a lesson. The argument hadn't stopped since Saturday. Abe had heard both halves of it about nine times by now, in corridors, on the stairs, once through a bathroom door. One half of it said Croft schooled him, sixty against three, and that was not close. The other half said Croft never got him on the floor at all, and asked who was still standing at the end.

He'd stopped wanting to correct anybody. It was the first argument anybody had ever had about him where he liked both halves. He had nowhere left in that building to be on his own. The corridor behind the music rooms belonged to Mr. Vane now, and the west stairwell had a wet floor sign that never dried. The library was eleven people and a librarian who noticed everything. A month ago Abe could disappear inside this building four times a day.

Now he ate his lunch in the middle of the noise like everybody else, famous and short of a single dead corner. He'd traded one for the other, and nobody had ever asked him. The sea wall reading would have to happen at home, in the yard, in the cold. He caught himself looking forward to it, which surprised him more than anything else all day. It was homework and it was his father's wall, both of those things at once, all term. The last bell had gone, and Abe was at the gates, when Nita Sowerby caught him.

She had her bag on both shoulders and her business face on, and she didn't waste any of his time or hers.

"There was a woman at the office at lunch," Nita said.

"Asking about you. Baxter's sister was in there with a nosebleed and heard the whole thing."

"Asking what?"

"How long you'd been at the school. Whether you were the boy from the board." Nita's mouth went thin.

"The office wouldn't tell her anything, so she left a card and went."

"What did the card say?"

"The office kept it. Mrs. Bell put it in the drawer like it was wet."

"Who was she?"

"Nobody knows. That's the point." Nita shifted her bag straps, and that was as close as Nita ever came to looking uncomfortable.

"She wasn't from Calder, Abe. Baxter's sister said she said your name really carefully. Like a word she'd learned off a screen." Abe stood at the gates with his bag on his shoulder and the street going past, buses and freshmen and somebody's mom with a stroller, all of it as ordinary as bread.

"Right," he said.

"Thanks, Nita."

"I'm not being dramatic about it," said Nita, who was never dramatic about anything.

"But nobody comes from outside Calder. I've lived here my whole life and I've met about four people who weren't born here. So." She went off to her bus. Abe walked home the long way, down the Corn Road, past the shop, the whole ordinary map of his ordinary life. He thought about the woman for one street, and got exactly nowhere, because a stranger asking careful questions was a shape with nothing inside it yet.

Then he thought about the sea wall the rest of the way home, and by his own front door he was almost running. There was a dead man's book in his bag that knew that wall stone by stone, and a folded page in the back of it in two kinds of handwriting. The library's donated shelf kept four guard's manuals, four different editions, and Abe had read every one of them twice in the year before he woke up. He'd read them like a boy pressing his face against a window. Now the school had gone and made them homework.

Abe ate his dinner fast and told June about the slip, and the swap, and the boy who thought he'd won.

"Dad would've laughed himself stupid at that," June said, with her mouth full.

"He'd have made you do the voice." She was right, and neither of them minded saying it. Then he went out into the cold to get started. Behind the trash cans, in the dark, the rain stopped falling for him, the same as it had the very first night. He read his father's book with a pen in his hand, the front half of it, the parts he'd always skipped past to get to the exercises. The margins had things in them no report had ever had.

Somewhere in the second hour, the Weave paid him for the reading, the same as Tench had said it would. Study · Novice Lv 6 (1, 014 / 1800) Some kids would have hated an essay about a wall, but Abe had a dead man to interview and all the time in the world.