Chương 22: The Full Bar

The bar filled on Tuesday night, and Abe stopped everything to watch it happen. He'd been checking it all week like a boy shaking a present. Three levels since the duel, and the fourth had been coming since Monday, close enough now that he kept breaking off the drill every few minutes to go and look at it. The yard was black and freezing and the rain hung in the air where it always hung.

He set his feet on his chalk line and ran the gate one more time, the half turn and the gliding step Croft had taught him on Sunday, and checked. Swordsmanship · Novice Lv 9 (4, 038 / 4, 050) Twelve points. Abe laughed out loud in a stopped yard at eleven at night. Twelve points was nothing. He'd swung that blade about two thousand times since Sunday and he had the whole night in front of him. He ran the gate again. Nothing moved. He ran it eleven more times, checking after each one, feeling stupider each time.

Then he stopped checking and worked properly for hours. Don't arrive, don't arrive, until his shoulders were sick of him. Swordsmanship · Novice Lv 9 (4, 038 / 4, 050) He looked at that for a long time. So he went at it harder, because going at it harder had always worked before. He did the gate slow, and then fast. He did it with his eyes shut, and eyes shut had cracked the whole month open for him back in October.

He did it against the shed door, and then against nothing at all, up and down the length of the yard until he'd lost count of the lengths and worn the chalk away. He ate. He went again. Somewhere in there he stopped being able to tell how long he'd been out, and that had never happened to him in a bad way before. The number did not move. His arms hurt, and Abe knew that hurt. He'd have gone through it for a week. This was something else and it had nothing to do with him.

Twelve points sat there in the dark like a door locked from the other side. Nothing said why. Nothing ever said why. The Weave had spent a whole month handing him things without ever explaining one of them, and this was the first time in his life that it had said no to him about anything. He came out of the still at four in the morning. The hours inside the still cost him nothing.

Getting into it cost him about fifty seconds of real time, every single time, so stopping and starting again was the only part of it that ever showed on a clock. He'd come out over and over tonight to look at the same twelve points, and that was where his night had gone. The rain arrived all at once and got him in the face, and he stood there and let it. History was third period, and Amrit did the drowned districts. He had eleven cards. He held them in both hands and read them out in order.

By the fourth card the room had gone somewhere else entirely.

"The drowned districts are the low part of old Calder," Amrit read.

"There are about four hundred and twenty streets in them."

"Wet houses," Ellis Naylor said at the back, in a stage whisper. Half the room laughed. Mrs. Farrant put a stop to it with her eyebrows alone.

"It was called the Longmarket," said Amrit.

"It had a market on it. That's why." Ellis Naylor put his head down on the desk and left it there. Abe was bored too. He'd been up until four and his eyes felt like they'd been rolled in sand, and Amrit's voice went along in a flat line with no hills in it anywhere, so Abe caught about one card in three.

"Nobody's mapped past the shallow line," Amrit read.

"So the numbers after this one are estimates."

"Are they interesting estimates?"

"No," said Amrit. Even Mrs. Farrant laughed at that. Amrit looked up from his cards for the first time in nine minutes, startled, like a boy who'd found a coin.

"Do it again," Ellis said.

"Do a whole card like that one."

"There aren't any more like that one." He got to the end. He said thank you and sat down fast and looked enormously relieved, and Nita Sowerby had written three quarters of a page about it anyway, because Nita took notes on everything in case. Mrs. Farrant let the room have its moment and then took it back off them.

"Amrit gave you nine minutes of facts about the drowned districts," she said.

"A hundred thousand people used to live down there. One of the streets was called the Longmarket, and Amrit told you why, and you were all asleep." The bell went a minute later, and nobody in that room thought about it for longer than it took to get out of the door. Danforth caught him at the top of the science stairs.

"Dolan. Have you got a minute?" He fell in beside Abe going down, easy and friendly, with his bag on one shoulder and his hands looking like they'd never been cold. Piers Danforth had been fair to Abe every single day since September. Abe had never managed to dislike him for it. Love this novel? Read it on Royal Road to ensure the author gets credit.

"Board's on the first," Danforth said.

"Twelve days."

"I know."

"Everybody knows. People keep asking me what you're going to post, like I'd have the faintest idea." He said it lightly.

"How many hours are you actually doing? Roughly." Abe had eleven answers ready for that question. He'd been carrying all eleven since October.

"A lot," he said.

"That's what you said in the corridor in October."

"It was true then as well." Danforth laughed, and it was a good laugh, and it went all the way up to his eyes.

"Fair enough," he said.

"Marek asked after you, by the way."

"Tell him thanks."

"I will." They came out at the bottom, and Danforth peeled off toward the hall with his gear bag, the same as he'd done every lunchtime for three years, and Abe went the other way and thought no more about it. Four Sundays had been the deal, and four Sundays had happened, and nobody had said anything about a fifth. There had been one Sunday with nothing in it at all, the week before Croft's lesson started, and Abe had spent it in his own yard and hadn't minded a bit.

Peg got the tin down on Wednesday evening while the potatoes were on. Abe was doing his sea wall reading at the table and June was doing actual homework. Neither of them looked up, because looking up would have made it a thing. The tin lived over the kettle and had lived there since before their mother died. Peg tipped it out onto the counter and counted it with one finger. It came to about forty marks. June's doses were two hundred and twenty and they turned up on the Friday, same as always.

Peg put the forty back in the tin. Then she went out to the hall and got her purse out of her coat. She came back and stood at the counter with her back to the room, and made up the rest of it out of her own money. Turning her back was how she hid it. She'd been doing that at that counter every month for four years. Both of them had worked it out a long time ago, and she was going to go on doing it anyway.

"Right," said Peg, to the potatoes. The only new part was that last month somebody else had beaten her to it. Two hundred and twenty marks had been sitting in that tin in October when she went to fill it, and she still hadn't asked who put them there. Abe looked at the page in front of him and read the same line about harbor stone four times. Riddell paid him fourteen marks a shift and he worked three shifts a week.

He'd worked out ages ago how many weeks of sweeping and sorting stood between him and two hundred and twenty marks, and that answer was the reason he'd gone down eight flooded steps in October. June kicked him under the table.

"You've got the face on," she said.

"I'm reading about a wall."

"You're reading about a wall in about the year 2200. Your page hasn't turned since I sat down." She went back to her book.

"Also Peg's doing the finger thing at the counter. So." He went out at nine and worked until his hands stopped listening to him, and then he sat down against the trash cans in a yard where the rain had stopped in mid air, and made himself think instead of swing. This was how he'd done the Laws, back at the start, when everything was new and nothing had ever refused him. You write down what you actually know. Not what you're scared of. What you know. He knew levels came from hours.

He'd had dozens of them, across three skills, and every single one had come out of putting the time in. Hours had never let him down once. He knew a rank was different, because he'd only ever had one. It had come in black water on a Sunday night with something coming up the steps at him. It had fired while he was moving and while he was frightened. He'd nearly died for it. And the bin lid had never once tried to be somewhere else. That was his own joke, in his own head, from a week ago.

Abe sat in the cold with his arms around his knees and thought about it until it made sense. He'd taught himself to swing at a thing that couldn't move, couldn't hit back, and didn't care. He'd done that for hundreds of hours. Nobody in Calder had ever put that many hours into anything. The Weave had paid him for every one of them, right up to the last twelve points, and then it had shut the door. Maybe you can't finish learning to hit a person on something that isn't one. He didn't know that.

He wanted to be honest about which parts he knew and which parts he'd made up. Getting that wrong was how he'd wasted whole weeks before, guessing at reasons that weren't the real one. But it fit everything he had. And it explained Sunday, which had never made sense. He'd put that hour down to Croft being a good teacher, and Croft was a good teacher. Now he thought there might be more to it. Croft was also a person, standing right there in real time, being rude about his feet. So: people.

That was the answer, and it came with a catch. Sunday was four days away and Sunday was one hour a week. He got his screens up and looked at all of it together.

Realm 1 · KINDLED · Body Layer 4 Foundation: 1, 704 / 2500 (Body Layer 5) Realm 1 · KINDLED · Mind Layer 3 Foundation: 1, 006 / 1600 (Mind Layer 4) Meditation · Novice Lv 2 (98 / 200) Set Stance · Apprentice Lv 6 (1, 150 / 7200) Study · Novice Lv 7 (298 / 2450) Swordsmanship · Novice Lv 9 (4, 038 / 4, 050) Everything on that screen had moved this week except one line. The one that hadn't was the only one he cared about. It was the strangest he'd felt since the night he found out what he was.

He had all the time in the world, more of it than any person had ever had, but tonight there was nothing he could do with it. The rain stood still in the air all around him, and it had been standing still for him every night since October. He needed people who would hit back. He needed two hundred and twenty marks a month as well, every month, for as long as June needed them. Three hours ago his aunt had stood at a counter with her back to the room and made up the difference out of her own purse.

She would do it again in December, and Abe was finished watching that happen. He was never going to get either one out of a shed door on Marley Street. There was exactly one place in Calder where those were the same problem. Riddell's opened at seven and Abe was there at ten to, the same as always. He swept the front. He did the Thursday sorting and stacked the trays back under the bench. Then he put the broom on its nail and stood in the shop doorway with his coat already on.

"Mr. Riddell. The weekend crews take on schoolboys with a permit." Riddell was at the bench with his back to him, doing an edge. He didn't stop doing it.

"They do," he said.

"I want one." The stone went along the blade twice more. Outside, the first bus of the morning went up the Corn Road with its lights still on.

"Go to school, Abe," said Riddell. So Abe went to school. The doses turned up on the Friday, same as always, and Peg paid for them out of the tin and went straight back out to her shift. Abe got in at four and found June at the counter taking the first one with a glass of water, the way she'd done it for as long as he could remember.

"You're staring."

"I'm not staring."

"You are. It's a pill, Abe. You've watched me swallow about four thousand of them."

"Sorry."

"Don't be sorry, be normal," said June, and put the glass in the sink and went off to do her homework with her sleeves pulled over her hands. The tin was still down on the counter where Peg had left it. Abe picked it up and there was nothing in it, the same as there'd been nothing in it in October, and he stood there holding it for a while. The next doses were four weeks away. It would be two hundred and twenty marks again, and Peg's purse again, and nobody in this apartment would say one word about it.

He wasn't going to fix that at fourteen marks a shift. He wasn't going to learn to hit a person by hitting a shed door for another ten days either. There was one place in Calder that answered both of those, and he'd asked the one man who might have known how to get him in, and been sent to school. Sefton worked the shallow water on Saturdays on a weekend permit, and Sefton sat two rows in front of him in history. Abe put the tin back up over the kettle.

On Monday he was going to ask Sefton how a person actually gets on a crew. Sefton would tell him too, because Sefton tells everybody everything, and that was the easy half of it. The hard half was that in Calder you mostly get a thing like that because your father knew somebody, and Abe's father was dead.