Chương 31: The Crossing

Abe read the water at ten to six and the water said it was going to be a nice day. He did it the same way he had done it last Sunday, which was the only other time he had ever done it. He got quiet on the boards with the harbor stopped around him, and then he went along the tide line and the roof ridges and the four punts and the weed. He took his time about it. Down there he had all of it and it was free. Flat. Bird mess on both ridges, which meant nothing had moved them off in the night.

The line on the harbor wall sitting where it sat yesterday. Fine day. Cold and fine. Then he did the other thing, the one that was not work, which was why he had never mentioned it to anybody on the crew. He could read anything he could see in a still. Both Sundays now he had read the drowned districts end to end, the shutters and the yellow lines and a laundromat price list behind unbroken glass and a poster for a movie with four people on it standing in a row.

It went on a long way past the point where the crews turned back. Nobody on crew nine had ever mentioned what was out that far. He let the world in and got on the boat and told Dobbs so, because Dobbs had started asking him.

"Fine," Dobbs agreed.

"Wind's nothing." The wind was nothing until eleven. They were out past the third roof by then, working a row of houses that had gone under in the first year and never come back up. Fenn on the slate. Cottle and Purnell on the poles. Sefton doing what Abe had done on his first morning, meaning everything nobody else wanted to do. Abe was in the water more than out of it. One Sunday had been enough to teach him where he was useful. He could stand in moving water on stone he could not see, and almost nobody could.

At eleven the wind came around off Mullen's hip, which is what it does at this end of the year. Then it kept coming around, which it is not supposed to do at all.

"Dobbs," said Cottle.

"I see it." The water changed while Abe was standing in it, which is the only way he could ever describe it afterward. It went from shoving to pulling, and the pull came from underneath. The whole flooded street he was standing in started to empty toward the harbor mouth, like somebody had taken a plug out. Everything after that happened in about four minutes. Dobbs got two of them into the punt, and the punt off the chimney stack, and it out into open water.

It took him away from the rest of them for exactly as long as it mattered. Purnell went in. She did not fall, though the stone went out from under her, and then she was in the channel between two roofs. The whole street's water went past her at a speed that had not existed twenty minutes earlier. She got a hand on a gutter and stopped.

"Hold there," Abe said. He was already moving.

"I've got it."

"Hold there." Sefton was on the roof above her with a hook pole and no idea. He was eighteen and he had never done this. He was going to put that pole out and get pulled in on top of her, and there was no time at all to say so. Here is what Abe could not do. He could not get quiet. Not with a person in the water forty feet away and his heart going like a bird in a box. Company locks it, and fear locks it harder, and he had never gotten under with a voice shouting at him.

So he did it the ordinary way, in real time, the same as anybody. He went along the ridge on his feet and got into the channel above her with his back against the roof slope and both feet planted, and he set. Set Stance is not complicated. It was the first thing his father learned too, guarding the same kind of wall. The water hit him and went past.

"Pole," he said to Sefton.

"Not to her. To me." Sefton put the pole into his hands. Abe put the butt of it into the gutter iron behind him and the head of it out where Purnell could reach. Then he stood there and let a flooded street try to take him off a roof. It could not. Last Sunday he had walked a line around a chimney stack in three feet of moving water and been pleased with himself about it.

This was deeper than that and it was moving in a way that water is not supposed to move, though he was still standing in it, and he had time to notice that and no time at all to enjoy it. Purnell got a hand on the pole. Then the other hand.

"You pull," she said.

"I'm no good to you like this." He pulled. The puller came up on his blind side, which is what they do and why the shed calls them that. Abe never saw it, and he never saw one properly all year. What he felt was the pole go heavy at the far end, out where Purnell was, in a way that had nothing to do with Purnell holding on. Behind him Cottle shouted one flat word. Then Purnell went under to the shoulders and came back up with her face changed.

"It's got me," she said, in an ordinary voice. That was the worst part of the day. This story has been stolen from Royal Road. If you read it on Amazon, please report it Abe had a hook in his belt because Dobbs made everybody carry one. He got it out left-handed with the pole still in his right, and he went down along the line of the pole and hit something that was not stone. It came off the hook. He felt it come off.

The pull on the pole doubled and his back foot slid four inches on the slates and stopped, because his back foot had been trained by a man who stood on a wall for eleven years and never once got to be anywhere else.

"Abe."

"I know." He could not see it. He could reach past Purnell if he let go of the pole, though letting go of the pole was the one thing he was not going to do, and the water was taking the light out of the channel by the minute. So he stopped trying to fight it and went back to the only thing he was good at. He set his feet again. He put his weight where his weight went.

Then he took the hook down and across in a line his arm had done about forty thousand times in a stopped yard behind his own block, in the dark, against nothing at all. Croft had spent most of one Saturday telling him, with detail, that it was the worst technique in Calder. It went in anyway, and it went in deep, and it stayed. The thing came off Purnell's leg and went back under. The water went red and then took the red away with it.

Abe stood in the channel with one hand on a pole and one hand on an empty belt loop, because the hook had gone with it. Then something in his chest turned over, and a light came on. He knew that feeling. He had felt it once before, in black water at four in the morning, and it had frightened him then. Swordsmanship · Novice → Apprentice Body 6 → 7 Purnell was still in the water. Abe read that whole box and put it out of his mind.

Then he pulled her the last four feet to the roof by the pole, and Sefton got her under the arms, and that was that. The menu came up while he was sitting on a wet roof with his legs shaking. EVOLUTION · Swordsmanship Choose one. This choice is permanent. SHORT WORK · Common Everything inside one step is a target, including the hand. Close is where you live now. BLIND SIDE · Fine You do not need to see a thing to put a blade in it. What you heard is enough. What you felt is better.

DRILL HAND · Fine The first exchange with anyone goes exactly the way you drilled it. Every time, against anybody, for as long as you live. SHORT WORK · Common would make him better at the end of a fight. BLIND SIDE · Fine would make him better at the thing he had just done, which he was fairly sure had been luck. DRILL HAND · Fine would make him excellent at the first four seconds against anybody alive. He wanted that one. He wanted it so much that his hand came up off his knee.

Croft had hit him sixty times in one morning in front of the whole year. Abe got three back and not one of the three had been an opening, because Croft owned every opening, every time, from the first bell. He had gone over those sixty more than he had gone over anything in his life. Take DRILL HAND · Fine and the openings stop being Croft's. Then he put his hand back down. In the drain he had picked in four seconds. Nothing had made him.

There had been no number coming down anywhere on that screen, and he went around all four corners of this one to be sure of it, and there was nothing on this one either. The four seconds had been the drain. His hand had been in pieces and there had been a dead thing floating against his leg and the water had been coming up, and a boy standing in that gets four seconds because that is what the drain gives him, not because the Weave is counting. Nobody was going to die on this roof. So the choice could wait.

It had always been able to wait, and Abe sat on a wet roof and felt how big that was. That mattered more to him than any of the three options, because of DEEP WELL · Rare. He had spent two months not knowing what it would have done, and he had never found one person to ask, because you cannot ask a question about a screen without explaining how you came to be reading it. This one he could ask about. There was nothing on it to hide.

It was three sword techniques on a Sunday, and every senior in this city gets a menu sooner or later, and anybody who heard him describe it would think he was doing well and nothing else at all. Tench had promised him an office, and a table, and as long as it took, and had not managed to give him any of it yet. Croft's family had done swords for three generations and written in the margins of a book about it. Croft was rude and helpful in that order.

He would tell Abe the truth without being asked twice, and he would do it in a corridor, for free, between lessons. Both of them would be in that building at nine in the morning. Somewhere between those two there was a person in Calder who knew which of these three was the one you regret. Abe was going to be standing in front of both of them before the first bell. Abe had planned a whole build on paper a year before he Awakened, in a library, with a pencil, off books that cost nothing.

He had been handed exactly one permanent choice since, and he had made it in four seconds in the dark, and he had been quietly angry about that ever since without ever saying so to anybody. Not this one. This one he was going to make sitting down. It was harder than the channel had been. He got it down to two before they had the punt back, and then he lost the second one and had all three again. The ache sat behind his eyes the whole time.

It hurt, and that surprised him, and it never got worse and never eased off, because it was not going to leave until he answered it. Dobbs brought the punt back at half past twelve and said one sentence about the wind that Abe did not catch. Then they went in. The day was finished whether anybody liked it or not. Purnell had a leg that would need looking at and a mouth on her about it.

"I had a hand on that gutter," she said, on the way in, to nobody.

"You did," said Cottle.

"I'd have been fine."

"You would." Then she looked over at Abe, who was sitting on the thwart with his hands open on his knees and nothing in either of them. She stopped talking about the gutter.

"Where'd you learn that," she said.

"In a yard."

"In a yard."

"On my own," said Abe.

"Badly. Since the end of October." Purnell turned her head and looked at him properly for the first time all day. Purnell laughed, and then stopped, because laughing hurt.

"Well," she said.

"Keep doing it badly." Abe said he would. He had four loaves in a cupboard at home behind the pans, and a block of cheese, and Peg thought the oats were the oats she had bought. Nobody on that boat would have said one word to him all afternoon if they had known where Sunday breakfast came from. Dobbs paid them on the boards at twenty after two, which was early, and he paid a full day, and a full day was more than the hours. He gave Abe his and then went on standing there after the money was done.

"You went in the channel," he said.

"Yes."

"Nobody told you to."

"No." Dobbs looked at the water. It was flat again and pretending. Then he said something Abe carried around for the rest of the week and never told to June or Peg or Croft.

"Next bad one," said Dobbs, "you're on my shoulder, not on Sefton's." Then he went and coiled a rope. Abe stood on the boards with forty-five marks in his hand and thought about a hasp coming out of soft pine, which had happened about thirty hours ago and which he had not thought about once between six in the morning and now. Abe put his coat on with the screen still open at the edge of his sight, and found that he could do it. He could hold a rope. He could answer Purnell about the hook and mean it.

Then, because he wanted to look at anything that was not the menu, he brought his skills up. Swordsmanship · Apprentice HELD · no progress while a choice is open There was no bar. There was a line where the bar went and nothing in it. Abe sat with that for the rest of the ride in. He had killed a thing in the water four hours ago and got nothing for it, and he was going to go on getting nothing for every hour that screen stayed open. One night of that he could stand.

A week of it he could not, and Abe sat on the thwart and decided he was not going to let this one sit. Abe walked home up the Corn Road with forty-five marks in his pocket and a screen in his head that would not close. Every time he thought about anything else it came back on him, like a bad tooth. He could ask Tench in the morning. Tench had promised him the office and a table and time, and tomorrow was the read. Three names on a screen nobody else could see. One pick, and the other two gone the second he made it.