Chương 39: The Wrong Ladder

"Yes," Abe said.

"I do." He did, too, and not just to be kind. His father had filled a whole paperback with ways to keep the man next to you alive, and never once told anybody at home he was doing it. The cake in Brammall's story sounded like the same man.

"Say the bit about the cake again."

"You've had it twice."

"Say it again," said June, so he said it again, and she laughed at the cake part with one arm out of her coat. June looked at him a moment longer, checking whether he was just being kind. Then she nodded and went in, and she carried the story up to bed with her, held close, like something hot. At breakfast she wanted the north end of the sea wall pointed out to her from the kitchen window, and Peg pointed it out with a wooden spoon and made her eat while she looked.

Peg knew the story already and told a piece of it back wrong on purpose, to see whether June would correct her. June corrected her twice before she worked out she was being had. That was Wednesday morning. Wednesday night, Abe went back to work. He read the screen in the yard before he started, standing between the trash cans with his breath going up in a column. Realm 1 · KINDLED · Mind Layer 4 Foundation: 61 / 2, 500 (Mind Layer 5) Sixty-one, four days after the crossing.

He got quiet, and the yard stopped, and he did everything he knew how to do. He sharpened. Every edge in the apartment went across Riddell's stone, the kitchen knives twice, and his hands did it perfectly, without him. Perfectly was the problem. There'd been a night in October when getting one kitchen knife right took him two hours and a strip off his thumb. He'd been proud of that knife.

He'd carried it around the apartment showing people, and Peg had told him to put it down before he took somebody's eye out, and that night had paid him better than this one was going to. He read. The diver's manual, the two cupboard books, the folded page in his father's paperback that he could have recited with his eyes shut. He ran the Study drills until the lines of print stood up in his memory and answered when he called them.

He did it all properly, at volume, for a whole stopped night, and he did it already knowing what it would say, because he'd said it to himself in his own yard back in November. Nothing in that yard was hard anymore. Nothing in those books was new anymore. He let the world back in and stood in the cold with rain starting and read the number. Realm 1 · KINDLED · Mind Layer 4 Foundation: 68 / 2, 500 (Mind Layer 5) Seven points. A whole night of his life, done right, done full out, for seven points.

He'd started at eleven and come out of it with the skin off two knuckles from the stone and his eyes gritty from reading, and it was still the same night out there, and the number had moved seven. He sat down on the cold step with the door at his back. Then he got up, because sitting down about it was worse. The rain came on properly while he stood there and he let it. There was a version of that night where he went back in and did another eight hours out of pure spite.

He could feel it sitting there being available. He knew exactly what it would pay him, too. Seven more points, near enough. He wasn't even angry. It was like being angry at arithmetic. What he couldn't get past was that he'd done it right. There wasn't a lazy hour in that night. He'd gone at it the way he went at the drain and the crossing and every good week he'd had since October, and it had worked every time before, and this time it bought him nothing.

The Weave paid for hard, and he'd spent two months making everything he owned easy, and now the bill for that had come in. Thursday morning Piers Danforth stopped him in the languages corridor, in front of the notice boards and half the year, and asked the question with no run-up. He'd been standing at those boards when Abe came around the corner, and he'd been standing there a while, because the notice he was reading was the swimming one and that had gone up in September.

"How many hours a day are you actually doing?" He said it in a friendly voice, like a question about homework.

"I'm not making a point. I'd like to know." The corridor got interested. Ellis Naylor stopped mid-sentence to listen. Ensure your favorite authors get the support they deserve. Read this novel on Royal Road.

"About fifty," Abe said.

"More on a Sunday." Naylor laughed loudest, a proper bark of it, and hit Abe on the shoulder like the joke had been for his benefit.

"Fifty," said Sam Ottley.

"What, before breakfast?" Danforth didn't laugh. He looked at Abe, and then he smiled and decided to let it be a joke.

"Fair enough," he said.

"It was rude to ask. I'd tell you mine, for what it's worth, but nobody asks me." He picked his bag up off the floor. Then he stopped.

"Do they give you a coach? Gault's people."

"No."

"They will." Danforth shifted the bag once.

"That's the part I'd want." He said thanks and went off toward the stairs, and Nita Sowerby watched him go with her arms folded.

"You could've just told him," said Naylor.

"I did tell him."

"Yeah, but properly." Abe went to French. The true number had been out loud in a corridor, in front of four people, and not one of them had wanted it. He found that funny all morning. He found Tench in the cultivation office at the end of the day, at the desk by the cupboard, with tea going cold next to a stack of marking. Abe put the borrowed book down on the desk. Then he asked it straight, because he'd spent the walk over deciding not to dress it up.

"I did a full night, sir. Everything, properly. It moved seven points." He heard how it sounded and kept going anyway.

"The night before was about the same. What am I doing wrong?"

"Nothing," said Tench.

"That's the trouble." He pushed his chair back and stood, and took down the old wooden practice knife that lived on top of the cupboard. He set his feet and turned his wrist over to show the shape of a cut, as he'd shown it a hundred times on the mats. He did it with his right hand. Then he moved the knife to his left to show the mirror of it, and the left hand took the handle and would not close on it, and Tench moved the knife back to his right without a word and went on talking.

Abe had watched him do that in class twenty times and had never seen it. He saw it now.

"You've come to the end of what a person gets alone," he said.

"Work pays while the work is at your edge. Your edge has moved past everything in this room, and past everything in that cupboard, and I'd guess past everything in the building."

"Then I find harder books."

"There are no harder books. The people who know the next part don't write it down." Tench put the knife back on the cupboard.

"Every man and woman who ever got deep had somebody. A teacher who'd been further, standing close enough to correct them the moment it mattered."

"Then how do I get one?"

"Sit down. This is the only useful thing I know and you're getting all of it." Abe sat, and Tench held up three fingers.

"There are three doors for people like you and me. First door: a family takes you in. They almost never do, and when they do there's a wedding involved, so put that one away for now." Abe put that one away. He folded the first finger down.

"Second door: the circuit decides you're worth a coach. That happens at Realm 2 and not before, because a coach's time costs more than anything else in the trade, and nobody spends it on Kindled boys. If you get there, you won't have to go looking. They'll come up your stairs." Abe thought about Gault's folder on the kitchen table, and the re-read waiting inside it in March, and said nothing. Realm 2. He kept his face still and let it go past him. He wanted the third door. He folded the second finger.

"Third door: a trade teaches you its own piece. The guard, the crews, the divers. Real method, tested for four hundred years, written in blood. Everything in that cupboard behind you is door three. I've spent years collecting it for boys with nobody, and I'll keep signing it out to you as fast as you can read it." Abe turned around and looked at the cupboard properly for the first time. The door was warped and the shelves inside it went four deep in paperbacks with the spines gone soft. Tide tables.

A diver's manual. Something about scaffolding, of all things. Most of them had a name written inside the cover in somebody else's handwriting, and Tench had been getting them off market stalls and out of house clearances since before Abe was born.

"But it stops."

"At seven, or eight if the man was gifted. A trade teaches you what the trade needs and not one rung past it." Tench sat back down.

"Now the part you're not seeing. You already have a somebody, one afternoon a week, and you're using him like a fence post." Abe looked at him.

"Miles Croft has been corrected every day of his life since he was six years old, by professionals, out of a book his family has kept for three generations," Tench said.

"You go to that hall on a Saturday and ask him to hit you, and he hits you, and you both think that's teaching. It isn't. Next time, ask him how his people drilled him when he got a thing wrong. What they did first. What they never let him do twice. Then make him do that to you. You can't buy what's in his book, but the shape of how they teach is sitting in that boy's bones, and he doesn't even know he's carrying it."

Abe sat there with his ears going warm, because it was obvious, and it had been obvious for five weeks, and he hadn't seen it.

"And I'll tell you the honest thing," Tench said.

"I stopped on Layer 4, forty years ago, because the man who could've taken me further wanted money we didn't have. Door two never opened and I was too old for door one. So I know exactly which door you're standing in front of, and I know what it feels like, and that's the whole of what I've got." Abe sat there. Tench had taught him for two months and had never said one word about himself in any of it. Layer 4. Forty years.

The man had been standing in front of a class since before Abe's father was born, telling boys about a ladder he stopped climbing forty years ago.

"Sir," Abe said, and couldn't find the end of it.

"Don't," said Tench.

"I'm not after anything." He took the little black notebook out of his back pocket, clicked his pen, and wrote one line in it, the fifth line anybody had ever seen go into it, and put it away.

"Take the tide tables book with you," he said.

"It won't have what you need in it. Take it anyway, and get your weight off your heels. You've been standing on them since you came in." Abe stood in the corridor outside the cultivation office with a book about tides under his arm, and got his phone out before he could talk himself down. Saturday. Can I ask you something about your family. Croft wrote back before Abe had reached the stairs. You can ask. If it's money the answer is no and also how dare you.

Abe was still working out how to put it when the second one came in. It's not money is it