Chương 28: The Sea Wall

Abe went into school on Thursday with a new layer in him and eleven pages in his bag, and nobody in that building knew about either one. The layer kept showing itself all morning. He came up out of chairs too fast, because his legs had more in them than they'd had on Tuesday and nobody had told them to stop. Twice he nearly walked into the back of somebody in the corridor. It kept being funny. From the outside it looked like nothing much.

A boy in a blazer doing up his top button, exactly the same as yesterday, and eight hours earlier he'd been standing in three feet of black water at the bottom of Salt Row, laughing out loud in the dark with nobody there to hear him. The pages he kept to himself. He got them out twice before third period just to look at them, and one of them had a ring on it where he'd put his mug down at four in the morning. He'd been almost sick with wanting to read it out since Tuesday.

That was a strange thing to catch yourself feeling about homework. Mrs. Farrant wrote the twenty seventh of November on the board and underlined it, which she did every single lesson, and then wrote REPORTS under it and didn't underline that. Nita Sowerby did the Arrival night, and she did it properly. She had it in a ring binder with tabs in it. She'd drawn a map of the first three hours herself, with arrows on it.

She'd gotten four separate sources to agree that the first confirmed one in this country came up out of the water and not down out of the sky, and she said that twice, because she knew nobody would believe her.

"Everyone thinks it was the sky," said Nita.

"It's always the sky in films. It was the sea. It was the sea everywhere." It went twelve minutes. It was the best organized thing anybody had brought in all term and it deserved to be, and Abe listened to about half of it.

"Is that four sources or three and a website?" said Ellis Naylor.

"Four." Nita didn't look up.

"The website's in the notes at the back. It's the worst one and I've said so."

"Is the map to scale?"

"No."

"Then it's a drawing."

"It's a map, Ellis." Mrs. Farrant laughed. She hadn't meant to, and she had to put a hand up to settle the room down again.

"That's good work, Miss Sowerby. Genuinely. It's also about nine tenths of everything our library holds on that night, which tells you rather more about our library than I'd like it to. Sit down." Nita sat down trying very hard to look like she hadn't enjoyed any of that.

"Mr. Dolan," said Mrs. Farrant.

"The wall." Abe got up with his eleven pages and went to the front, and the room settled into the slump it saved for the third report of a Thursday. Amrit said "it's a wall" from the back in a stage whisper and got a laugh, and it was fair enough. Everybody in Calder does the wall. They do it in sixth grade and they do it again in eighth grade and there's nothing left in it. He read the first page out.

It was about how the wall got built, and it was the same page anybody had ever written, and he could hear how boring it was while it was still coming out of his mouth. He got halfway down it and stopped.

"That's, um." He looked at the page and then stopped looking at it.

"Everyone knows that bit. Sorry. I want to do the other bit."

"Which is what?" said Mrs. Farrant.

"What it's actually like. Up there." He put the pages down on the desk and got the book out of his blazer pocket, and nearly dropped it, and had to get a better hold of it. It was a paperback with a green cover and a coffee ring on the front. It had a price of eight marks printed on the back, and the word COMMON above the price in small letters.

"So this is, every dock shop in the city sells this," said Abe.

"It's been the same book for forty years." Nobody said anything, so he kept going.

"And it's all online as well. All of it, free, you can have the whole thing on your phone in about a minute. It's not a rare book or anything. It's eight marks because everybody's already got one."

"Then why has everybody got one?" said Lena Ward.

"I'll get to that." He turned it over in his hands.

"Sorry." He put it down on the desk and picked it straight back up again.

"A watch is six hours. There's forty men on a mile of stone, and you can see about nine of them from wherever you're standing. So mostly it's you and the water and whoever's on your left." He'd stopped looking at the pages on the desk. He wasn't looking at the class either.

"You take your food up with you, because there's nowhere to go and get any. And there's a bell on every tower."

"You've got radios," said Ellis Naylor.

"Not in weather. In weather you've got the bell." He was holding the book against his chest now without knowing he was doing it.

"You ring it, and the next tower rings it, and it goes the whole length of the wall in about forty seconds."

"That's a hundred and twenty years old," he said, "and nobody's ever done better than it."

"What do you actually do for six hours?" said Lena Ward.

"You look at the sea." Abe had to think about that one.

"And you read that."

"That's it?"

"Six hours is a long time and you're not allowed to sit down." Nita Sowerby laughed, a small friendly one, and half the room went with her. All period they had been laughing at the person giving the report, but this time they were laughing at the report. Did you know this text is from a different site? Read the official version to support the creator. He opened the book about halfway, where the pages had gone soft.

"This is the bit I meant. The writing in it." He turned it round so they could see, and nobody past the second row could see a thing, and he did it anyway.

"In the margins. You're up there six hours with a pen and nothing to do with it, so you write down what you got wrong that day."

"Are you allowed to?"

"That's what it's for." He looked at the page.

"The printed bit's free, everyone's got the printed bit. It's the writing you can't get anywhere." The room had gone quiet somewhere in the middle of that and he hadn't noticed it happening.

"There's a chapter in here about standing in water," he said.

"Hardly anybody reads it. If you work on top of a wall you don't expect to be in the sea."

"How do you know all this?" It was Amrit, who'd pulled the sea wall out of the box on the day the topics went round and swapped it to Abe for pre-Arrival sewage without ever reading what he'd gotten. He wasn't being clever. He asked it the way he'd have asked anybody where they got their coat.

"My dad stood on it for eleven years," said Abe. He heard it after it was already out of his mouth. He hadn't planned that sentence. It wasn't in the eleven pages, and it wasn't in the version he'd read out loud to a stopped yard on Tuesday night, and he had never said one word about his family in that building in five years. Nobody moved. Abe stood at the front of a classroom with his father's book in his hand and no idea at all what he was supposed to do next.

Amrit had asked him a question and he had answered it. That was all it was, and the strange part was how easy it had been to say. The hard part came afterward. Thirty one people sat in that room and every single one of them decided not to be the one who spoke first. So he looked back down at the book and finished.

"There's a page in here about what to do if the wall goes," he said.

"It's about a paragraph long. It's mostly about the bell." He picked his eleven pages up off the desk and went back to his seat. Two desks behind him the boy who'd swapped the wall away said something to the girl next to him. Abe caught about half of it, and the half he caught was I had that one. He didn't turn around. Nobody said anything kind to him. Nobody said anything at all. Mrs. Farrant let it sit there for a while, which was the single most useful thing anybody did for him that week.

"Mr. Dolan. What's on the far tower?"

"Nothing. It's the last one." Abe didn't get up.

"Stone on three sides and water on the other, and the bell's a different note, so you know it's the end of the wall."

"Thank you. Mr. Naylor, you're next week." Then she taught, because the period was still hers, and the class went back to being a class. It reached June by lunch, because everything in that school reaches everybody by lunch. She was two years below and four corridors away, and she got it secondhand off a girl in her form whose brother was in the room. By the time it arrived it had turned into Dolan did his report on his dad, and that wasn't what happened.

So Abe crossed the whole building to find her, at the busiest twenty minutes of the day, which he had not done once all year. She was at the lockers outside her homeroom with two girls he didn't know.

"Can I talk to you?" June looked at the two girls, and the two girls discovered they had somewhere else to be.

"I heard," she said.

"It wasn't like what you heard. Somebody asked me a question and I answered it."

"Right." Abe waited for the rest of it. June had a speech about him. She'd had one since the third of November and half her year had heard it, and she stood there with her bag on both shoulders and didn't give him a word of it.

"You told a room full of people you don't even like," said June.

"About Dad."

"It wasn't like that."

"You've never said one thing about him to me. Not one, not since I was eleven." She got her bag higher up her shoulder.

"And now a whole class knows. A whole class, Abe. Because somebody asked you a question."

"June."

"I've got double French." Then she went, and she went the long way round rather than past him, and Abe stood at somebody else's lockers with the bell going over his head. He believed every word of that. He'd have believed all of it, completely, if she'd said it to him on Tuesday. But June had stopped looking at him on Wednesday night, over the potatoes. That was the night before the report. Whatever was wrong had started a day before he ever stood up in that classroom.

She'd worked out who killed the thing at the bottom of Salt Row. She was never going to say it out loud, and neither was he, and a row about their dad in a corridor was a great deal easier for both of them than the other conversation. The other thing that happened on Thursday was that Miles Croft said nothing. He'd sat two rows over and one back through the report.

He came out of the room afterward with his bag on one shoulder and went off toward the hall without speaking to anybody, and Miles Croft had an opinion about everything and had never managed to keep one to himself. Croft's family had a book too. Three generations of them had written in the margins of it. Abe thought about that book all the way down the corridor. Then he started thinking about something he didn't like thinking about, and couldn't stop. Everything free was already in his head.

He'd had the common Swordsmanship routes off a wiki since before he Awakened, the library's donated shelf hadn't told him one new thing in a month, and his father's handwriting ran out partway through the book, because that was as far as his father ever got. The only writing left in this city that could teach him anything was inside people's houses. He could get into a house. He'd known how since October. He would go in through a door in real time, and get quiet once he was inside.

Then he would stand in somebody's living room and read for as long as the quiet held, and put the book back where it came from, and walk out with empty hands. He wouldn't be carrying anything. He'd just know it. The quiet would drop the moment anybody came near him. In a house where everybody was asleep upstairs, nobody would. There'd be nothing missing in the morning. There'd be nothing for anybody to find out.

Abe walked down a school corridor on a Thursday afternoon and worked out that the only thing actually stopping him was that he didn't know where Miles Croft lived. It made him feel a bit sick, and he kept walking. He had four days until the board, and Saturday was Croft and Sunday was the water, so it wasn't going to be this week. Then he noticed he'd said this week to himself instead of never, and kept walking. He kept expecting Croft all afternoon anyway.

Through fourth period and through fifth he waited for him to turn up at his shoulder with some remark about walls, or bells, or standing about in the sea, delivered rudely and meant well. It never came. At four o'clock Abe walked out of the gates on his own and understood that it wasn't going to. He'd have taken the rudest thing Croft could think of, gladly. Getting nothing at all felt worse than the quiet in the classroom had. He worked the yard until half past one that night.

Then he sat down against the trash cans and got his screens up. Realm 1 · KINDLED · Body Layer 5 Foundation: 118 / 3600 (Body Layer 6) Study · Novice Lv 7 (664 / 2450) The report had paid him almost nothing. He'd known it would. He'd read that book so many times that the Weave had stopped calling it learning somewhere around the middle of October, and four days of copying it onto eleven pages was the easiest work he'd done all month. Ten minutes at the front of a room. Thirty one people. Barely a point in it.

Abe sat in a stopped yard and found out that he didn't mind. That was new. He had never looked at a number that small and been fine about it. He'd stood out here on Monday night and told a stopped street he wanted Layer 5 by the first of December. He'd gotten it on Wednesday, in the water, five days early. Then he looked at the yard itself, which he had never done. A shed door. A drain. A stretch of concrete with a chalk line across it that he'd worn away and drawn again about forty times since October.

Two nights ago, three feet of black water on broken stone had given him a whole layer. Tonight this had given him seventy seven points. He sat against the trash cans with the rain hanging over him and understood that everything left out here was something he could already do in the dark. Saturday was Croft. Sunday was the water. That was two days out of seven that could still teach him anything, and the other five were a shed door and a drain.

Four days until the board, and he had no idea in the world where to find a third one. He got up and did another hour anyway, because there was nothing between him and Monday except his own two hands. He went up at half past two and stopped outside June's door. She was the only person alive he could have told about that classroom. About standing up in front of a whole room and saying their dad out loud, and the sky not falling in on him. He stood there long enough to feel stupid about it. Then he knocked.

"I'm asleep," said June, through it. That hurt more than everything else that day put together, and it surprised him how much. Abe stood in the dark hall for a while. Then he took his coat back off the hook and went down the stairs again. There was nothing left in that yard. He knew it, and he went and worked it anyway. He'd had oats at seven and nothing since. There was toast in the apartment for the morning and it was June's, so there would be nothing waiting when he went back up either.

His hands stopped closing properly before the hour was out, and the rain came through his jacket, and he stayed out there anyway, because he had nowhere else in his life to put any of this.