Chương 41: Chapter 40: The Far End

Abe walked home the long way and ran it through the still, in plain words, because that was the habit now whenever the problem was money or food or knowledge, and this was knowledge. He could stop the world in any library in Calder and read the whole building in an afternoon. He could stand in the reference room at the town hall for fifty hours and come out knowing everything anybody had ever written down in this city. He tested it the way he tested everything now. Which building. Which shelf.

How many hours, and whether he'd have to get in at night, and how, and what it cost him if a caretaker came around a corner while he was standing in a stopped room with his hand on a door. All of that was answerable. He had an answer for every part of it. And it would move him seven points a night. Nobody would ever tell him if he was doing it wrong. The answer was no. He turned it over twice, looking for the crack in it, and there wasn't one, and he didn't enjoy it.

He met Ada Bewley on the second-floor landing, coming the other way with a bag from the shop on her arm. They had been passing each other on those stairs since they were about seven, and in all that time they had said maybe forty words to each other.

"Mom's still going on about the dog," she said.

"Six weeks. She's got a theory now, and there's a man at the bus stop who agrees with her."

"Right," said Abe.

"Never give my mother a man at a bus stop." She got her key out and then stopped with it in the lock, because he hadn't moved off the landing.

"What?"

"Nothing." Abe found his own key so his hands had something to do.

"Why holds?" Ada looked at him like the question had come out of the wall.

"Because I can do it in my bedroom," she said.

"That's the reason. Everything else on that card needs a partner or a floor."

"That's it?"

"I've called Sefton out twice on the mats. He's won twice." She shifted the bag onto her other arm.

"He's going to stop winning." Then she let herself in and the door shut behind her, and Abe stood on the landing until the timer took the light out. Friday after school he went to the hall with the light already gone, because the Croft form was all feet, and the hall had the one thing his yard had never had: forty feet of floor in a straight line. Ada Bewley was already in it.

She was down at the far end under the one working light bank, in her school shirt with the sleeves pushed up, holding a stance he didn't know. She'd plainly been there a while, and she'd plainly been there before, many times, and Abe stopped in the doorway like a boy who has walked into the wrong house. The hall was cold and about half lit, because Vane only ever put the far bank on.

Wall bars down one side, a stack of mats against the other, and between them forty feet of floor with nothing standing on it anywhere. He'd been in that room a hundred times for lessons and never seen it empty. It turned out it wasn't going to be empty tonight either.

"Vane lets me have it till six," she said, not stopping.

"Since September."

"How much does that cost?"

"Not money." She came up out of the stance, took a breath, and went back down into it.

"And it's not mine to hand out. So there's one rule if you're stopping. You don't help me, and I don't ask you anything. Not one question. That's it."

"I've got marks. I could pay you for the half you're not using."

"No," said Ada, and that was the end of the discussion about money in that room, forever. Abe stood in the doorway working out whether he'd been let in or told to go.

"Is that a yes?"

"It's a floor," said Ada.

"There's forty feet of it and I'm using about six." So Abe took the far half of the floor, and they worked, hours against hours, on opposite ends of forty feet, and the only sounds were feet and breathing. It was the first training of his life done next to somebody his own size, and he could not stop the world with her in it, and it turned out that mattered less than he would ever have guessed. He tried it once. He wasn't trying to cheat, or not mostly.

He was fifteen minutes into the form with his feet arguing at him, and the old habit came up out of him like a hiccup, and he had his eyes half shut and his weight going soft before he'd decided anything. Find this and other great novels on the author's preferred platform. Support original creators! He got a little way in and heard her breathe out at the end of a hold, and the quiet went straight back out of him. He stood there with the world still running and found he wasn't sorry about it.

Nothing in a stopped yard was ever watching. Two months of that had made him fast and it had also made him sloppy, because there was never anybody in there to see the eighth rep go soft. Ada could see him. She wasn't looking, and she'd said out loud that she wasn't going to ask him one thing, and it made no difference at all. He ran the fourth set as clean as the first because there was a person forty feet away who'd have known. She trained like nobody he'd watched.

She'd set herself some count of a hold and work it with her whole face gone somewhere else. Then she'd stop dead, shake it out, and move to the next thing. She had a notebook on the floor by the wall bars with a pencil pushed through the spiral. Between sets she went to it and wrote something and came back, and she never once looked at it while she was working. Abe had spent two months writing nothing down, because remembering was the one thing a stopped yard had always done for free.

Once she stopped a set while her legs were still shaking, when anybody could see she had more in her.

"Why'd you stop?" he said, because asking her things wasn't against the rules.

"It stopped being hard." Ada wiped her hands on her skirt.

"So then it's just standing there. I don't have spare evenings." She said it like a bus timetable and went back to work, and had no idea she had said anything at all. Abe stood on his own end of the hall with that going off in him like a slow firework. He'd been running dead sets for two months. Two thousand repetitions of things that had stopped being hard in October, because he had a thousand hours and no reason to spend them well. Nobody had ever told him to spend them well.

Tench had told him to spend them and Croft had told him to spend them on feet, but the girl at the other end of that hall was the first person he had ever watched decide, set by set, what was worth doing. He dropped every drill he'd planned. He set his feet at the end of the forty feet and ran the first form whole, at speed, end to end, the entire line of it, which no yard the size of two parking spaces was ever going to let him do. It was hard.

It was first-week hard, feet and lungs and thought all at once, and he got it wrong four times in the first run and knew exactly where. He turned at the wall and ran it back. Twice down the hall and he was blowing. Four times down and his legs had opinions about it. He'd forgotten what it was like for something to be hard the whole way through. He stood at the wall end with his hands on his knees and grinned at the floorboards like an idiot. Her back foot slid on the worn boards, down at her end.

He saw the fix the way you see a dropped plate falling.

"Outside edge," he said.

"Your back foot, put the weight on the..." The hall went very quiet. Ada came up out of the hold and looked at him down the length of the floor. He knew what he'd done before he got to the end of the sentence. That was the one rule she'd given him, he'd had it about an hour, and he'd broken it because he was good at something. She didn't say anything. She stood at her end with her hands down and waited for him to work out what he'd done, which took no time at all.

"Sorry," Abe said.

"It won't happen again."

"New price," she said.

"You face that wall." She pointed at it. He turned and faced it, and behind him he heard her go back down into the hold. It was a brick wall with a fire door in it and a strip of green paint somebody had started and given up on. He faced that wall for the rest of the evening and got more done off it than the yard had given him all month. He learned the sound of her sets without meaning to. Down for a long time, then one hard breath out, then a stretch of nothing, then down again.

By six he could have told anybody when she was about to move without turning around, and he was still facing a brick wall while he did it. Somewhere in the last hour, on a run where his feet finally beat the count the whole way down, the screen lit in the middle of his head. Set Stance · Apprentice Lv 7 (0 / 9, 800) Seven. His father's skill, off his father's folded page, moving for the first time in five weeks, in the first room he'd ever shared.

He got his back against the wall bars with his shirt stuck to him, and read it four times over. Five weeks. A hundred hours of a stopped yard and nothing. Then two hours in a cold hall with somebody else's breathing in it. He wanted to tell somebody about it. There was one other person in the building and she had made him promise not to talk to her. He must have made a noise about it, because Ada looked over from her end while she was getting her coat.

"That's a real one," she said.

"The board can't see that." Ada got her coat on over her school shirt and killed the light bank at the door, which she plainly did every night of her life.

"Same time Monday," she said.

"The wall's still yours." Abe said Monday. It came out sounding more pleased than he'd meant it to. They walked back to the block not quite together, her half a stair ahead the whole way. She peeled off at the second floor without saying anything, and her door shut. Abe went up two more flights with his head somewhere else entirely. The kitchen smelled like Friday. Friday was Peg using up the week's ends of things in one pan.

"The stalls went up on the Corn Road today," June said, before he had his coat off.

"The whole top end. Kerry saw them putting the lights on."

"We are not buying anything on the first day," said Peg, to the pan.

"First day is tourist prices."

"I'm not buying. I'm looking. Abe's coming." Peg had a view about the stalls that she'd plainly been saving up. Somebody had moved the fish end down by the church, on a slope, and she'd said in September it would happen.

"Who'd you say it to?" said June.

"Marion."

"So nobody."

"I said it," said Peg.

"I've got a shift." Riddell had taken somebody on for the weekends, the shop's one busy season, and Saturday was going to be shoulder to shoulder in there.

"After, though." June accepted after. Then she said the board read the whole year again on the fifth of January, twenty-four days off, and she didn't have to check that before saying it. Peg put a plate in front of him that could have fed the wall guard, and Abe ate all of it and let the kitchen happen around him, and underneath the noise he laid the week out straight, because it had finally come straight. The wall wasn't hours.

He had more hours than anybody alive, and he'd spent two months finding out exactly what they couldn't buy. What he was short of was a person who'd been further, and people like that weren't on shelves and weren't for sale in Calder. They were in families. Every one of them was in a family. He had Tench's one thing to try, and he was going to try it on Saturday whether Croft liked it or not.

And under that, with a plate in front of him and June arguing about tourist prices, Abe finished the thought he'd been walking around all week. Method lived in families. If he wanted any, he was going to have to get inside one.