Chương 6: The Settle

On Friday morning Abe went to do up his shoes. He got down onto one knee without thinking about it, and the thought caught up with him a moment later. He stayed down there on the kitchen floor with his hands on his laces. On Wednesday that would have hurt. It was a small thing. It was such a small thing that he couldn't have explained it to anybody without sounding insane. Two days ago his legs had complained about stairs.

This morning they'd put him down on one knee and got him back up again, and they'd said nothing about it. He read the screens with his mouth full of toast. Realm 1 · KINDLED · Body Layer 1 Foundation: 264 / 400 (Body Layer 2) Conditioning · Novice Lv 5 (620 / 1250) Two hundred and sixty-four. One more night, and most of another, and the number stopped being a number and turned into a point of Body.

"You're doing the face again," June said.

"I'm eating toast."

"You're eating toast with a face on." She put her bag over her shoulder.

"It's a better face than last week's, so I'll allow it." The board in the corridor said what it had said all week. DOLAN, A. · Layer 1 · Body 1 · Mind 1 · Blank at the end. Ruled line above it. TOP 10 BY NOV 3 in green in the corner, going slightly furry at the edges, because that's what marker does. Twenty-four days. Abe read it on the way past and didn't slow down, and something in his chest went tight and hot and pleased, which was new.

Cultivation class was the last two hours of the day, and the first hour of it was body work. Abe was nobody in it. Tench ran them through carries and holds and sprints up the gym's one flight of stairs, and Abe finished somewhere in the middle of the room, and he was delighted about it, because in September he'd finished last at everything. Croft did the whole hour like a man out for a walk.

Near the end of it he carried two of the sand bags up the stairs, one in each hand, because Ellis Naylor bet him a bus fare he couldn't. He came back down not breathing hard and collected the money. Five points of Body. Every one of them bought and paid for, in a hall, three evenings a week, for years. Then Mr. Tench put a stopwatch down on the bench and didn't bother with the whistle.

"Sit down. All of you. Nobody is touching a sword today." He waited until two hundred people were on the floor.

"The settle," said Tench. The groan that went up was the loudest noise Abe had heard in that room all term. Tench did this to them once a month, on no schedule anybody had ever been able to work out, and everybody hated it and nobody was allowed to say so. Everybody in Calder learned the settle at about eleven years old and everybody in Calder skipped it for the rest of their lives. It was the first page of every method ever printed.

Sit down, close your eyes, get your attention into one place, and hold it there without letting it wobble. It's the most boring thing a human being can do, and it's very nearly impossible. There was a skill at the end of it, called Meditation, and the school had been trying to hand it to them since they were eleven. Nobody Abe knew had it. To get it you had to sit there and actually do it, and nobody could stand to.

"Eyes shut. I want one minute," Tench said.

"One, not two." He picked a spot on the far wall to look at.

"If your attention goes, put your hand up and stop wasting your own afternoon." He picked up the stopwatch.

"Danforth is going to do it. Everybody else is going to find out something about themselves." Abe closed his eyes. He was there in about fifty seconds. That was faster than Tuesday. Getting quiet was a place Abe went four or five times a night, every night, because it was the only way into the still and there was no other route in. Breathing on a four count, and no chasing, and no wanting it. He barely had to think about any of it anymore.

Then he was there, at the place where the rain stops, and the rain didn't stop. Of course it didn't. There were two hundred people in that room, and the still had never opened for him with anybody else in the world awake beside him. So Abe sat at the door of his own power with two hundred people breathing around him, and waited, and he was extremely good at waiting there. Hands started going up around him inside forty seconds. Ellis Naylor lasted about eleven and said so out loud.

Nell Mott got to thirty and made a small frustrated noise. Amrit laughed and about nine people came apart at once. At a minute Tench said, "Right," and didn't stop the watch. Abe didn't hear him. He was somewhere with his breathing on a four count, and words were happening a long way outside that, and none of them had anything to do with him. At two minutes there were eleven hands still down. At three there were four, and one of them was Danforth.

Croft's hand had gone up at ninety seconds, with a face like a slammed door. Croft had five points of Body and one point of Mind, same as the board said. At four minutes Danforth put his hand up. He did it slowly and he looked annoyed about it, which for Danforth was practically shouting. At four minutes there was one. Enjoying the story? Show your support by reading it on the official site. Tench let it run. Abe came out of it at nine minutes and forty seconds, because his foot went to sleep.

A screen was waiting for him behind his eyelids. Meditation · Novice Lv 1 (0 / 50) He looked at it and felt almost nothing. It was on the first page of his father's book and on the first page of the one Tench made them buy. Seven years the school had been making them sit, and every one of them who had Awakened already could have had this any evening they liked. Nobody had ever wanted it. He opened his eyes. Two hundred people were looking at him. Nobody was talking. Nita Sowerby had both hands over her mouth.

"Oh," said Abe.

"Sir, is he asleep?" said Ellis Naylor, to the whole room, and about thirty people laughed, because thirty people badly wanted something to do. Tench clicked the stopwatch. Croft was sitting eight feet away with his arms around his knees. His face had gone flat and careful, and it wasn't a cruel face, but it wasn't a friendly one either. It was the face of a boy working something out and not liking where it went. There is no method for the settle, and no coach who can hand it to you.

You either sit down and do it ten thousand times or you don't. Croft had a hall three evenings a week and a family that had been at this for sixty years, and he'd lasted ninety seconds. Abe sat on mat four with his foot buzzing and understood, all at once and much too late, that he'd just shown two hundred people the one thing about himself he couldn't explain. He took that home with him and could not put it down.

Eight days ago he'd sat on this same floor and done sixty push-ups, and two hundred people had watched nothing happen. Today he sat on it with his eyes shut and did nothing whatsoever, and not one of them made a sound. Somewhere over by the racks somebody said, "What?" in a small voice, to nobody in particular. Tench put the stopwatch down on the bench. Then he asked Abe a question, quietly, without turning around.

"Where did you learn to do that?" Abe opened his mouth and discovered there was no answer in it. Not a true one, and not a lie that would come out sounding like a place.

"I just practice it a lot," he said.

"Hm," said Tench. Then he took a little black notebook out of his back pocket. Nobody in that room had ever seen him open it. He clicked his pen and wrote one line in it. He wrote it with his eyes on the page. He said nothing to Abe at all, then or for the rest of the lesson. When the bell went he was over at the sword racks with his back turned. Nita Sowerby caught him at the door on the way out. She had her marker in her hand, because Nita always had her marker in her hand.

She was looking at him like somebody who has checked the same answer twice and still doesn't believe it.

"Nine minutes and forty seconds."

"Was it?"

"Don't do that. Piers Danforth has a Mind of four, and he got to four minutes, and he was furious about it." Nita's marker was going tap tap tap against her leg.

"You're on ones, Abe."

"I know what I'm on." She looked at him a second longer. Then she looked down at the marker in her hand, and Abe understood something that had never occurred to him before. There was nothing for her to write. The board had a column for your layer, and one for Body, and one for Mind, and one for what your Talent did. It didn't have a column for whatever had just happened on mat four.

"It's a stupid board," Nita said, to nobody in particular, and went off down the corridor after her friends. Abe was no good for the rest of the day. He sat through his last lesson and heard none of it. He got on the bus and got off two stops early without deciding to. He walked the rest of the way with his bag banging against his leg. By the time he got to the apartment the idea had arrived, and it wouldn't go away.

It came to him on Saturday morning, sitting on the edge of his bed with one sock on, and he said a word out loud that Peg would have hit him for. The still did not use up one minute out here. He had known that since the kitchen clock said 11: 31. He had thought about it a dozen times and never once followed it all the way to the end. Here was the end of it. The still cost him no real time at all, so there had never been any reason to save it for the night. Night was just when he happened to be alone.

He could do it in the four minutes between lessons. He could do it in the twenty minutes of a lunch break, or standing at the back of the bus, or in the yard behind Riddell's between loads. He could do it in any quiet minute of his life where nobody happened to be looking at him. He had no idea how much that came to. He was going to find out. He went out to the yard on Saturday night to think about it, and stayed out there until the other thing happened.

He crossed four hundred at about ten o'clock, halfway through the second hold on page fourteen. Nothing happened. Abe had known nothing would happen. Every book on that library shelf said the same thing about it, and his father's said it on page three in print small enough to miss. The bar fills and then it sits there. A layer is something you have to sit down and let settle into you, and if you get up and walk about instead it'll wait for you, politely, for as long as you like.

Four hundred out of four hundred, and a boy standing in a yard in the dark. So Abe sat down cross-legged on the wet concrete and settled. He was extremely good at that now. Two hundred people had watched him be good at it that afternoon. It took about twenty minutes and it was the best twenty minutes of his life. It came downward. Nobody had told him that, and he was annoyed about it afterward, because it seemed like the sort of thing that ought to be in a book.

Something warm and very heavy started up behind his ribs and went down. Into his stomach, then his hips, then all the way down both legs, slow as syrup. Then out along his arms and into his hands. It kept going long after he was sure it must've finished. It didn't hurt and there was nothing electric about it. It was more like being filled up, starting from the bottom, the same as a jug fills. Abe sat in a wet yard with his eyes shut and his mouth slightly open, and let his whole body get heavier.

When it stopped, he could feel where it had gone. Not in any way he could've pointed at. He simply knew that there was more of him than there had been an hour ago, and that the more of him went all the way down to the bottom. Body Layer 2 reached. Body 2 Realm 1 · KINDLED · Body Layer 2 Foundation: 0 / 900 (Body Layer 3) Abe stayed on the concrete and looked at that until he believed it. Then he got up, because he wanted to know what a whole point of Body actually felt like.

The yard wall was seven feet of brick with a gutter running along the top. Kids from the block had been getting over that wall since before Abe was born. He'd tried it about a hundred times between the ages of nine and thirteen. The best he'd ever managed was to get four fingers on the gutter and hang there like a coat on a hook. He backed up three steps and went at it. He was over before he'd finished deciding to jump.

Abe landed in the alley on the other side, in the wet and the dark, about a foot from a stack of pallets he had not known was there. He stood completely still with his hands out from his sides. He had not tried hard. He'd gone at that wall like somebody who already knows he can't get over it, with about a quarter of himself, but his body had put him on the other side anyway. The strongest man who ever lived was on a one.

Layer 1 was where everybody started, the ones who had trained every day of their lives and the ones who had never trained at all, because the Weave did not care what you had done before it woke you up. Abe was not in that column anymore. He stood in a wet alley at two o'clock in the morning and thought about Miles Croft, who had five. Abe had watched that boy move around a gym for nine weeks and had never understood what he was looking at.

He understood it now, standing on the wrong side of a wall he couldn't get over on Tuesday, and it was the single most frightening thing he'd learned all year. Then he climbed back into his own yard, one try and no thinking about it, and sat down on the step and laughed until he had to put his sleeve in his mouth. He stopped laughing about a minute later.

Four streets from where he was sitting there was a chain off its post and eight flooded steps, and something at the bottom of them that had been standing in the dark since Wednesday. Nobody had come. Peg had asked on Thursday morning and nobody had come. Abe sat on the step in the cold and thought about how much stronger he was tonight than he'd been yesterday, and about how far that was from being enough. On Monday morning Abe went to school with his father's manual in his bag.

He didn't hear one word anybody said to him before eleven o'clock. The free period was the one after break. He had it in the library, in theory. In practice nobody checked. The west stairwell between the second and third floors was the deadest place in the building. It only went up to the music rooms, and nobody had music on a Monday. Abe went up to the half landing and sat down on the third step from the top with his bag between his feet. Forty minutes until Biology. He could hear the building all around him.

A door banging somewhere below. A cart. Somebody's voice went up at the end of a sentence, two floors down and a long way away. If somebody came up those stairs and found a boy sitting on the floor with his eyes shut, there would be no explaining it, and Abe would never be able to sit in this stairwell again. Getting caught was not what frightened him, because he'd been in trouble before and it had always been survivable. Losing the stairwell was.

This was the only dead corner in a building with four hundred people in it, and the next twenty-one days depended on it staying dead. Somewhere above him, up by the music rooms, a door opened and a pair of feet started coming down. Abe closed his eyes and started counting anyway.