Chương 3: The Rules

Abe did four more push-ups before he believed it enough to stop. He came up slowly the last time, braced all the way, absolutely certain the rain was about to start falling again. It did not. The rain hung there. The big drop by his face hadn't moved a hair. So he stood up to have a proper look at it. The rain hit him in the face. The whole held storm finished its fall in one instant and the hiss came back. The water went down his collar and up his sleeves and took his breath clean away.

"Ah," said Abe, standing in the live rain.

"Right." He was grinning anyway. Getting it back took him a long time, and it taught him the most important thing he learned all night. He got down and did push-ups and nothing happened. He did twenty more and nothing happened. He knelt in the rain and wanted it back so hard that his jaw ached, and wanting it did absolutely nothing at all. It came back when he stopped trying. He'd given up and gone back to counting properly, elbows in, breathing out on the way up.

Somewhere in the second minute his head went quiet and the count took him over. Then the hiss went out of the rain between one breath and the next. Abe held still in the middle of it and worked out what that meant. It needed him calm. About a minute of quiet, and no grabbing at it. It was like falling asleep, in that you couldn't order yourself to do it and could only stop getting in your own way. Which meant he'd been able to do this on Friday.

Abe knelt in the stopped rain with his hands flat on the concrete and felt sick. He'd done push-ups on his bedroom floor at four minutes after midnight with his heart going like a bird in a box. He'd done them in Riddell's yard, on the stairs of the block, and on a gym floor in front of two hundred people. Every single time, he'd been reaching for it with everything he had. Except on the bus. He had reached for it all the way home and got nothing.

But past the bridge he had stopped bothering, and the bus had gone quiet around him. He'd owned it the whole time. He'd owned it while Croft said skipping rope. The only reason it'd never come was that he wanted it too badly, and nobody had told him, and nobody was ever going to.

"You're joking," Abe said, out loud, to the rain. Then he decided to stop being sick about it, because there was a stopped rainstorm hanging over his head and he had all night. He tested the second rule on purpose, and he was honest with himself about why. The thought had turned up while he was still lying on the concrete, and it had turned up whole and finished, with nothing left in it to work out. A stopped city. Every door in it, every shop, every shelf, and nobody in the world able to see him do it.

Two million marks sitting somewhere in Calder tonight, in a building he could walk into. He was not proud of how long he looked at that. Then he counted himself down, reached out slowly, and touched a hanging raindrop with one fingertip. The world lurched alive. Cold, hiss, and the drop breaking and running down his hand. He got quiet again and tried the door handle on the back of the building instead, and the night came back to noise before he had even finished deciding to pull. Working on himself held the quiet.

Reaching out to take anything, or move anything, or change anything at all, gave the time straight back. Then he sat down on the wet step to think about it, and the world came back on for a third time.

"Oh, come on," he said. He got the third rule by accident, and it was the best one. He'd gone back under and was working the slow squats on page nine, and about halfway through a set he started genuinely wondering how long he'd been out here. So he counted his own pulse, about a hundred beats to a minute, and then he started working it out properly. And the rain kept hanging. Abe stopped in the middle of a squat with his legs burning. Thinking counted.

Working a problem out was work, and as long as the labor was happening behind his eyes, the world stayed exactly where it was. Then, because he wanted to find the edge of it, he let his mind go slack on purpose. He looked at nothing and thought about nothing. The rain came down inside four seconds. Working held the quiet, in his body or in his head. Slacking off or grabbing at the world gave it back. Three rules, and all three of them were the same rule.

Abe went under again and walked out into the middle of the yard. The rain went all the way up. It was a solid field of little glass beads going up past the gutters and past the roofline and into the black until he lost them. He walked between them. He put his face right up against one and looked at his own eye in it, huge and curved and upside down. He was studying it, and studying was work, so the world held.

Abe stood in his own yard at half past eleven at night and understood that he could look at anything in Calder for as long as he wanted. Anything at all. For as long as he liked. That was too big to think about standing up, so he decided to be amazed by it later. He had a book to get to. He did not have to wonder what to train, because he had known for a year. The paperback was in a bread bag under the step where the rain couldn't get at it.

Abe reached down for it and the world came back on, all at once, wet and loud. Support the author by searching for the original publication of this novel.

"Yes," he said.

"All right. Fair enough." So he picked the book up first, and stood there in the live rain with it held against his chest, and got himself quiet again with it already in his hands. The rain stopped. The book stayed exactly where it was, and he could turn the pages, and the pages turned. That was the fourth rule, and it changed how he would live for the rest of his life. Nothing out there was his, but whatever he carried in with him was.

Green cover, coffee ring, and on the front in worn gold letters THE IRON BODY METHOD, and under that in smaller letters, A Wall Guard's Conditioning. Abe had read it so many times that he could've found page fourteen with his eyes shut. Page fourteen had the slow holds on it, the hardest thing in the book, three lines underlined twice and pressed hard enough to score the paper.

Beside the diagram of a man doing a slow push-up with his elbows tucked in against his ribs, his father had written one word in small square capitals. ELBOWS. Abe looked at that for a while. Tench had told him the same thing in a gym five weeks ago, and it'd been the only useful thing anybody had said to him all term. Then he got down on the concrete and did the holds properly. He'd always been rubbish at them.

Somewhere in the second one his body stopped fighting the position and simply sat in it, correct, the way the little diagram said. And the Weave noticed. Conditioning · Novice Lv 1 (0 / 50) Abe came out of the hold and read it twice. Conditioning. The book said IRON BODY METHOD on the front of it. The screen said Conditioning. Conditioning was the commonest skill on the entire planet. Every single person in his class had registered it about four months ago and hadn't thought about it once since.

He'd waited a year to find out what he was going to be. The Weave had watched him do his dead father's exercises in the rain, and it'd written down the most ordinary word it owned. That lasted until he opened the back of the book. Then Abe opened the back of the paperback. He'd read the back of it too, and the back of it was the reason he'd picked this book off that shelf in the first place. The last eleven pages had no exercises on them. They were a route. Guards called it the guard's line.

Somebody had walked the whole thing decades ago and written down every turning he came to. That was the ordinary way anybody learned anything in Calder. The Weave put a screen up in your head, and you could read it, so you could copy it out afterward onto paper for the next person. Half the trade manuals in the world were somebody's memory of a screen. This one had been set properly, in a box, with the lines in the right places.

Abe turned to the first crossing and there it was, printed in gray ink on cheap paper, laid out exactly as it would hang in the middle of his head. EVOLUTION · Conditioning Choose one. This choice is permanent. SET STANCE · Common · Much harder to move, knock down, or drive off a line. LONG WATCH · Common · Tires far more slowly at sustained work. THICK SKIN · Common · Takes a hit and keeps standing. Somebody had drawn a hard line under SET STANCE in blue pen, twice, pressing hard enough to score the paper.

Abe put his thumb on it. Of course it was Set Stance. His father had stood on a wall in armor, holding one spot in the dark while something big came at him, and all he'd ever needed to do was still be standing when it was over. The crossing came at Novice Lv 10. Abe was at Novice Lv 1, on a bar that started at nothing and needed fifty. He turned the pages anyway. There were more of them, crossing after crossing, going up.

He didn't understand most of what he was looking at, because he had been Conditioning Lv 1 for about four minutes. And on the last page, on its own, underlined twice in the same blue pen, it said IRON BODY. Abe sat down hard on the freezing concrete. His father had underlined the first step of it and he'd underlined the last step of it. He'd died somewhere in the middle, and the book had come home in a box without him.

So Conditioning was the first word of a road, and his father had marked out that road in blue pen, and had never once said any of it out loud to anybody. Abe sat in the rain that wasn't falling and cried for a bit, which he hadn't done since the funeral, and which he was fairly sure his father would've found funny. Then he wiped his face on his sleeve and got back to work. There was a bar now, and a bar meant he could finally measure this thing instead of staring at it.

The Foundation line came up while he was working the third hold. It surfaced slowly, like a word coming up through water. Realm 1 · KINDLED · Body Layer 1 Foundation: 4 / 400 (Body Layer 2) Four. Abe knew what a Foundation bar was. Everybody in Calder knew. You spent your whole childhood catching sight of them over people's shoulders, on the bus and in the corridor and on the feeds. Four hundred points took you up a layer. Every layer after that needed more than the one before.

He'd just never had one of his own to look at. Four points, for the better part of an hour in his father's holds, and he hadn't felt a single one of them go in. He also noticed what had paid him nothing. The raindrop and the door handle and the standing still doing multiplication, all of that clever experimenting, had held the world open for him and put nothing whatever in the bar. That figured, and any kid in his class could've told him why. The quiet was one thing and the bar was another.

The bar only moved when he was actually practicing something the Weave had agreed to call a skill. Abe worked for another two hours by his own pulse and read it again. Realm 1 · KINDLED · Body Layer 1 Foundation: 14 / 400 (Body Layer 2) Five an hour, near enough. Five an hour was nothing. Five an hour was pathetic. Four hundred points at five an hour was eighty hours of work, near enough, if tonight was anything to go by. Nobody in the world had eighty spare hours lying about.

Abe sat back on his heels in the stopped rain and started, very slowly, to smile, because he'd eighty spare hours. He had all of them. He had as many of them as he wanted. He went inside at half past eleven at night, which was eleven minutes after he'd gone out. The kitchen clock said 11: 31. He stood in front of it, dripping on the kitchen floor, and read it three times. Eleven minutes of the world. He'd been out there the better part of a working day.

His arms were shaking, his legs had gone stupid, and he was hungrier than he had ever been in his life. The clock didn't care. Peg was asleep, June was asleep, and the kettle was where he had left it. Abe ate half a loaf of bread standing at the counter and decided not to think too hard about why he was so hungry. Then he sat down at the table in the dark, in his wet clothes, and did the sum properly for the first time. He couldn't get any faster than he had been tonight.

He couldn't buy essence and he couldn't buy a coach. Danforth got four hours a day. Abe had been turning that number over since the stairs, and sitting at the table with a bar of his own in his head he finally worked out what was wrong with it. Four hours in a hall is not four hours of work. Only the hard part pays, the part where you keep failing at something and correcting it and failing at it again. A body will give you one good stretch of that in a day and then it's done.

After that you're only sweating, and the Weave has never paid anybody for sweating. Everybody wants a second stretch of proper work in a day, and nobody gets one, because one stretch is all a body has in it. That was what the man standing over Danforth was for. You can't buy a longer day. You can buy somebody who keeps you in the hard part the whole time you're still able to be in it. Abe had done his one good stretch out in that yard.

Then he'd sat down with his back against the trash cans and eaten a crust and let his arms stop shaking, and then he'd gone and done another one. Everybody in Calder got one go at it a day. He got as many goes as he could eat for, and the clock on that wall would move eleven minutes. He didn't need to be faster than Miles Croft. He needed to be longer than Miles Croft, and he could be longer than everybody in Calder put together, for the rest of his life, starting tonight.

Abe put his forehead down on the kitchen table.

"Oh," he said, into the wood.

"Oh, that's not fair at all." He was laughing again. He had to press his mouth into his sleeve to keep it quiet, because his sister was asleep down the hall and his aunt got up at six. Then he lifted his head and looked at June's list on the wall by the window, and at the little drawn face in the gap. He'd spent four years training himself not to look at that paper, because there had been nothing he could do about his sister being ill. Tonight he read every zero in it. He still couldn't buy the medicine.

Nothing that had happened out in that yard put one mark in his pocket. A door handle had already told him why. He could not take a single thing out of a stopped world, and money is a thing. He was never going to have the money. What he had, as of about an hour ago, was more hours than anybody alive. He did not go to bed. Tomorrow afternoon there was a cultivation class. Croft would be in it, and Nita's board would still be out in that corridor with the empty space beside his name.

Abe sat at his aunt's kitchen table in his wet clothes with his arms aching, and thought very hard about what he was going to put in that space. He was going to need a bigger loaf of bread.