Chương 69: Four Seconds

At four twenty on the seventeenth of January they cleared the middle mat, and the hall went quiet, and Danforth had been right about that too. Six hundred people. You could hear the roof. Abe stood at the edge of it with the scrap one in his hand and his coat off. Every single thing he had planned to think about had gone out of his head an hour ago and had not come back.

"Breathe out," said Croft, at his shoulder.

"Not in. Out. In is a trap."

"That's not a real thing."

"It is a real thing, I just invented it." Croft thumped him once between the shoulder blades.

"Go on, then." Sam Quirke was twenty and built like a gate. He came out to the mat with his sleeves rolled and a plain training sword, entirely relaxed, like a man who has done this in front of six hundred people about forty times. He shook Abe's hand. He said the room was cold, and that Abe should watch the seam in the middle mat, which was decent of him. Abe was too far gone to answer him properly. Croft had told him about Quirke in the parking lot in eleven words.

"Don't let him touch anything. Anything. I mean anything at all." That was the Talent. His sword came out of whatever his bare hand had touched. The mat. A post. Your own shoulder. Give him two minutes and he had a hand on half the room. After that he could reach you from anywhere in it without moving his feet, and he was a Realm 2 and you were not. Two people from Ketton had made a sign about it. The referee was a woman with a whistle and no interest in either of them.

"Two minutes. Down and staying down, or I stop it. Yes?"

"Yes," said Quirke.

"Yes," said Abe. She stepped back and the hall did not make one sound. Abe looked across four feet of rubber mat at a man who had gone through the door in front of the whole north, and who had put one hand flat on that mat on his way onto it. Then she said go. Here is what Abe had. He had a first exchange that could not fail. It was drilled into him past the place where thinking happens. He had run it in a yard six feet wide, and in a marsh, and on a bridge over a stopped city.

He had stopped counting the repetitions somewhere in the second week and could not have given you the number. It came out of him in the first second of anything, at the speed of a reflex. And here is what Quirke had. A pair of hands, and two minutes to get them onto a room. Nobody had ever taken a bout off Quirke before he was ready for it to end. Two minutes was nothing to him. His whole afternoon was built on the part that came after the first exchange. Abe had never needed a second exchange.

Quirke came forward, the way he had come forward in every bout that hall had watched him win. Abe was not where he had been. He was inside. He had turned off the line at the exact angle he had turned off it ten thousand times, and Set Stance put his back foot down in the place Croft had kicked it into that morning, and held it there while the rest of him moved. The scrap one came up under Quirke's guard from a place Quirke had never put a hand.

The flat of a badly made blade came to a stop against the side of Sam Quirke's neck. Quirke stood absolutely still, with a piece of scrap iron resting under his jaw. He had been on that mat for four seconds and he had touched two things, the mat and Abe's hand. Nobody in that building made a noise. The referee got there and got a hand between them, and asked Quirke something, and Quirke shook his head once. Then she lifted Abe's arm. The noise came after that, and it was not cheering.

It was six hundred people all saying something to the person next to them at once, which is a completely different sound. It went up into the dark part of the roof and came back down. This story has been unlawfully obtained without the author's consent. Report any appearances on Amazon. Abe stood on a rubber mat in a bus garage with his arm in the air and his heart going like a bird, and then he started laughing. He could not help it, and he did not want to, and it came up out of him in one piece.

He had not laughed like that since the gym on Monday, but this was six hundred people and none of them were his. He had never been able to show anybody one minute of it. Six hundred people had just watched him do it in four seconds. Quirke came and found him at the edge of the mat before Abe had gotten his coat back on.

"Right," he said. He had a hand out and he was not smiling exactly.

"I didn't see any of that. Not one part of it."

"I'm sorry."

"Don't do that." Quirke shook his head.

"Do that once more and I'll take it personally. How long have you been drilling that?"

"Since November."

"Since November," said Quirke, and looked at him for a while.

"I started when I was eighteen. Four seconds. I'll be thinking about that for a month." Then he did not go. He stood there with the sword his Talent had made him hanging off two fingers, and let it go, and it was gone before it reached the mat.

"I hadn't got a hand on the room yet," he said.

"Another minute and you're on your back." He bent down and picked his blade up off the mat.

"Doesn't help me much, does it." Then he went off to find his own people. Croft arrived at a run, took Abe's head in both hands, and shouted something into his face that nobody has ever been able to reconstruct. Then he let go and stepped back and pointed down.

"Your foot," he said.

"Look at your foot. I spent four hours on that foot." The screen came up while Croft was still shouting. DRILL HAND · Apprentice → Adept Body 15 → 16 Abe sat down on the floor at the side of the mat with his back against the climbing bars, because his legs had decided something without asking him. Croft sat down next to him and did not ask one single question. He picked at the tape on his own grip the whole time. The menu came up behind the box. Three options. Two of them he understood.

The third one had a word in front of it he had seen once before, in a marsh, at the bottom of a hole in the world, when he had looked at it for a long time and then closed the screen and gone back to work. SECOND MEETING · Rare In the marsh he had read the two lines under it twice and could not make them worth anything, because it only worked on somebody who had already landed a blow on him, and the first exchange was the one thing on Earth he did not lose.

Tonight he had just won one in four seconds in front of six hundred people. He took it. He took it sitting on the floor of a bus garage, with his back against a set of climbing bars and six hundred people behind him talking about him. The screen shut. Nothing happened at all. He waited. Nothing went on happening.

"You've gone a color," said Croft.

"I'm fine."

"You've gone the color you went in the gym on Monday and I did not like it then either." Croft got up and put a hand down.

"Come on. Everybody in this building wants to look at you and you're sitting on the floor like a coat." The next hour was the strangest of Abe's life and he could not have told anybody why. Nobody was rude to him. Everybody was extremely pleasant, and he kept waiting for one of them to laugh at him, and not one of them did. A man he did not know shook his hand and said he had known Tom Dolan. He had not known Tom Dolan. He said it warmly and he meant well by it and it was still a lie.

A woman with a camera asked whether he had a photograph she could use. When he said no, she took one. At the twos end, where the forty people were, three of them came up the room. They had never come up the room before. Abe did not know he was watching a thing that does not usually happen. Croft did know, and said nothing about it, and enjoyed it enormously. Marchbank was one of the three. He did not say anything at all.

He put his hand out and shook Abe's hand and held on to it a little longer than he had to, and then he went back down the room. The man in the brown coat came back at about five, with his folder, and this time he was not bored at all.

"Right," he said.

"What do you want."

"Sorry?"

"You did that with a flat bar off a scrap heap and I have had four people ask me about it in an hour, and one of them was from Salford." He had the card out already, the one with two shoulder measurements on it and a gap between them nobody had mentioned.

"So. What do you want made." Abe looked at the scrap one on the table, wrapped up in its canvas with the tape showing. He had ground that edge on a wheel in Riddell's yard in October, on a Thursday, with the light going. He had done it because he could not afford anything else. Riddell had let him have the wheel for nothing and then gone inside, so that he would not have to watch.

"Can I think about it?"

"You can think about it, and while you're thinking, everybody who watched that is going to be telling the story wrong." The man wrote something on the card anyway.

"They'll say you had a good sword." Then he went off to measure a boy from Salford, and Abe stood there with his hand flat on the canvas. Gault got to him at half past five and she was walking faster than he had ever seen her walk.

"Do not go anywhere. Do not agree to anything. If anybody puts a card in your hand, take it and say thank you and give it to me."

"Somebody already has."

"I know. I watched her do it and we will discuss it in the car." She had her phone in one hand and her folder open on her arm, and she was writing on it while she talked, which he had not known was possible.

"Leeds want you on the seventh."

"Right."

"Salford want you, which is new. Salford have never wanted anybody out of Calder in their lives." She turned the folder over.

"And there's a thing on the fourth of February that I said no to in December and have just said yes to."

"That's three."

"That is three. And there are four clips of you up since five o'clock, one of them shot from somewhere in the roof." She stopped writing and looked up at him for the first time.

"Abe. That was the best four seconds anybody has done in this building in ten years and I've got you on a train for most of the spring on the strength of it. Are you all right?"

"Yes."

"Say it again with your face doing something."

"Yes," said Abe, and grinned at her until his cheeks hurt.

"Good," said Gault.

"Now we have to talk about the eighth of February." Abe heard about half of it. He was adding up what three cities were offering and setting the total next to a number taped to a kitchen wall in Calder. It did not touch the number, but it was the first money that had ever pointed at it. Danforth was by the door when they went out, with his gym bag on his shoulder, waiting for a ride.

"That was extraordinary," he said, and put his hand out, and Abe shook it.

"Thanks."

"No. I have been coming here since September and I have never seen anybody do that to a two." Danforth was looking out at the parking lot while he said it.

"Quirke put Halstead down in November and Halstead is on the national sheet."

"I got lucky with the angle."

"You didn't," said Danforth. Danforth said it pleasantly, and shifted his bag on his shoulder, and went on watching the road for his ride. Then a car came up for him and he got in it and was gone. Abe stood in the cold with his bag on one shoulder and the scrap one wrapped up under his arm, and Gault came out behind him already talking about the seventh of February. Croft was halfway across the parking lot and had heard none of it.