Chương 51: Nine Days

He got about two streets before he stopped. He was carrying nine days of food back down a road that would take him another day to walk. At the end of it was a yard six feet wide with a drain in it. He was going to train there instead of here. Abe stood in a stopped street in Prescot and thought about that for a while. There was nothing in Calder he needed. The bar was a bar. His sword was on his back.

What his yard had that this city did not was a wall he already knew the height of, and a drain, and the fact that it was his. Prescot had a covered market with forty feet of clean floor in it. He found a school off the north side of the market with its gates shut and its yard empty and lines painted on the ground. The fire escape on the sports hall stood a hand's width open, with the closer at the top hanging off its bracket. Somebody had been meaning to fix that since before the break.

Inside was a floor better than anything in Calder, and racks of equipment along the wall. Nobody was going to want any of it until the fourth of January. Abe put the bag down at one end of it and did not go home. The first thing he did was eat until he could not. The second thing took him about forty minutes on a stranger's floor with a bar he had not earned, and it was thirty two points, and it came in the middle of a set. Body 8 reached.

Body 8 Realm 1 · KINDLED · Body 8 Foundation: 0 / 4, 900 (Body 9) He sat on the floor with his back against the rack and let it come down through him, and it went on a long time. Nothing had ever felt like that except the last time it happened. Then he looked at the next bar along. Four thousand nine hundred. More than twelve times the first one he had ever crossed. He had nine days of food. Everybody else got one good day out of a day, and then their body made them stop and sleep it off.

He got one, and then he sat down for twenty minutes, and got another one, and went again, for as long as the food held out. Then he found the light switches. They did nothing, because electricity is a thing that moves. So he trained in what came through the high windows off a gray nine o'clock sky. It never got brighter and it never got dark, and after two days he stopped noticing. He had forty feet of sprung floor. He had never had forty feet of anything. The Croft form goes down a line.

Every time he had ever run it he had run it in six feet of yard and turned around. He ran it end to end in that hall and it was a different thing entirely. So he ran it again. He was still running it on the second day. Realm 1 · KINDLED · Body 8 Foundation: 164 / 4, 900 (Body 9) The rack along the wall had bars on it going up in tens, which is a thing you only have if a school can afford to buy weight it does not need yet. He worked up it one bar at a time. Then he got to one that would not leave the floor.

He tried it eleven times. On the eleventh his hands came open on their own and the bar went down and he sat next to it and looked at it for a while. Then he did the sit until his arms came back, and got up, and tried it again. That went on for what felt like a day and a half. Nothing in it looked like getting better. He did the same lift badly, and rested, and did it badly again, and the bar stayed where it was. The only thing that changed was that somewhere around the fortieth try he stopped being angry about it.

Then, on a try that felt like every other try, it came up. It came up slow and it came up ugly and his back was in the wrong shape for most of it. He stood there holding a stranger's weight over a stranger's floor with his arms going, and he did not put it down for a long time. When he did he sat against the rack and laughed at the ceiling until it stopped being funny. The sit put his arms back. He went again.

Realm 1 · KINDLED · Body 8 Foundation: 407 / 4, 900 (Body 9) Two hundred and forty three points for a day and a half of failing at one lift. He looked at that number and understood something he had been getting wrong since October. The easy sets had never paid him anything at all. The day and a half of not being able to do it was the part he had been paid for.

Then he drilled the opener in front of a wall of mirrors, which he had also never had, and found out he had been going easy on the shoulder for two months without knowing it and calling that the exercise. Fixing it took most of a day and it was the least fun day of the nine. When he had it right the opener came out shorter, and faster, and he could run it twenty times without the shoulder telling him about it afterward. When his legs would not take another set he went out and ran the city instead.

Prescot has a ring road inside the wall too. There was nobody on it. He ran it until he had to walk, and walked until he could run, and did that until he lost count of the laps. If you spot this tale on Amazon, know that it has been stolen. Report the violation. Running · Novice Lv 6 (0 / 1800) The bus at the bottom of the hill had a woman in the window with her hand up to somebody. He went past her twenty or thirty times. By the end of it he knew the shape of her fingers.

Somewhere around the fourth day he noticed the other thing. He had been getting quiet four and five times a day since Monday, because getting quiet was how he rested now. Somewhere in there it had stopped being an effort, and he could not have said which time. He timed it on the next morning, out of curiosity. About forty seconds. Maybe a shade under. Fifty had been the number since October. He had stopped thinking of it as a number at all and started thinking of it as simply how long it takes.

Abe sat on a stranger's floor with his back against the rack and thought about a boy in a school corridor in October with four minutes between lessons, working out whether four minutes was enough. Ten seconds. It was not nothing. On about the fifth day he caught himself talking. Not to anybody. Out loud, in an empty hall, counting a set and then saying something about it afterward, as if somebody else were in the room. He stopped and listened to how quiet it was. There is no sound at all in a still.

A quiet room hums, but this does not. Abe had known that for three months and it had never once mattered, because he had never been in one longer than a night. He started leaving the roll-up door of the hall open so he could see the street. By the sixth day he had names for four of them. The woman on the bus with her hand up was Carol. The man outside the bakery with his collar turned wrong was Mr. Pryce, and he had a face like somebody Abe half remembered.

There was a boy about June's age on a bike at the corner, standing on the pedals, going nowhere. Abe did not name the boy on the bike. He went past all of them on his laps and did not slow down. The talking had gotten worse by then, and it had stopped being counting. On the seventh day he heard himself ask Mr. Pryce whether the bakery was any good, going past at a run, and he did not find it funny. He had wanted an answer. That was the part that got him.

Then he slowed down, and stopped, and stood in front of Carol on the bus with his hands in his pockets. He looked at her hand for a while. He looked at the ring on it and the pen in her other one. She had been halfway through saying something and halfway through laughing at it.

"Long day," Abe said. The still went out from under him. The world came on all at once. The bus was running. The bus door was open and there was a man behind him on the sidewalk with a dog. And Carol was looking at a boy standing eighteen inches from her window in the sleet with his hands in his pockets. She said something. The part he got was you okay, and he did not get any of the rest. He went. He got around the corner and down a service road and in behind a row of trash cans.

He put his back against the wall and told himself she had not seen his face, and knew that she had. Then he tried to get quiet, and could not, and that was the worst part of the nine days by a distance. Four count. No chasing. No wanting it. His heart went like something trying to get out. Every time he nearly had it he heard the dog again. It took him a long time. He never did work out how long, because the only clock he had was outside, and outside was running.

When it finally went, the service road stopped with a chip bag in the air off the top of the trash cans, and Abe sat down on the ground in the middle of it and put his head on his knees. The Weave had never stopped him because a thing was dangerous. It had held in October in a wet yard, and in the drain, and in a stranger's stockroom with a man's shoulder coming through a curtain. It had refused him once before that, in a hall on Fenner Street, for the same reason it had just refused him now.

A person, awake, close enough to see him. Two words to a woman on a bus was not training. That had been the whole rule since the third of October, but he had gone seven days in a city with nobody in it and started forgetting it. Somewhere in there the food started running low again, and he did the arithmetic, and it came out at two more days. So he trained for two more days. Realm 1 · KINDLED · Body 8 Foundation: 641 / 4, 900 (Body 9) Eight hundred and fifty.

He did the last set of the nine days at the end of a stranger's hall, under a window that had been the same brightness since Monday morning. His arms went twice before he got the bar up and he did it anyway. Realm 1 · KINDLED · Body 8 Foundation: 850 / 4, 900 (Body 9) In October he had crossed four hundred in a wet yard at ten at night and sat down on the concrete and thought his whole life had turned over. He had put close to fifteen hundred into it since Monday, and outside that window it was still Monday.

Abe got up off the floor of a stranger's sports hall and went outside to the wall at the end of the school yard, because he wanted to know. It was seven feet of brick, near enough the same as the one at home. Kids had been getting over that one since before he was born. He had tried it about a hundred times between nine and thirteen and the best he'd ever managed was four fingers on the gutter, hanging there like a coat on a hook.

In October he had barely tried at all and gone over it anyway, like his body already knew something he didn't. He backed up three steps and went at it. He was over before he finished deciding to jump, and he landed on the far side and had to put a hand down, and he got back over and did it again. Then he brought up the other screen. The one the school pad reads. The one that puts a number in a corridor. DOLAN, A. · Layer 13 · Body 8 · Mind 5 Thirteen.

Ivy Halloran got to twelve, working in an office, and nobody in Calder had touched it since before he was born. Danforth had told him that on a stairwell landing in October, when Abe was on ones. It had taken her thirteen years. Abe had found that part out later, and not from Danforth. Abe stood in a school yard in Prescot and read the row twice. Nobody in that city could have moved if he shouted. The sleet over the roofs hung exactly where it had hung when he came in through the gate.

Peg was a day's walk south with the kettle in her hand. June was in the room next to hers with a page half turned. Nine days of it for him. Nobody else alive had gotten a single hour. He went back inside and looked in the bag, because he already knew and wanted to be wrong. Two jars, a handful of bars, and the box of cereal with the cartoon on it that he had not opened and was not going to. Two days. Maybe three if he was careful, and he had not been careful about anything since Monday.

Nine days of training had cost him a warehouse. The next nine would cost him another one. So would the nine after that. He could have bought it. He made himself go through that one properly before he let himself past it. Gault paid him four hundred marks a month, on the first, into Peg's name. June's doses took two hundred and twenty of that the day it landed.

The rest went in the tin over the kettle, for the cure, and in October he had promised himself he would never take a mark of it back out for anything of his own. Nine days of eating the way he had just eaten came to most of a shelf. Buying that every nine days would empty the tin instead of filling it. So it was his sister's cure or it was somebody's warehouse. Those were the two.

He was going to keep doing this, which meant he was going to keep stealing, and he had known both of those things before he sat down to work any of it out. He stood in a stranger's hall and waited to feel worse about that than he did. Nine days had cost him about three minutes of the world, not counting whatever the woman on the bus had cost him, because that one he had never managed to time.

The rest of the bill he could name: the ninety seconds in the Prescot warehouse on Monday, and the fifty on that same floor afterward. Out there it was the twenty-ninth of December. The pad in the school corridor was going to read him on the fifth of January, which was seven days away, and seven days away is not a distance when the sun does not move. He was not going to get nine days before the board. He was going to do this again as soon as he could carry the food for it.

He had two ways to get it and he did not like either one. The light through the high window was the same light it had been on Monday morning. He kept hold of the still and it stayed that way. Then he went looking for a third.