Chương 33: The First Monday

"Three," said Croft.

"Say them again." So Abe said them again, by the wall outside the hall at ten past eight on the first of December, with his bag between his feet and nothing in his stomach except somebody else's oats. Croft listened with his arms folded and his face perfectly still. That was the face he used when he was actually thinking, and it had taken Abe two months to learn the difference.

"Blind Side."

"You haven't heard the third one."

"I heard all three. Blind Side." Croft unfolded his arms.

"You put a hook into something you could not see, in bad light, at the far end of a pole, on a roof. Do you know how many people can do that?"

"It was luck."

"Everybody's lucky once," said Croft.

"The point is you were holding a hook at the time and you knew where to put it." That was the most useful sentence anybody had said to Abe about swords in a month, and Croft immediately ruined it.

"Also everything else you do is horrible," he said, "so a door that doesn't care about your technique is frankly the kindest option on the table."

"Thanks."

"I got mine about a month after my birthday." Croft picked his bag up.

"My father had opinions. There were three of us in the room and a lot of shouting and I still don't know if I got it right, so don't stand there thinking I'm an authority."

"That's the first useful thing you've said."

"It's the second," said Croft.

"Blind Side. Go on, you'll be late, and I've got to go and be told I'm still on Layer 4 in front of everybody." Tench's office at half past eight had the light on and the window open, in December, which explained a great deal about Tench.

"Sit down," he said, before Abe had said anything at all. Abe sat down. He had never once sat down in this room. He had stood in it in October with a speech in nine sentences, and again in November with a broken hand behind his back. Both times he had stayed on his feet, and both times that had felt like part of the asking.

"You have a crossing."

"How do you know?"

"You are here at half past eight on a Monday looking like a boy who did not sleep." Tench pushed a pad of paper and a pen across the desk.

"Write them out. All three, exactly as they read."

"I can see them, sir. I don't need to write them."

"I know you can see them. Write them out." So Abe wrote them out in his own handwriting, in a school office, on a Monday morning. SHORT WORK · Common. Everything inside one step is a target, including the hand. BLIND SIDE · Fine. You do not need to see a thing to put a blade in it. DRILL HAND · Fine. The first exchange with anyone goes exactly the way you drilled it.

It took longer than he expected, and by the time he finished he had noticed something about Blind Side that a whole day of thinking about it had missed. He looked up. Tench was doing paperwork and did not appear to be paying any attention.

"That's why," said Abe.

"That's why," Tench agreed, without looking up. They read them three times. Tench read them out loud, once each, in the flat voice of a man reading a delivery note, and made Abe say back what each one would actually do to a life. Then he made him do it again, and the second time Abe got further, and by the third time they were arguing.

"Short Work is the cheap one," said Abe.

"It is the Common one. Those are different words."

"It's the one you take if you're going to spend your life inside one step of somebody."

"That is a real life," said Tench.

"About a third of the people who do this for money live exactly there, and they are not poor, and they mostly still have all their fingers."

"But I'd be choosing to be a close fighter forever."

"You would be choosing it now, at eighteen, off one Sunday. Yes." Tench put his pen down.

"That is what the word permanent is doing in that sentence. Half that cupboard is boys who read it too fast, and I watched more than one of them do it." Abe looked at the pad.

"Blind Side," he said.

"Croft's pick." If you find this story on Amazon, be aware that it has been stolen. Please report the infringement.

"How do you know that?"

"Because it is the exciting one, and because he watched you do something with a hook that he could not have done, and Croft says so out loud when somebody's better than him at something." Tench almost smiled.

"He is not wrong. It is a very good option."

"But."

"But it is an option about the worst afternoon of your year." Tench turned the pad around so it faced him.

"You will not spend your life on a roof in the dark. You will spend it in halls, and in daylight, in front of people who can see you perfectly well, and so can you." That left one, and Abe did not want to say it out loud, because he had wanted it since the roof and he did not trust himself about it.

"The third one," said Tench.

"It's a grudge."

"Say that again."

"My sister says it's a grudge." Abe put both hands flat on the desk.

"Croft hit me sixty times in October and I got three back and none of them were openings. If I take Drill Hand the openings stop being his."

"That is a grudge," Tench agreed.

"It is also, and I want you to hear these as two separate sentences, the option your actual life argues for." Abe waited.

"You have hours." Tench said it like a fact about the weather, and Abe's ears went hot anyway, because in five years nobody in this building had ever said that about him.

"I do not know where you get them and I have decided not to find out. But you drill, and you drill more than anybody I have taught, and you have almost nobody to drill against."

"Yes."

"Then take the door that pays for drilling." He pushed the pad back across the desk.

"Two of those three are about talent. One of them is about work. You are not a talented swordsman, Mr. Dolan, and you are going to be a dangerous one anyway, and it will be entirely because of the boring thing." Abe read them a fourth time, which nobody had asked him to do.

"I want the third one."

"Then take the third one, and take it because of the hours and not because of Miles Croft, and if you cannot tell the difference then wait until you can."

"I can tell the difference."

"Good," said Tench.

"Then stop asking me." Abe sat down in a chair in a warm office with the window open, and took it on purpose, and it took no time. Swordsmanship → DRILL HAND DRILL HAND · Apprentice Lv 1 (0 / 200) The word Swordsmanship came off the screen and did not come back. In its place was a name out of somebody's family, three generations old, and Abe had picked it in a school office with a pen in his hand. The bar was there again.

There was a number in it and the number was zero and he had never been so pleased to see nothing. Then he started working out what he was going to put in those first four seconds. He had the hours to drill them until they were perfect, and after that they would come out the same way against anybody alive.

"Well?" said Tench.

"It's done."

"It is not done. You have gone somewhere." Tench picked his pen back up.

"Whatever that is, have it outside. Go to the gym. It is the first Monday and you are going to be extremely late." Abe got up and got as far as the door.

"Mr. Tench. Thank you for the chair." Tench looked at him over the paperwork for a moment.

"That is a strange thing to thank a man for," he said.

"Go." The gym on the first Monday of the month is a different building, and Abe had been in it before, and knowing what was coming did not help. Two hundred people in birthday order, oldest first, four seconds each. Ellis Naylor was running the line from the bench again, telling everybody exactly how many minutes they had left, to the minute, and being right, and making certain everybody knew he was right. The difference was that this time the room knew he was coming. In November nobody had looked up.

Abe had sat by the doors for two hours with his heart in his throat and been completely invisible until the screen changed. Today he could not get across the floor without somebody saying something to him, and three freshmen had come in who had no business being in that gym at all. He stood on the pad. It takes four seconds. DOLAN, A. · Layer 7 · Body 7 · Mind 3 The noise was not the same as November's noise.

November had been two hundred people making a sound because a number turned up where a number was not supposed to be. This was two hundred people who had been waiting a month to find out how much, and it came out of them in a single flat shout and then broke up into arithmetic. Nobody in that gym was thinking about Ivy Halloran. She got to nine before anybody's parents were born, and she works in an office somewhere, and not one person in that room would have known her face. They did the sum they could see.

"He was one ahead of Danforth in November," said Lena Ward, to about nine people.

"He's two ahead now."

"That's what I'm telling you."

"Danforth's been the best in this year since we were thirteen," said Ellis Naylor, and then heard which tense he had used, and did not go back and change it. Danforth was ten feet away with his bag already on his shoulder, and heard every word of it, and kept his face exactly where it was. Abe was thinking about her. He was two off a record nobody in there cared about, and Piers Danforth was standing ten feet away, so he kept it in his head.

He stood on a rubber pad in front of the whole senior year and had absolutely no idea what he was supposed to do with his face. Then Danforth came over, and put his hand out, and said the right thing.

"Congratulations. Genuinely, that's a serious number."

"Thanks, Piers."

"Seven in a first year gets looked at from outside." Danforth's smile was in the right place and his eyes were doing sums.

"There's been a man looking at me since before you Awakened."

"You never said."

"Nobody asked. There's no clip of me." He got his bag higher on his shoulder.

"It's a good thing, what's happened to you. I woke up a year before you did and I've had a coach the whole way through it." Then he went off to his own morning. It was halfway down the corridor before Abe worked out what was missing from it. Danforth had said congratulations, and Danforth had not asked how. In October Danforth had told him where a coach lived on Fenner Street, unasked, for no reason, and had looked embarrassed about it. Nita rewrote the board at lunch with a crowd four deep behind her.

She did it again from the top, in green, and did not smudge a single line of it. Abe watched her put his name in the first row and write a seven after it. Ada Bewley was tenth and stayed tenth, and wrote it down in her planner, and went to French. Croft came and stood next to him and looked at the board for a while without saying anything, which was new.

"Which one did you take?"

"The third one."

"Huh," said Croft.

"You wanted Blind Side."

"I wanted Blind Side. I'm not you." Croft was still looking at the board.

"Saturday. Two o'clock. Don't be early, I'm sick of you being early." Then he went, and Abe watched him go, and Croft did not look at the top of that board again. The clip of the gym was on the feeds before the end of lunch. Somebody had held their phone steady this time and got the whole four seconds and the noise. Gault's message came in at ten past three, while Abe was in French, and it was four words long. Six hundred from January. He read it three times under the desk.

Then the bank thing on his phone made the other noise, the one it had made exactly once before. There were four hundred marks in an account with his name on it and the first of the month written against them. Abe Dolan sat in a French lesson with six hundred marks a month in his pocket for January, four hundred already in it for December, a name on a screen that used to say Swordsmanship, and a seven on a wall two corridors away in green marker. He got his phone under the desk and sent one message to June.

7 She wrote back inside a minute, and it was not congratulations either. I know. Ward's sister is in my French. Everyone in this room already knew before I did and I hate it and I'm really really pleased. Come straight home.