Chương 34: The Free One

The hall on Fenner Street had a floor that gave a little when you walked on it. Abe had been thinking about that floor since about half past eleven in the morning. He had four hundred marks in an account with his name on it. Two hundred and twenty of it went out to the drugstore the same day it landed. The rest was his, and he had never in his life had money that was his. So he walked up there after school with a sentence ready, and Marek opened the door and did not say hello.

"I want to buy hours," said Abe. Marek looked at him for a while.

"How many."

"As many as I can have. I've got about a hundred and eighty a month and I can do evenings."

"There are none," said Marek. Abe stood on the step.

"There's a whole hall behind you."

"There is a whole hall behind me and every hour in it is sold until Easter. Somebody bought the lot. Every evening, months of it, paid up front." Marek said it flatly and with no apology in it at all.

"I cannot undo that because you have come up the road with a hundred and eighty marks in your pocket."

"Right."

"You are not the first this week." He started to shut the door, and then stopped, and said the kindest thing Abe had ever got out of him.

"It was good money and I took it. If I had known you were coming I would still have taken it." Then the door shut. Abe walked back down Fenner Street with the first money of his life sitting in a bank, and it had bought him nothing. The school gave it to him free the next morning, which is the kind of joke the year had been playing on him since October. Tench announced it with his coat already half on.

"Blades from today. Blunts, and you will still get hurt." He wrote two words on the board and underlined the second one.

"Tuesdays and Thursdays. Only those. And if anybody wants to know why only, the answer is sitting at the end of the mats getting paid by the hour." The answer was called Mrs. Amery. She was about fifty and she had a folding chair, a paperback and a flask. She looked like a woman who had spent nine years being bored in gyms and fully intended to go on doing it. Sam Ottley put his hand up.

"Sir. Does it still count if it's a blade? Only I don't bruise."

"We shall find out, Mr. Ottley," said Tench, and the room made a noise like a kettle coming on. It had been coming since the end of October, when the last person in the year turned eighteen. Two hundred of them now, every one Awakened, every one with something to spend and nobody at all to spend it on. Five years of carries and sprints and wrestling, because wrestling is what two hundred children can be put through at once without anybody bleeding.

Now there was a woman at the end of the mats who could put a wrist back together, and everything changed shape. Abe worked it out about four seconds after everybody else. He had opponents. Tench called Dolan and Naylor first and nobody in that gym thought it was an accident. Everyone standing there had watched those two the last time. Ellis Naylor had gotten the grip and the turn and the drop, and had done all three of them properly, and Abe had simply not gone anywhere.

He had won that bout without attacking once, with a broken hand behind his back, by standing still until a boy his own age ran out of ideas. That was what the room was expecting, and Abe could feel it on his back like weather. Two hundred people had watched him not go down in November, and they had settled on what he was, and what they had settled on was a wall. They had come to watch the boy who cannot be knocked down not get knocked down again. Then they handed him a blade.

He took it the way he had been shown, crooked knuckles along the flat of the grip, knuckle and point down the same road. Naylor rolled his shoulders and grinned at him, because Naylor grins at everybody.

"Guard," said Tench. Here is what Abe had done with the two days since he sat down in a warm office and chose. He had worked out that he could plan the first exchange of a fight completely, before either of them had reacted to anything the other one did. Then he had built one. One opening, from guard, against a right-handed boy of about his own height. Four seconds of it. He had run it in a stopped yard until his shoulders gave out and he could not lift the bar.

Then he had rested and run it again, and again, in the dark and in the rain, against nothing at all. Support the creativity of authors by visiting the original site for this novel and more. He had no idea how many times. He stopped counting somewhere in the second night. He had not told anybody. There was nobody to tell. Naylor came at him, and the world did the strangest thing it had ever done. It did not slow down. Abe knew exactly what slow looked like from the inside, and this was nothing like that.

The world came on at completely ordinary speed, and his body went first and brought the rest of him along afterward, like a boy running downhill who has stopped being in charge of his own legs. His back foot set without being asked. His weight was already off it before Naylor's front hand had finished moving, and the blade was not where Naylor was. It was where Naylor was about to be. It had gotten there first. Abe felt his hand turn a quarter over.

He felt the point come up under the guard on the exact line he had cut in the dark until his shoulders quit. It was the same line. It was in the same place, and his feet were where he had put them two thousand times. It went in flat and hard across the ribs. Ellis Naylor sat down on the mat. It took about four seconds, and the strangest part of all of it was that it had not felt like doing something. It felt like remembering something. Nobody made a sound, which is not what that room does.

Then it came apart completely. Sam Ottley was standing on a bench, and somebody at the back was shouting a word Mrs. Farrant would have sent him out of a lesson for, and forty people were talking at once. Nobody was talking to Naylor. He was sitting on the mat with his hand flat on his ribs and his mouth open.

"What was that?" said Naylor.

"I don't know."

"Get up," said Tench.

"Again." So they did it again. Naylor came in higher the second time, and did not grin, and it made no difference. It went about the same way in about the same time, off a slightly different line. Abe put him down a second time and stood in the middle of the mat with his heart going, and no idea on earth what to do with his face. He had been in this gym in October and been laughed at by his whole year. He had been in it in November and stood still until a boy his own age wore himself out on him.

This was the first time in his life he had gone at somebody and won. Abe stood there and let it happen to him. Nita Sowerby had both hands over her mouth, and Amrit was hitting the wall bars with the flat of his hand and shouting something, and Ellis Naylor was getting up off the mat laughing in a slightly stunned way and saying a word Abe could not hear over the rest of it. He had wanted this since he was about eleven and had never once been able to say so out loud.

Then he did it to Sefton, who is bigger than him, and then to a boy from the other class whose name he did not know. Four seconds and four seconds and four seconds. The fourth time, Tench stopped the bout before it started and told him to fight left-handed. Abe went in with the same feet and the same line and the same everything, because it was the only thing he had. The boy took it off him at the wrist and put him flat on his back.

The room enjoyed that enormously, but Abe lay there with the wind knocked out of him and grinned at the ceiling anyway. It was the first time all afternoon that anything had happened which he had not already seen. Then he got up and went again, and lost again, and did not mind. Piers Danforth was two mats over and had watched all of it, including the part where Abe went over on his back.

"Four and two," he said on his way past, counting it up without being asked.

"First day with a new skill. That is a real afternoon, Abe." He said it kindly, though he did not stop walking, and he did not ask how. The bout on the next mat was still going, and Abe stayed where he was and watched it. Ada Bewley was on it, against a girl from the other class who was a head taller than her. The tall girl hit her on the shoulder, and then on the arm, and then across the back of the leg hard enough that the sound came all the way over.

Ada took all three of them and stayed exactly where she was standing. Then she did it again, and again, and the bout went on and on. All she did was keep her feet under her. She let the tall girl swing until the swinging got slow and her arm came down an inch, and then she got a hand on the wrist and put her on the mat. Mrs. Amery did not look up from her book. Forty people were still talking about four seconds. Ada picked her blade up and went to find out who was next.

Amrit came off badly in the last bout and landed on his wrist. That was when the room found out what Mrs. Amery was actually for. She put her book face down on the chair to keep her page. Then she came over, took the wrist in both hands with no ceremony in it at all, and gave it back. About ten seconds, start to finish. Amrit swore at her cheerfully and got sent to sit down. Then she went back to her chair and found her page.

Abe stood at the edge of the mats with a blade in his hand and his shirt stuck to his back, and thought about his sister. She was two floors down in this same building, in a room he could have walked to in a minute. Nobody has ever done that for June. Not for any money, and not because nobody tried. Croft was at the wall bars with his arms folded and had not said one word all afternoon. He came over while Abe was getting his breath back and looked at him for a long moment with his face doing nothing at all.

"That's the third one," said Croft.

"Yeah."

"You've had it two days."

"Yeah." Croft nodded slowly, and Abe waited for the rude half, because with Croft there was always a rude half.

"You know what my grandfather used to call the first exchange," Croft said.

"He called it the free one. He said everybody gets one and almost nobody spends it on anything." He picked his bag up.

"That is going to be a problem for somebody," he said, and went, and it was the only thing Abe got out of him that day. DRILL HAND · Apprentice Lv 2 (36 / 800) The order went up on the wall by the equipment cage before the end of the lesson, because Tench had been waiting five years to put it there and had the card already written. Two hundred names in one column, and everybody starts at the bottom of it. Sam Ottley got to it first and found his own name.

"I'm under Amrit," he said, to the whole corridor.

"Amrit fell over in the warm-up." Then he called out the boy two rows above him for Thursday before he had gotten his coat on, and Amrit called Ottley out from the bench without getting up, and it went along the wall like a fuse. Ada Bewley came to the card after the shouting had started and read it from the back of the crowd. Then she called out Sefton, who was six rows above her, and said it once in a normal voice, and went to get her coat. He was not near the top.

He had beaten three boys and lost twice, and the card did not care what his depth was. Piers Danforth's name was four rows above his own, and Miles Croft's was above that. It was the only board in the building he had ever wanted to climb. The other one, the one on the wall in the main corridor with his name in the first row of it, had taken him eight weeks and had cost him a hand and a night in three feet of moving water, and standing in front of this one he could not make himself care about it at all.

He walked home the long way with his ribs aching from a boy his own age and a bruise coming up on his forearm that he could feel with two fingers. On Saturday morning a woman he had never met was getting on a train to come and measure him. She was going to put instruments on him and write down how fast he was moving, and she would get the hours, because hours are the easy thing to get. She was going to miss Tuesday completely.