Chương 5: The Whole Night

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 on the ground floor. 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. 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. There was a taxi halfway through the junction. Its wipers had stopped at the top of the windshield. Abe walked all the way around the taxi. Nobody in it 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. 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. Support creative writers by reading their stories on Royal Road, not stolen versions. 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 with his hands shaking.

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. 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 he'd stood on the white line in the middle of it with his arms already tired. 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 six 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." 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.