Chương 40: Experimenting with writing style, please tell me what you think

It was raining in the yard and none of the rain was falling. Abe Dolan stood in the middle of it with a wooden sword in his hand and his arms burning. The drops sat in the air around him, hundreds of them, not going anywhere. The city didn't make a sound. Nothing moved in it except him. He did the drill again, and again, and one more time after that, until his legs went. Then he stood there breathing in a street full of stopped rain.

It was two in the morning, and it was going to stay two in the morning until he let go. He was eighteen years old. His hands had stopped looking eighteen. None of that had happened yet. The sword, the rain, the stopped city, all of it was still weeks off. First there was a Thursday, and a pot of soup. There were three kids in Abe's class who hadn't woken up yet. By Friday there'd be two. That's just how the last year worked in Calder.

You woke up on your eighteenth birthday, and everybody else in your year was already ahead of you, and there was nothing to be done about it except wait your turn, which Abe had now been doing for eleven months. He got in at half past four on Thursday and the whole apartment smelled like soup. Peg was back from the school kitchens ahead of him, still in her apron, and she had the radio on to the shipping report, which she didn't listen to. Nobody in that apartment had a boat.

The pot was a big one, big enough for a family twice their size.

"Tomorrow," she said.

"Tomorrow."

"You want bread with that? There's the end of the loaf."

"I'm alright."

"It's going stale anyway. Somebody's got to." She put it on the table next to him and went back to the pot, and turned the radio down, and then a minute later turned it back up. June was at the table with her homework spread out everywhere and her pen cap missing. She was sixteen, two years below him at the same school, and better than him at school things.

"You've got the face on," she said.

"I haven't got a face."

"You've got the face you get when you're trying to be normal at something. It's your worst one." She went back to her book, then didn't.

"Sit down and eat, you're hovering."

"I'm not hovering."

"You're doing the thing where you stand next to a chair." On the wall by the window there was a sheet of paper with two columns on it in June's handwriting. WHAT IT COSTS on the left, and two million marks under it, every zero written out. WHAT WE HAVE on the right, and three hundred and forty. In the gap between the two she'd drawn a little face sticking its tongue out.

"That's gone up," Abe said.

"By eleven marks. Don't get excited."

"It's gone up."

"I worked it out on the back. You don't want to know." June turned the page of whatever she was reading.

"It's a bad number."

"June," Peg said, from the pot.

"What? He asked."

"He didn't ask."

"He looked at it." Two million was what the real medicine cost. The brown bottles by the sink were two hundred and twenty a month and they didn't fix anything, they just held June where she was, and the soup was good, and Abe ate two bowls of it and didn't look at the wall again. Afterward he sat on his bed with his father's book. A green paperback with a coffee ring on the cover.

His dad had been a wall guard, eleven years on Calder's sea wall, and he'd written in the margins of this exact copy the whole time, small square capitals, some of it about the work and some of it about nothing at all. Page forty had a note about a man called Wicks who owed him a dinner. Abe had never found out if Wicks paid up. There was a folded page at the back with nothing printed on it. A year of Abe's own planning was on that page in his own handwriting. He didn't open it.

He checked it was there and put the book back in his bag. Nobody in Calder sleeps the night before their birthday. The Weave came at midnight wherever you were, whatever you were doing, and it was never a minute late. Abe sat on his bed with his back against the wall. At some point June came in without knocking and sat on the end of the bed with her feet tucked up.

"I'm not talking," she said.

"Right."

"I'm just going to sit here. Because you'd sit in the dark on your own waiting for a magic screen and then you'd come out weird, and I'd have to live with you." Abe laughed. Then he got up, checked the window latch for no reason, and sat back down.

"June. What if it's nothing good." She didn't tell him it would be fine.

"Then it's nothing good," she said, "and we're all still here anyway. Peg burned the toast this morning and nobody died. We'll work out what to do about it Saturday."

"I work Saturday."

"Then Saturday night, you idiot." His phone said 11: 59. He watched the last minute go one number at a time and he thought about his dad, who'd woken up at eighteen with something small and useful, and taken it up onto the wall, and died up there when the monsters came over. Midnight. It didn't hurt. He hadn't expected that. Everything went quiet all at once, the way it goes when a machine he'd stopped hearing switched off, and he could hear his own blood. Then something huge moved inside his chest, slow and heavy.

A light came up inside his head with his eyes open in a dark room. Abe forgot to breathe and didn't care. It was the best thing that had ever happened to him. It was the best thing that had ever happened to anybody, and it was happening to him, in his socks, on his bed, and he laughed out loud. And then there was a screen sitting in the middle of his own head, as clear and ordinary as a page held up in front of his face. ABE DOLAN · Age 18 Talent: [Stillpoint] While you train, the world holds still.

Time within flows for you, and you alone. Measured effect on the world: none. Grade: F He read the top. Not a word of it meant anything to him. He read the bottom part and understood that one fine. The Weave had looked at everything he was and decided none of it did anything. Then it gave him the lowest letter it had. There was a page of his own handwriting folded into a paperback four feet away, laying out what he was going to do with whatever he got, and what the Weave had put at the bottom was none.

Nobody else could see it. Your Talent and your grade were yours and nobody found out unless you told them.

"Well?" June said. It came out too bright.

"It's a training one," he said. Which was true, as far as it went. He left out the F, and the line under it. That was the first lie he'd ever told her.

"A training one," June said.

"Is that good?"

"I don't know yet."

"Huh." She thought about it. Then she stood up and yawned like a cat.

"Be unbearable about it tomorrow. Tell everyone twice." She went to bed. Abe waited until he heard her door, and got down on the floor, and did push-ups. While you train, the world holds still. The fridge hummed. Somebody upstairs went to the bathroom and the pipe in the wall knocked twice, the way it did every night. A car drove by outside. Its lights swung across the ceiling and kept going. Some of it came back off the mirror on the closet door. None of it stopped. He did forty.

He read the screen again with his arms shaking. Peg had the skillet going when he came through in the morning.

"So?" she said.

"It's a training one," June said from the table, before he could open his mouth.

"It helps him train. He's doing the humble face about it."

"A training one." Peg said it twice more at the stove, to herself, and put eggs on his plate, two more than usual. Half the soup was still in the fridge. At school everybody asked, and "training one" held, because nobody expected proof before Monday. Ellis Naylor had it worked out by lunch anyway.

"It's stamina," he told the table, and nobody had asked him.

"Watch Monday. He'll go two hours straight, three even. My uncle worked with a stamina one at the docks, the man never sat down once in nine years. I've been saying all year something was up with Dolan."

"You have not," Nita Sowerby said.

"I've been thinking it." Abe let him. Saturday he had his shift at Riddell's. The shop sharpened tools and bought whatever came off the salvage trucks, and that morning the truck had brought in a crate of door hinges, hundreds of them, all sizes.

"You're eighteen now, then," Riddell said, going through the crate one hinge at a time like a man reading his mail.

"What'd it give you?"

"A training one."

"Huh." He turned a hinge over and put it on the left-hand pile.

"Had a cousin with one of them. Did all right for himself. Count these into dozens when you're done with the van." Between loads Abe went out in the yard with his coat off and did push-ups on the wet concrete. He tried it fast, slow, angry, calm, holding his breath, counting out loud. His jaw locked up and his count went ragged and nothing anywhere let go. A gull screamed at him off the shed roof.

He threw half a sandwich at it and missed, and it took the sandwich anyway, and stood there on the shed eating it and watching him, and Abe went back to work with his knuckles stinging off the concrete.

"You're going to be in that yard all day," Riddell said, through the back door, not really asking.

"I've got twenty minutes left."

"You've had twenty minutes left for an hour. There's a crate of chisels wants doing."

"I know."

"I'm not saying stop." Riddell stood there a second.

"I'm saying there's a crate of chisels." By Sunday night he had run out of things to change and the words on the screen had come apart from being read too much. Somewhere in there he started to believe them. Cultivation class was two hours every afternoon in the old gym, and on the first Monday after your birthday it was the only thing anybody in that building talked about. You could see the whole ladder from the door. Down one end were the July and August birthdays, two months awake and moving like it.

Miles Croft was running a practice sword through a form his family had been teaching for sixty years. The sword left a thin silver line hanging behind it that faded out slow, like a finger pulled through fog, and people stopped to watch him without meaning to. Above the wall bars hung a banner that said CALDER SCHOOLS ATHLETICS in letters that had been red once, one corner hanging down. By the wall was mat four. Blue rubber, worn pale in the middle. That was where Abe did push-ups. Mr.

Tench went around the room with his hands behind his back, old and gray, with a bad left hand he kept out of the way and never explained to anybody. Five weeks back he'd stopped at mat four and told Abe to tuck his elbows in. That was still the most useful thing anyone had said to him in that room all term. At half past three he blew the whistle and everybody sat down along the wall.

"Two of you," Tench said.

"Mott first." Nell Mott went out into the middle with her hands up her sleeves. Small, freckled, turned eighteen on the Wednesday. She crouched down at the end of the bench, got one hand under it, and stood up, and the bench came with her. A steel-framed gym bench, held off the floor with one arm like it was a broom.

Her face went from terrified to delighted so fast the whole room laughed and then cheered, and Sam Ottley started stamping on the stands, and then everybody was doing it, and Nell stood in the middle of the noise holding the bench and grinning like her face was stuck.

"Do the wall bars next!" Ottley shouted.

"That's a working Talent," Tench said, when it died down.

"In four years somebody's going to pay you money for that every day." Nell sat back down and kept turning her own hand over in her lap like it belonged to somebody else, and about eleven people hit her on the shoulder on the way past.

"Dolan," Tench said.

"Pad." The pad was a gray rubber square by the wall bars, wired up to the screen where the basketball scores used to go. Abe stood on it. DOLAN, A. · Layer 1 · Body 1 · Mind 1 Layer 1, Body 1, Mind 1 is what every human being in history has woken up with, so nobody reacted to it.

"What did you get?" Tench said.

"A training one, sir."

"What sort of training one." Abe had been thinking about this for three days and hadn't found a word that was both true and sayable.

"It works while I train," he said.

"Then show us." So Abe Dolan walked out into the middle of the gym floor in front of two hundred people, got down on his hands, and started doing push-ups. Somewhere behind his ribs he was still completely certain that this was going to be the time. He went after the feeling from midnight and pulled at it with everything he had.

"One," he said.

"Two." Nothing happened. The fluorescent tube over the wall bars kept buzzing. He kept his elbows tucked in, and somewhere in the twenties the room went quiet, the wrong sort of quiet. Two hundred people waiting for a thing to happen and starting to work out that the thing wasn't coming.

"Is this it?" Naylor said from the back, loudly. Nita turned around.

"Shut up, Ellis." Nita had decided to be sorry for him, and Abe minded that more than the laughing. Somebody laughed. He didn't look up to see who, because he had a rule about that, and the rule was that looking up only ever made it worse. The laughing didn't last. Nobody was even enjoying it. He did his sixty on the floor of the old gym with the whole senior year watching, and his arms went from burning to shaking, and nothing came to help him.

"That's enough, Dolan," Tench said. Abe got up. His ears were roaring. He sat back down against the wall and nobody said one word to him, and Tench looked at him a second longer than he needed to and then went on to the drills. It was Croft who put a word to it, out by the racks, cheerful as anything and loud enough for the room.

"F-tier," Miles Croft said, laughing while he said it.

"Boys. We've got an actual F-tier." F-tier was forum talk, a word for a build that does nothing, and Croft was only fishing for a laugh. Abe got his bag and went. He was ashamed all the way down, in a way that was new to him. He thought Croft was right. He sat upstairs at the back of the bus with his dad's paperback in his lap and brought the screen up in the middle of his head and read the top two lines again. While you train, the world holds still. Time within flows for you, and you alone.

They still didn't mean anything. And underneath them, where it had said the same thing since midnight on Friday, it still said none. Abe put his head against the cold window and reached for it again, as hard as he possibly could. Nothing came. The bus went over the bridge and down the shore road, past the tide bells, and somewhere along there he gave up, because he was tired and his arms hurt and there was no point to it. Then the bus went quiet.

The engine, the wheels, a man coughing behind him, all of it gone at once. The woman across the aisle halfway through turning her page. A dropped ticket hanging in the air under the seat in front. Then the noise came back and the page turned and the ticket landed. Abe sat up so fast he cracked his head on the glass, and he spent the whole rest of the ride trying to do it again, as hard as he possibly could.

Nita Sowerby had written the board up on Monday evening while Abe was on the bus, so by the time he got to school on Tuesday it'd been sitting there all night and half the morning. The board lived in the corridor outside the gym, and four hundred people walked past it every day. Nita kept it in green marker. She'd appointed herself to the job in the first week of the year, nobody had been brave enough to stop her, and by now it would've felt strange if anybody else touched it.

Under the board sat the lost and found box, which had one shoe in it. The shoe had been there since September. Abe had spent the whole night deciding he was going to look at the board properly. He'd been awake on the floor of his room since he got off the bus, doing push-ups until his arms gave out, and nothing had happened. Then he'd lain on his back and gone through the bus again. The ticket had hung in the air. The woman's page had stood mid-turn. The engine had cut out in the middle of its own sound.

It had happened, and he had no idea how to make it happen again. Somewhere around two in the morning he'd decided he was finished walking past the board fast so he wouldn't have to read it. A person who could do what he'd done on that bus could look at a list. That decision had felt fine at two in the morning, and it felt a lot worse at eight twenty, with his bag on his shoulder and the corridor full of people. The corridor was arguing about the board, the way it did most mornings.

"She's put 'heals a bruise.' That is not what it does."

"It's what it does, Ryan."

"It does a lot more than a bruise. The healer girl fixed my ankle in April. I heard it click."

"So it heals an ankle." Further down, Ellis Naylor was explaining to two people at length, and completely wrongly, why Mind was a waste of a column.

"Nobody has ever won a fight with Mind," he said.

"Nobody. Look it up." Abe went and stood in front of it and read it. The board had four columns and then a fifth. Name, then your layer, then Body, then Mind. Then a wide one at the end where Nita wrote down what your Talent did. The layer is a count of rungs. There are two ladders, Body and Mind, and everybody Awakens at the bottom of both with a one in each column. Climb a rung on either ladder and your layer goes up by one, and so does that column. The other two columns can run ahead of it.

Every so often a skill gets good enough that it turns into a better version of itself, and when that happens it pays a point into Body or Mind on top of everything else. A rare one pays two. That is why the names at the top of that board have bigger numbers in those columns than their layer could ever have given them. DANFORTH, P. · Layer 4 · Body 4 · Mind 4 · reads a room CROFT, M. · Layer 3 · Body 5 · Mind 1 · cuts through Then the rest of them, all the way down.

Layer 3s, then a long run of Layer 2s, each with a word or two beside it. Sees in the dark. Never gets lost. Heals a bruise. Then the newest group at the bottom, all sitting on Layer 1 with ones in both columns, because nobody climbs anything in their first two weeks. Nell Mott was in there with lifts what she holds written next to her name. Then a ruled line. Somebody had drawn it across the board months ago, purely so that the bottom would look like a bottom, and the last row sat underneath it. DOLAN, A.

· Layer 1 · Body 1 · Mind 1 · The last column was empty. Abe stood and looked at the empty space where his Talent was supposed to be written down, and it hurt. The numbers didn't hurt. He checked, because he'd braced for them all night, and the hurt didn't come. Nobody in history had climbed a layer in three days. Five other names were sitting on ones with him, all new like he was, and numbers like that go up. The empty space was different.

The empty space was going to sit there until somebody gave Nita something to write in it. She'd watched him do sixty push-ups on a gym floor, she'd come out to the corridor with her marker afterward, and she hadn't been willing to write a joke about him where four hundred people could read it. So there was nothing there at all. He'd have preferred the joke.

"You're famous," said Croft. Abe had heard him coming from six feet away. Miles Croft had a voice built for corridors.

"Am I."

"Nita's left you a hole." Croft stopped next to him with his hands in his pockets and looked up at the board, and whistled at it. That was somehow worse than sneering would've been.

"Two hundred names on there. Every single one of them has got something in that last column. Even Mott, and Mott woke up on Wednesday."

"Mott had something to show."

"So show us yours."

"I did."

"You did push-ups." Croft said it happily, like he was reminding Abe of a nice afternoon the two of them had spent together.

"For about six minutes. Then Tench told you to stop, and the whole year went out to break, and not one person in that gym could tell Nita a single word to put in your box." Abe didn't answer, mostly because all of it was true.

"So what does it do?"

"It works while I train."

"So does a skipping rope." Three people behind Croft laughed. Abe couldn't think of anything to say back, because it was a good line and it was very nearly right. Croft said it cheerfully. He wasn't standing there trying to hurt anybody, but he was completely sure he understood how the world worked, and he liked saying so out loud where people could hear him. Abe hated him anyway, and had done since the first week of term. The jokes were the smallest part of it.

Miles Croft had never once in his whole life had to wonder whether he was going to turn out to be somebody, and Abe thought about that most days. Then Croft looked back up at the board, at the names above his own, and pulled a face.

"Look at Danforth, though. Body 4. Four." He shook his head slowly, like a man talking about a friend who keeps making the same mistake.

"Half his hours go on some pottery thing his coach makes him do on Sundays. Genuinely the best in our year, and he spends every Sunday of his life making a bowl." Abe looked up at the board too. Danforth was one whole layer above Croft, in the column that everybody in Calder used to decide who was winning, and neither Abe nor Croft said a word about it. Croft looked straight at it and went on complaining about the pottery.

Abe did see it, and it didn't mean anything to him yet, because he had no idea what he was looking at. Then Croft reached up and tapped the board, once, on the wall just under Abe's name.

"Don't let them rub you out, Dolan," he said.

"Somebody has to be last." Then he went off down the corridor with the three of them laughing behind him. It had taken about forty seconds. Croft hadn't said one single thing that would've gotten him in trouble if Abe had told a teacher about it. Piers Danforth caught up with him on the stairs, and Piers Danforth had never done that before. Abe had spoken to him maybe four times in five weeks and every one of those had been about a door or a chair.

"That was foul," Danforth said.

"It was accurate."

"Yeah. It's still foul. He knew it was foul when he said it, that's why he said it." They went down a flight. Danforth looked over the rail to see who else was in the stairwell. Abe had not expected him to check.

"I'm going to tell you something I shouldn't. Croft's own demonstration went wrong in August, in that exact room, and he cried about it in the locker room afterward, and about eleven people saw." Abe stopped.

"He didn't."

"He absolutely did." Nothing happened on Danforth's face. Two flights further down, Abe worked out that this had been a joke.

"I wouldn't repeat it. Nobody would believe you anyway. I'm telling you because it happens to nearly everybody, and because the board moves."

"How fast?" Danforth started to say something, stopped, and started again. Abe watched him pick the true answer over the kind one, and watched him not enjoy it.

"Fast at first. Everybody gets Layer 2 inside a few weeks and everybody feels great about it. Then it gets harder every single time, forever."

"How far does it go?"

"Most of us finish the year on three. Top of that board, six. Seven if you have a really good year, but those ones all have a coach, and four hours a day, and someone at home buying their essence." He heard himself and looked slightly ill about it.

"Sorry. You did ask."

"What's the record?"

"In Calder? Nine. A woman called Halloran, who works in an office. She got there before either of us was born and nobody has touched it since." Nine. Abe held on to it. The best anybody in his whole city had ever managed was a single digit, and it had been standing there longer than he had been alive. They came out at the bottom into the noise of the corridor.

"What happens if you haven't got two hours a day?" Danforth was quiet.

"Then slower," he said.

"I don't know a way to say that which isn't rude."

"It's not rude if it's just true."

"No, it's still rude," Danforth said.

"I just can't help it." The rain started while Abe was walking home from Riddell's, and by the time he reached the apartment it was coming down hard and sideways. Peg was asleep in the chair with the television on low, some program about a man restoring a boat. Abe put the blanket over her and she didn't wake up, and he counted that as a win. There was a plate under a bowl on the counter, and under the plate a note in June's handwriting. ate at 6 like a normal person. the board is stupid. love j.

Her school was his school. Of course she already knew. Abe ate the cold dinner standing up at the counter. Then he went out the back. There was a concrete yard behind the building where the trash cans lived, about the size of two parking spaces, with a wall around it and a drain in the middle that had never drained properly. The security light had been broken since before he moved in. Nobody else ever went out there, which was the whole reason he did.

He got down on the wet concrete in the rain and started doing push-ups. He'd tried it eleven times since he got up. The bathroom, the walk in, twice in the corridor with his back to the board, once at the back of a lesson with his hands flat on the desk, and the rest anywhere he could stand still for half a minute. Nothing had come. He wasn't trying now. There was nothing left in him to try with, and he was cold, and his dinner had been cold. The rain came down the back of his collar and kept going.

His shoulders started complaining at about twenty and were shouting well before fifty. He tucked his elbows in like Tench had told him to five weeks ago, and he kept going. Down and up. The hiss of rain on concrete, the sound of his own breathing, the count, and nothing else in the world he had to do except the next one. Sixty. And then the rain stopped. It didn't stop the way rain stops. Abe kept counting for a beat and a half before his ears caught up with him, like when you keep walking after the last stair.

The hissing sound of it was gone. All of it, everywhere, at once. He held the push-up at the top with his arms shaking, and he looked up. The rain was hanging in the air. All of it. Thousands and thousands of drops, gray and small and perfectly still, held up between the sky and the concrete like somebody had pressed pause on the whole night.

Light from a kitchen window two floors up caught them, so that the drops lit up one above another above another, a staircase of tiny beads going up past the roofline and into the dark. Abe forgot to breathe. There was a drop the size of a pea hanging a hand's width from his face. He could see the wall of the yard inside it, bent and upside down and small and perfect. Out past the wall a car had stopped in the middle of the road, and its headlights were two solid cones of light that didn't move.

A pigeon hung over the roof of the next building with its wings spread, going absolutely nowhere. In the apartment upstairs a television had been talking, and it was not talking now. His arms went, and he came down onto his knees. The whole city had gone quiet and still and beautiful, and Abe Dolan was kneeling in a puddle behind the trash cans in the middle of it, and he was the only thing in it that moved.

"Oh," he said, out loud, to nobody. His voice worked. His breath came out as a cloud and hung in front of his face for a moment, and then it started moving again, warm and alive, in the middle of a city that had stopped. Abe knelt in the puddle with his arms screaming, and he started to laugh. He laughed until he nearly put his face in the water. He was so happy he couldn't hold his own weight up. Then he sat back on his heels to look at it properly. The rain hit him in the face.

All of it, all at once, the whole night coming down again out of the sky, and the hiss came back on like somebody had turned a tap. Abe knelt there in the wet with his mouth open. He had a guess about what had done it. He got his hands back down on the freezing concrete and pushed himself up, slowly, one more time. Sixty-one. The rain stopped in the air. Abe stayed at the top of that push-up for a long time, holding a stopped rainstorm up with his arms, and he wasn't laughing anymore. Twice now.

Once on the bus, and once here in the yard. He had all night to find out what he had done.

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, and 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. 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, and 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, wound up so tight he could barely count. 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, and 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 again.

"Oh, come on," he said. He got the third rule by accident. He'd gone back under and was working the slow squats off page nine of his father's book, from memory, 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. Over the wall, somebody's laundry line still had a shirt on it, stopped mid-flap with one arm out. He walked between the drops. 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.

"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. 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.

"I know," Abe told the book.

"Somebody mentioned." 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.

"Thanks," Abe said, to the middle of his own head. 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 same word it had already written for two hundred other people. That lasted until he opened the back of the book. 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.

If you stumble upon this tale on Amazon, it's taken without the author's consent. Report it. 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.

"Four," Abe said.

"Great." He 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, and 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, and nobody in the world had eighty spare hours lying around. Abe sat back on his heels in the stopped rain and started, very slowly, to smile, because he had eighty spare hours. He had all of them. He had as many of them as he wanted.

He put the book back in its bread bag under the step before he went in, out of the rain. 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 math 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.

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 tonight, 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.

Abe ate his lunch. Then he ate June's crusts. Then at one ten he went back and bought a second roll with the money he'd been keeping for the bus.

"You're eating like a horse," June said.

"I'm growing."

"You're eighteen. You've finished growing." She watched him take the whole end off the roll in one go.

"You slept about four hours and you look like you've been up for a week." Abe had been up for about a week. He'd gone out to the yard on Tuesday night at eleven twenty and come back in at 11: 31. Somewhere in the middle of those eleven minutes he'd worked until his arms wouldn't close a door. There wasn't a way to say any of that at a lunch table.

"Long night," he said.

"Doing what?"

"Push-ups." June looked at him for slightly too long. Then she took her tray over to sit with Ellis Naylor, and Abe finished the roll and thought about how badly he wanted another one. Cultivation class was at half past two. Abe got to mat four early and started on the slow holds from page fourteen. He had now done them more times than anybody alive had ever done them. On Monday he had held it for forty seconds.

Today he held it for fifty-one, and he lay on the mat afterward looking at the ceiling, because nothing had happened in between except a rainstorm and a bread bag. Croft was down the far end running the sword form, and people stopped to watch him without meaning to, exactly like always. Then Mr. Tench blew the whistle, and everybody sat down along the wall, and he told them the date.

"Monday the third of November," Tench said.

"The whole year, across the pad, one at a time. Nita will write the board out again the same night." He let that sit. The room started making a noise.

"Quiet. There is a reason I am telling you now instead of in three weeks." Tench put his good hand behind his back.

"Amrit turns eighteen on the twenty-fourth. Sowerby on the thirty-first. After that there is nobody left, so the third of November is the first time this year that board will have every single one of you on it." Two hundred people worked that out at the same moment. Abe felt the room change around him. Same people, same places, and every one of them suddenly working out where they stood. Danforth was going to be top, and everybody knew that. Nobody knew the rest of it.

The rest of it was about a hundred and ninety people who had spent five weeks quietly deciding they were better than whoever was sitting next to them. Four weeks. Twenty-six days, counting properly, and Abe had counted properly before Tench finished the sentence.

"It is a read," Tench said.

"You cannot revise for it. All it does is tell everybody the truth about where you have gotten to." Then he sent them off to warm up. Miles Croft came all the way down the gym to mat four. He did it slowly, and he did it in front of people, on purpose.

"Dolan."

"Croft."

"Twenty-six days." Croft crouched down on his heels beside the mat, friendly as anything. He was close enough that Abe could see the stitching on his practice jacket was a family crest, raised thread, three lines and a bird.

"What are we hoping for?" Abe kept his elbows in and kept going. He'd spent a year in this building keeping his head down, and it'd worked. He was the poorest kid in the room, with no method and no coach and a shift at four, and the only thing he'd ever found to do about that was stay quiet and stay out of the way. He'd gotten extremely good at it. Two days ago he'd done sixty push-ups on this floor while two hundred people watched nothing happen.

Last night he'd knelt in a stopped rainstorm behind the trash cans and found out that the world would hold still for him for as long as he was willing to work.

"Because I'll be honest with you," Croft said, "I have a bet on with Ellis about whether you move at all." He said it like he was telling somebody their shoelace was undone.

"I'm not being unkind. I've watched you for five weeks." Croft said the rest of it kindly, and the kindness made it worse.

"You're going to be standing on this mat on the third of November with those same numbers by your name. There's no shame in it. Ask Ellis, I've got money on it." Abe stopped doing holds. Two days ago it would've been true. It would've been the truest thing anybody had said about him all year, and he would've tucked his elbows in and counted and waited for Croft to get bored and go away. Last night the sky had stopped over his head because he'd asked it to.

And Croft was crouching there in his family's jacket, being completely honest with him, and being completely wrong, and there was no way on earth to tell him so. Abe was tired, and he was hungry, and for the first time in his life he was absolutely sure of something. It came out of his mouth before he decided to say it.

"Top ten." Croft blinked.

"Sorry?"

"I'll be in the top ten by the third of November." Abe could feel how far out of the window that sentence had gone. He could feel exactly how impossible it was going to be to get it back. He didn't want it back, and that frightened him. He looked at Croft crouching there in his family's jacket, and he wanted it so much that his ears rang. Croft didn't laugh, and Abe should have taken the warning. Croft stood up, dusted off his knees, and turned around to face the rest of the gym.

"Dolan says he's top ten by November," he said, in his corridor voice. The nearest twenty people looked over.

"Say it again, Dolan."

"Top ten by the third of November."

"He says top ten."

"He never."

"He said it to my face about a minute ago," said Croft.

"Who's Dolan?" said a boy at the back. His friend told him.

"Oh," the boy said, and everybody heard it. Croft was grinning now. It was a real grin, delighted, the grin of somebody who has just been handed a present.

"Top ten. By November. Everybody hear that?" They heard that. Tench heard it too, from the far end. He looked over, and he didn't say anything. By lunch tomorrow it would be all over the year. Croft wasn't going to wait for that, because Croft never waited for anything. At the end of class he collected Nita Sowerby on the way out. Abe watched it from twenty feet back with his bag on his shoulder. Croft was talking, bright and reasonable. Nita shook her head, and then she shrugged.

Then she got the green marker out of the side pocket of her bag, because Nita kept the board, and the board was for things people said out loud. She wrote it small, up in the corner beside his row. She wrote it neatly, because she wrote everything neatly. TOP 10 BY NOV 3 Then she put the cap back on the pen and looked at Abe. Her mouth went tight, like she wished somebody else had asked her. Then she went off down the corridor after her friends. Abe walked up and stood in front of the board. DOLAN, A.

· Layer 1 · Body 1 · Mind 1 · Under the ruled line, with the blank where his Talent went, and now with four green words in the corner telling four hundred people exactly what to laugh at and exactly when. Abe stood there and felt sick. He also felt important, and that was a brand new thing to feel inside this building. Four hundred people were going to walk past his name every day for twenty-six days and think about him on purpose. He was going to have to do it now.

He'd put it on a wall where the entire school could read it, and there was no quiet way out of it anymore, and he found that he was glad about that. He looked at the gladness carefully, the way he'd looked at the raindrop, and it was still there when he checked. Then Danforth said, "That was Croft, was it," and Abe nearly went through the ceiling.

"I didn't hear you come up."

"Nobody ever does. I've been told it's unsettling." Danforth was looking at the corner of the board with his hands in his pockets.

"Did you say it, or did he say you said it?"

"I said it."

"Right." Danforth nodded slowly.

"Then that was brave, and I wouldn't have done it." Abe waited for the rest. There was always a rest.

"I want to say something and I'm going to do it badly," Danforth said.

"I have a coach on Sundays. Two till five, at the hall on Fenner Street."

"Danforth."

"My father pays for that room whether I use all of it or not. I only ever use two of the three hours, because after two hours I'm no good to anybody." Abe stopped breathing for a second.

"You're offering me an hour."

"I'm offering you an hour a week for four weeks. Marek is very good and it won't cost you anything, and I've already asked him." Danforth said it fast, like a boy getting a rehearsed thing out before he lost his nerve.

"I'm not doing it to be nice. I'd quite like the top ten to be difficult this year." And Abe's whole body wanted to say no. He could hear exactly how it'd sound in the corridor by Friday. Dolan goes to Danforth's coach now. Dolan gets carried. He was already the charity case in this building, and here was a chance to be the charity case in a much nicer one. Then he made himself stop and think about it properly. Because he'd spent last night finding out that he had all the hours in the world.

He'd spent about eleven minutes of it finding out that he had no idea whether he was doing any of it right. He had his father's paperback, and his father's underlining in the margins of it. Nobody alive had ever stood over Abe Dolan while he trained and told him he was doing it wrong. One person had. Once. Five weeks ago, for about four seconds, about his elbows, and he still thought about it.

"Yes," Abe said. Danforth had a whole second sentence ready and had to put it away again.

"Yes?"

"Yes. Sunday. Two o'clock." Abe's ears had gone hot.

"And I'm going to be embarrassed about it the entire time, so don't be kind to me about it or I won't come back."

"Understood," said Danforth.

"I'm extremely good at not being kind to people."

"That's a lie. You're terrible at it."

"I'm working on it." Abe couldn't tell whether he'd just made a friend or a much better enemy, and he was too tired to work it out standing up. Abe's hands had started shaking. Marek would show him something for an hour, and then Abe would go away and practice it for what felt like a month, and nobody would ever work out why he came back so much better. That was the one thing he could never say out loud.

Danforth was going to get an hour with Marek, take whatever he told him home, think about it for a week, and get one afternoon to try it out. Abe was going to get the same hour. Then he was going to walk out of that hall, find somewhere quiet to stand, and work on it for a month before anybody else had gotten home.

"You do know that top ten is still not possible," Danforth said.

"From Layer 1, with nothing, in twenty-six days."

"I know what I said."

"An hour a week with Marek doesn't change that. I'm not going to pretend it does." Abe noticed something then, and put it away with everything else he was carrying. Danforth had said top ten twice now, but he had never said first. It hadn't occurred to Piers Danforth, at any point in this conversation, that anybody in this school might be coming for him.

"I know that's what it looks like," Abe said. They stood there in the corridor a moment longer with the board on the wall beside them. Two hundred names on it. One of them ruled off at the bottom with a green note in the corner. Danforth looked at him for a long time. Then he did something Abe thought about for a long while afterward. He stopped arguing.

"Sunday, then," he said.

"Bring something to eat. Marek doesn't care if you're tired. He just keeps going until the hour's up."

"Danforth."

"Yes?"

"Why?" Danforth thought about that for long enough that Abe nearly took the question back.

"Because you did sixty push-ups on Monday," he said, "and every single person in that room was waiting for you to stop at twenty. I was counting. I got to about forty and started feeling sick about it." Abe couldn't think of one single thing to say to that.

"Sunday," he managed.

"Sunday," said Danforth. He held the stairwell door open with his foot, and the two of them went down together into the four o'clock noise, with four green words on the wall behind them. He told her that night. Peg was on the late shift. June was at the kitchen table with her homework spread out and the radio on low, halfway through a program about tide tables, and Abe stood in the doorway with a plate in his hand and didn't say anything for a while. Then the words came out on their own.

"It stops," Abe said. June looked up from her homework.

"When I train. Everything stops. The rain and the cars and all of it, and I keep going, and it doesn't use up any time out here at all." Abe stood in that doorway and got ready for the part where his sister was kind to him.

"How long can you keep going?" June said.

"What?"

"How long. Is it minutes. Is it a night." Abe stared at her.

"You're not going to tell me to prove it."

"Why would I do that?" June put her pen down and looked at him as though he had said something stupid, which he had.

"You've never lied to me about anything that mattered in your life." Abe thought about the third of October, four minutes after midnight, and a screen that said his Talent had no measured effect on the world, and telling his sister it was a training one.

"Eleven minutes on the kitchen clock," he said.

"Last night. It was hours in there. My arms went before the clock did." June sat with that for a bit. Then she got up and took the calendar down off the kitchen wall, and Abe watched his sister count the days to the third of November with her finger, twice.

"You told Croft you'd be top ten," she said.

"Yes."

"In front of everybody."

"Yes." June put the calendar back on its nail and straightened it.

"You're going to be insufferable," she said. Neither June nor Peg asked what it took out of him. He was eating like three people and sleeping like a dead man, and both of them blamed the training.

The bread went in the bag first, because Abe had learned the hard way that everything he wanted had to be in his hands before he started. Then the water bottle. Then his father's manual. Then, after thinking about it, his coat, because the yard was cold and the cold would be there for as long as he was. He stood in the middle of the concrete with all of it held against his chest, feeling like a boy about to go camping in his own back yard. Then he got quiet. The rain had stopped days ago.

Tonight the sky just stopped instead, in a different way, and the trash cans and the drain and the broken security light went still and stayed still. Abe put the bag down carefully. It stayed where he put it, because it had come in with him. Then he walked out of the yard. He'd thought about this all through math and thought about it again on the bus, and it'd seemed like a large idea both times. Doing it was much bigger than thinking about it.

Biscuit was frozen halfway through barking at him from behind the Bewleys' gate downstairs. Her front feet were off the ground and her lips were up off her teeth, and not one sound was coming out of her. That dog had barked at Abe every day for as long as he could remember, and this was the first time he'd ever been able to stand still and look at her. Up close, with her whole face doing that, she was the silliest thing he'd ever seen.

"Evening," Abe said. He didn't touch her. He wasn't sure yet what the rules were about anything. The alley behind the block came out on Marley Street, and Marley Street was where the city started. He worked out the important thing in the first thirty feet. Walking didn't break it. He'd been braced for that. But the sidewalk didn't go anywhere when he stepped on it, and a wall didn't go anywhere when he put his hand on it, and neither did the ground. Only things that could move seemed to count.

The raindrop had come apart when he touched it. The door handle had wanted to turn. Those were the things that ended the quiet and started the world up again, and a street was not one of them. A woman stood at the corner with one foot off the curb, her head turned to look at something behind her. Her hair was lifted on one side by a wind that had stopped blowing, and there was a grocery bag on her arm with celery sticking out the top.

There was a taxi halfway through the intersection with its wipers stopped at the top of the windshield. Abe walked all the way around it. Nobody inside moved. The driver had his mouth open and one hand up off the wheel, mid-sentence, mid-argument, mid-something. Then Abe went down to the harbor, because he wanted to see the water. The tide bells were ringing when the world stopped. They were still ringing, in the sense that the hammers were up against the metal and not one sound was coming out of them.

Abe stood underneath and listened to the loudest silence of his life. Past the bells the harbor looked flat, like a photograph, but it was not calm. There were six-foot waves out there, standing up out of the water with their tops curled over, going nowhere at all. A gull hung over the fish dock with its wings out and its head turned sideways, close enough to touch. Abe kept his hands down. A gull was the other kind of thing.

A gull would come apart in his fingers like the raindrop had, and the whole night would start moving again, and he was two miles from home. He walked out into the middle of the Corn Road instead. It was six lanes wide and busy at every hour of the day, and he stood on the white line with buses on both sides of him. The nearest one was full. Every window had a face in it, and every face was doing something, and none of them were doing it anymore. A small boy had his forehead against the glass.

He was staring out at exactly the spot where Abe was standing, and he could not see him. Abe stood in the middle of a road he'd crossed at a run four hundred times. A whole city was holding perfectly still all around him, and he was so happy that it frightened him.

"Hello," he said. Twenty thousand people did not answer. He laughed out loud, and the sound went out into the street and didn't come back, because there was nothing moving for it to come back off. Then he found the shop window, and the night got serious. It was a tool shop on Gill Street. Not Riddell's, a better one, with a lit display and a book propped open in the middle of it. The card under the book said WHETTING AND SETTING, FULL COURSE, TWO HUNDRED MARKS. The book was open at a diagram of a bevel angle.

Abe had walked past that window twice a week for two years and had never been able to do anything about it. He stood there and read it. He read both pages, and then he read them again. Then he worked through the angles in his head until he could see what the drawing was actually telling him. The still held the whole time, because working something out is work, and the Weave had never cared where the work happened. Nobody came. Nobody was ever going to come.

That light would still be on and that page would still be open no matter how long he stood there, and nobody had ever let him take as long as he wanted with anything. He was there an hour. When he finally walked away he could've drawn that diagram from memory, and he hadn't paid anybody two hundred marks, and he hadn't stolen one single thing. He was four streets from home and grinning like an idiot when he found the stairwell. It was set back off Salt Row behind a chain that had come off its post years ago.

It went down to one of the old service levels that ran under half the district. The bottom eight steps were under water. There had been a barrier once and somebody had taken the metal. Abe would've walked past it. He'd walked past it his whole life. He looked down it because he was looking at everything tonight. There was something at the bottom of the stairs. It was standing in the black water with its back to him, about as tall as a car and much longer than one. It had too many joints in its legs.

Its head was down. Whatever it was doing when the world stopped, it had been doing it slowly. Abe's whole body went cold in one go. He didn't run. Running meant moving, and he couldn't make himself do that either, so he stood at the top of the steps and waited for it to turn around. Every rule he had was about raindrops and door handles.

He'd never frozen a living thing before, one that could decide to come up a flight of stairs at him, and the part of him that was screaming didn't care what the rules said about rain. He counted to a hundred. It didn't move. He counted to a hundred again, and it still hadn't moved, and somewhere in that second hundred the fear turned into something much stranger. It was as frozen as the gull. It was as frozen as the boy on the bus.

He could stand at the top of these steps and look at it for as long as he liked, and it would never know he'd been there. So he looked. He counted the plates down its back, and there were nine, and at the shoulder there was a finger's width of gap between each one. He worked out which way the legs folded. He looked at the water and worked out roughly how deep it was, and where the steps ended, and where a person could stand.

He looked at its head for a long time without being able to make sense of it, and decided he did not want to. Then he made himself think the sentence he'd been avoiding for four minutes, which was that this was inside the wall. Things came in. Everybody knew things came in. They came in through the drowned districts and the old levels and the water. The guard went down and dealt with them and it was in the news for a day. His father had been a guard. Nobody knew about this one.

Nobody had reported it, because nobody had been down that stairwell in years. It was standing in the dark four streets from the apartment where his sister was asleep. Abe backed up the steps. He did it very carefully, one step at a time, watching it the whole way, as though it could hear him. It couldn't hear him. It couldn't do anything. He went slowly anyway, because it still felt like the only sensible way to leave. At the top he stood on the sidewalk until he trusted his legs.

Then he walked home through a city that hadn't moved an inch, and he kept his eyes on that stairwell until he turned the corner. He worked in the yard for the rest of the night, because he didn't want to think and working was the only thing that had ever stopped him. The hold on page fourteen is a wall sit without the wall. Your back goes against nothing and your thighs take all of you, and the legs are not the hard part of it. He held it until his legs quit.

Then he ate half the bread and drank most of the water and went at the slow squats until those quit too, and then he sat on the step with his hands over his face until he could start again. The world stayed exactly where it was, and the numbers in the middle of his head went up. Conditioning · Novice Lv 3 (112 / 450) That happened somewhere in the middle. He'd come out of the yard as Lv 2 without ever noticing he'd stopped being Lv 1, which annoyed him, so he watched the bar properly after that.

It went to Lv 4 while he was doing squats. He whooped, out loud, in a stopped city, and nobody woke up. Then it got hard. The edges of things started going soft somewhere after the second time he ate. His hands were shaking on the holds and not in the good way. He came up out of a squat and the yard swung around him like a bus taking a corner, and he had to put a hand on the wall. That was when the next rule arrived, all at once, and very cold. Passing out was not training.

If he dropped here, the still dropped with him. The world would start again. There would be a boy lying on his face on wet concrete behind the trash cans in the middle of the night, with a bag of crusts and his dead father's book. That was survivable. He was in his own yard. Then he thought about the Corn Road, six lanes wide, and how he'd stood on the white line in the middle of it with his arms already tired, and thinking about it made him feel sick.

He sat down on the step and put his head between his knees until the yard stopped moving.

"Right," Abe said.

"New rule." He read the screens before he let it go. Conditioning · Novice Lv 4 (420 / 800) Realm 1 · KINDLED · Body Layer 1 Foundation: 139 / 400 (Body Layer 2) A hundred and thirty-nine. He'd gone into that yard on fourteen. He sat on a cold step with his legs shaking and worked it out twice, because he didn't trust himself to do arithmetic in the state he was in. A hundred and twenty-five in one night. Two more like it would leave him just short, and a bit of a third would finish it.

Four hundred of them made a layer, and a layer was one point of Body. Body was the second column on Nita's board, the one Croft had five of and Abe had one of. Three nights, then. Three nights, and he would be stronger than he was born to be. Actually stronger, not just better at push-ups. Abe let the still go, and the cold came back, and the noise of Calder came back with it: a car somewhere, a gull, the hum off the block. The kitchen clock said ten to six.

He got the door open as quietly as he could and Peg was standing at the stove with her back to him. Abe stopped dead in the doorway with the bag in his hands. Peg worked the school kitchens, and she left the apartment at half past five every morning of her life. She had the radio on while she got ready, always the same station, always the man who took calls about people's gardens. She had opinions about the callers and she said them out loud to the stove.

Abe had known that for four years and hadn't once, in all his careful planning, thought about it. She turned around. She looked at the bag, and the coat, and the state of him. She looked at the fact that he was coming in through his own front door at ten to six in the morning with his hands shaking. Abe had no story ready at all, and he stood there and waited to be asked. Peg did not ask. She turned back to the stove, and got a second plate down out of the cupboard, and put it on the table.

"Sit down," she said.

"You are gray." Abe didn't move.

"You are gray. Sit." So he sat down, and she put food in front of him. He ate all of it, because he was hungrier than he'd ever been in his life. She stood by the counter with her arms folded and watched him do it, all the way to the last mouthful. On the radio a man wanted to know whether to cut his roses back now or leave them until spring.

"Now," Peg said to the radio, and did not look away from Abe. Abe wanted to tell her about the bells with no sound in them, and the boy on the bus, and standing in the middle of the Corn Road. He wanted it so badly his throat hurt. He put his fork down and told her the only part that mattered.

"There's something living down the old service stairs off Salt Row," he said.

"The ones behind the chain. It's big." Peg went completely still.

"How big."

"Bigger than this kitchen." She put her cup down on the counter without looking at where she was putting it.

"How do you know that, Abe." He did not have one honest answer to it. He couldn't tell her about a stopped rainstorm. He couldn't tell her that he'd walked out to the harbor in the middle of the night and stood under the bells, and that a whole city had held its breath for him while he counted the plates down its back.

"I was out early," he said.

"I looked down the steps." Peg looked at him for a long moment. Then she let it go and took his plate to the sink. Abe had watched her do that before. She'd done it with his mother, near the end, and she'd done it standing in the doorway the night somebody came about his father. Then she went into the hall and got the phone off the hook. She was already dialing before Abe had finished being surprised. She gave the street name twice. She said no, she hadn't seen it herself.

She said no, she couldn't tell them what it was, and she kept her eyes on the far wall while she said it. Then there was a long pause, and Peg's voice changed.

"I know it is tide season," she said.

"I know exactly where they all are." She listened for a while with her hand flat on the wall.

"Then when the season is over," she said.

"Yes. Thank you." She put the phone back and came and stood in the kitchen doorway with her arms folded.

"Every guard in this city is on the wall until November," she said.

"That is where they are supposed to be, and that is where they are going to stay."

"They will send somebody when they send somebody," she said.

"You do not go near it."

"No."

"Abe."

"I won't go near it," Abe said. It was the first lie he had ever told his aunt.