Chương 66: The Listing

June was reading his phone when he came into the kitchen, which was his own fault for leaving it on the table.

"It's up," she said.

"It's not up until nine."

"It went up at seven ten." She did not give the phone back.

"There are four hundred and something comments on the first one already and I've read most of them, and I'm going to save you some time. Nobody has got it."

"June."

"Sit down and eat something, you're gray." He sat down. Peg had gone at six and there was a plate under a bowl for him, and June turned the phone around on the table and pushed it across to him with one finger.

"The funny one first," she said. The funny one was a man who had done a whole page of arithmetic proving that the Calder board was broken, and two thousand people had agreed with him. One woman underneath him used the word prodigy and asked whether he had considered it, and got told to grow up. Abe laughed with his mouth full, which he regretted.

"Right," June said.

"Now the other one." The other one was three lines long and it had eleven replies and it was already six screens down. Compare the Prescot assessment photo (6 Dec) with the school clip from 3 Nov. Same boy. Five weeks. Look at his face and then tell me the timeline is right. Abe read it twice and put the phone face down and got on with his breakfast. June let him get about four mouthfuls.

"That one's not about the stopping," she said.

"I know what it's about."

"So look at it."

"I've looked at it."

"You've read it." She put her hand flat on the back of the phone, still face down where he had left it.

"There's a picture attached and you have not looked at the picture." Abe ate the rest of his breakfast.

"Right," June said, and took the phone off the table and put it in her blazer pocket, and did not push it any further. Then she got her bag and went, and she was gone before he worked out that she had not asked him a single question. The listing was on every phone in the building by homeroom and in the hands of about nine people who had no business having their phones out. The circuit put a new sheet up every few weeks and it was sorted the way the trade sorted everything.

Realm at the top, because realm was what those rooms bought. Then depth inside the realm, then the city, so that anybody with money could find you in four seconds. Ellis Naylor read the whole top of it out loud on the stairs in a voice like a man announcing a boxer, starting with the header, which is the only part nobody argues about. NORTHERN CIRCUIT · PROSPECT LISTING · 15 JANUARY REALM 2 · TEMPERED · 1 · MARCHBANK, E. · Ketton · Layer 17 REALM 2 · TEMPERED · 2 · HOYLE, D.

· Prescot · Layer 16 Then eleven more names Abe did not know, and then the line where the sheet changed color, and then the whole of Realm 1 underneath it. REALM 1 · KINDLED · 1 · DOLAN, A. · Calder · Layer 20 REALM 1 · KINDLED · 2 · CARLYON, J. · Prescot · Layer 12 Naylor stopped announcing when he got to the gap.

"Sorry," he said, in his normal voice.

"That's, what. Eight?"

"Eight," said Abe.

"Eight whole layers between you and the second one."

"I can add up, Ellis."

"I'm not needling you, I'm saying it out loud because nobody else is going to." Naylor scrolled down with his thumb.

"Danforth's fourth in the ones. That's up six." Danforth was four steps up, with his bag on one shoulder, and had been the whole time.

"Fourth in the ones," Naylor said again, to him this time.

"I'll take it."

"Up six, though." This content has been misappropriated from Royal Road; report any instances of this story if found elsewhere.

"I'll take it," Danforth said, and he was pleasant about it, and he went on up the stairs. Nobody followed him. Everybody went back to the gap. Lena Ward had who said it first, second and third, in that order, with the times, and by eleven o'clock nine people had asked her. Then Ottley shouted Naylor's name from the bottom of the stairs and he was gone. Abe stood there and read the two lines above his own again. A boy from Ketton had gone through the door in August. Five months later the sheet gave him a seventeen.

That seventeen sat above Abe's twenty, because that is what the sheet is for. At break the message came in from a name he did not know. It was polite and it was short and it asked him for nothing at all. We watched you at Prescot in December, before there was a sheet with your name on it. If you ever want to know what a different arrangement looks like, this is the number. And then, underneath: You're signed until the summer. We know that. No company. No address. No name.

Abe stood in the corridor outside the music rooms with his thumb over the screen and worked out three things, and got through two of them before the bell went. That message had not come from Gault. In December, in the lobby at Prescot with the cups going cold, Gault had told him about the other one herself.

A woman in the same trade, working the same cities, who had stood at his own school gates in November, four days before Gault got there, and got his name wrong twice in front of Nita, and then been slow about what she did with it. Somebody else was early and they were slow about it, and I was fastest, and those are different things. The other one had not been slow this time. Then he got to the part that was worse. Last week somebody had to stand in Riddell's shop and ask what the boy was like.

Then the same person had to get to Manchester, and find a stall man, and ask the other half of it, and put the two answers side by side. The sheet had his name, his city and his number on it, in one line, for nothing. The last one he stopped in the middle of, because it was about the photograph taken on the sixth of December, and he did not finish it until half past four. Then the bell went and he did not move. He got the reply box open and got as far as one word.

What Then he stood in an empty corridor and looked at it, until Ottley came past and said, "French, Dolan, or have you retired." He shut the phone and went to French. Croft found him at the end of the corridor, going the wrong way, which meant he had come looking.

"Nineteen replies," Croft said, with enormous satisfaction.

"On the one where he says the board's broken. And they're all telling him he's an idiot."

"I saw it."

"My mother read the whole thread out at breakfast. My mother. She doesn't know what a layer is." He was walking Abe backward toward the stairs without either of them agreeing to it.

"Saturday. Eight, like I said. You're bringing the scrap one."

"I'm bringing the scrap one."

"Say it like you mean it. If you turn up with a school blade I'll put you in the pond." Croft stopped walking.

"Everyone's going to be very strange with you for about a month."

"Are they."

"I thought I'd tell you, since nobody else will."

"You're not being strange with me."

"No," said Croft, as though this were the most obvious fact in the world, "because I've already lost to you, so I've got nothing left to be frightened of." Then he went off down the corridor at his usual volume. Gault called at four.

"You've seen it," she said.

"Everybody's seen it. My sister had it before I was up."

"Good. Then we can skip the part where I tell you." A drawer went at her end.

"Two people have asked me what you cost. One of them asked before nine, which is the earliest anybody has ever asked me anything." Abe leaned on the wall outside the music rooms, in the same place he had stood at break, and waited, because he had known since Tuesday afternoon that this part was coming and he had spent the whole day not thinking about it.

"Now," Gault said.

"One thing, and it's not business, and you can tell me it's none of mine."

"Go on."

"Twenty," she said.

"So. Have you had a think about when." There it was, at four o'clock, on a Thursday, from a woman on a phone. Tench had missed nothing at all.

"No," Abe said.

"That's not true, but it's a perfectly good answer and I'm not going to pick at it." She said it warmly, and she moved straight on.

"Eat something before Saturday. And Abe. Whatever you're doing, you should know that people in my trade have started saying your name in rooms you are not in."

"Is that good?"

"It's Thursday," said Gault.

"Ask me in March." Then she hung up, and he stood in the corridor with the phone in his hand. Tench had told him on Tuesday that the first person to ask would be the woman on the phone, and that she would ask him nicely, and that it would be on a Thursday. He had been right down to the day of the week. Two days to Saturday, and a scrap blade in the yard that wanted an edge on it before Miles Croft got a look at it.

Peg was on the late shift and June was not back, so the apartment was his for an hour, and he did not go down to the yard. There was a shoebox on the top shelf of the closet in Peg's room with photographs in it, printed ones, on paper. Their mother had them done that way and nobody had stopped since. Abe had to bring the chair in from the hall to reach it, which Peg would have had something to say about. The one he wanted was near the top.

The third of October, in this kitchen, with a cake Peg had made at six in the morning before her shift and eighteen on it in icing that had gone flat in the heat. In the photograph he is standing behind the chair with both hands on the back of it. He put it on the kitchen table and got his phone out and found the December one and set it down beside it. Then he sat and looked at the two of them, with nobody in the apartment to do it in front of. It was not that he looked tired in December.

He looked tired in October as well. It had been a Friday and he had been at school all day and he had come home and eaten a bowl of soup. The boy in October still had some growing left in his face. The one in December had none. Nine weeks. June had told him at the end of October, in their own kitchen, and the word she used was older. She had said it gently and he had told her he was only tired. He put the October one back in the box and the box back on the shelf.

Then he carried the chair out to the hall and put it where it had been. Then he stood in the kitchen with his phone in his hand and got the message up again. He typed: Thank you for the message. I am signed until the summer and I am not looking to move. He read it back. It was exactly what Ruth Gault would have written for him, in her words and in her order, and nobody had asked him to build it. He deleted it. Then he typed four words with his thumb and sent them before he could read them a second time.

What can you get The answer came back in under a minute. Somebody had been sitting with a phone in their hand all day, waiting for him to do exactly that. Abe stood in his own kitchen and did not open it.