Chương 9: Fenner Street

The bar filled on Saturday night while he was doing the slow squats, and Abe sat straight down on the wet concrete and let it happen to him. He knew how this went now. Nothing happens when the bar fills. The layer waits, politely, and then you sit down and settle and it comes. It came downward, the same as last time, warm and heavy and slow as syrup, and it took about twenty minutes and he loved every second of it. Body Layer 3 reached.

Body 3 Realm 1 · KINDLED · Body Layer 3 Foundation: 0 / 1600 (Body Layer 4) Then he got up, because there was a thing in that yard he had been walking past his whole life. The communal bin lived at the end of the yard, and it was the big steel one on four wheels with a lid that took two hands. Abe had watched the men from the city put a hip against that bin twice a week his whole life. It took two of them, one at each end, leaning into it, with a lot of swearing and a noise like a train coming.

He got both hands on the end of it and moved it about four feet. Then he stood there in the dark with his hands still out, looking at where it had been, and then he put it back exactly where it had come from, because he didn't want anybody wondering about it in the morning. He sat down on the step. Two weeks ago Abe had been on a one, down in the column where all the human beings are kept. He was two rungs above it now, and it had taken him two weeks. He was still looking at the skill line when he went in.

Conditioning · Novice Lv 9 (204 / 4, 050) Nine. Then ten, and then the page in his father's book that's printed like a screen, because somebody once copied one out from memory. RANK CROSSING. Three options, choose one, and the choice is permanent. Abe had read that page so many times he could see it with his eyes shut. Set Stance, underlined twice in blue pen, pressed hard enough to score the paper.

He sat on a cold step in a wet yard and worked out that he was about four thousand off it, and he could get four thousand. Then he made himself stop thinking about it, because wanting a thing had never helped him get it, and he had a lesson in the morning. Marek did not say hello. He hadn't said hello last Sunday either. Abe had spent that whole week deciding whether he was supposed to mind. He'd settled on no. Marek didn't say hello to Piers Danforth either, and Piers Danforth's father paid for the room.

The hall on Fenner Street had a floor that gave a little when you walked on it. That was the first thing Abe had noticed about the place, and a week later he still couldn't get over it. Somebody had built a floor on purpose, out of money, so that it would be kinder to people's knees. The yard behind his block was concrete laid over rubble in about 1990. Danforth was down at the far end working through something with two weighted bars, in shoes that were made for exactly this and nothing else.

He lifted a hand without stopping. Abe lifted one back.

"Boots off," Marek said.

"Walk to me." That was how last Sunday had started too. Abe put his bag down by the wall, got his boots off, and walked the length of the hall. He'd thought the walking was a joke the first time, but it wasn't one. Marek stood in the middle of that floor with his arms folded and watched a boy walk twenty yards. Then he told him he carried his head like a man waiting to be hit. Marek had put two fingers under Abe's chin and moved it about an inch. Then he explained it, once.

"You go tight here." Marek tapped the back of his own neck.

"Then all of this goes tight with it." He ran a hand down his own back, neck to hip, without hurrying.

"It does that all day. You get tired standing still." Then he'd made Abe walk the hall about forty times. That was the twelfth of October, seven days ago. Abe had done it four hundred times before lunch the next day, in a corridor with nobody in it and the dust hanging in the light from the high window. He had done it again in the yard that evening, and again in an empty shop with a stone in his hand and six ruined chisels on the bench, and then in the yard once more until it got light.

He had no idea what the real number was anymore. It was not four hundred. This Sunday he walked the length of the hall and turned and walked back, and Marek said nothing, and made him do it again.

"Bars." So Abe carried the two bars up the hall and back, twice. Last Sunday that had been work. Today he had to remember partway up to breathe like it was costing him something. Somewhere behind him Danforth had stopped making noise, which Abe noticed and didn't think about. Then the descent, down onto one knee with a bar across the shoulders and back up. Abe did four. Marek said "Slower," and Abe did four slower, which is much worse, and came up off the fourth one with his legs shaking.

"Eyes shut." That one was interesting. Abe stood there working out why anybody would ask for it. Then he shut his eyes and did two more. They were the best two he had done. Abe had already practiced it with his eyes shut, hundreds of times, alone in the still. The tale has been illicitly lifted; should you spot it on Amazon, report the violation. He opened his eyes. Marek was standing much closer than he'd been.

"Stop," Marek said. He said it to the room, not to Abe. Down at the other end Danforth put his bar back on the rack. Marek walked around Abe twice. He did not touch him. He looked at his feet, and at his knees, and at the back of his neck. He took his time about it. Abe stood in the middle of a sprung floor and let a stranger look at him.

"Do it again." Abe did it again.

"Now do it the way you did it last week." Abe opened his mouth to say all right, and then went down onto one knee, and came back up, and it was exactly the same.

"No," Marek said.

"Last week. Head down. Like you came in here." So Abe tried. He genuinely tried. He put his chin down and let his shoulders come up and went down onto his knee like a boy expecting a slap. It felt insane, like writing with the wrong hand. Partway down, his body stopped doing it and did the other thing instead. He tried twice more. He couldn't get there. Abe's stomach turned over, because he'd just understood what he was showing. Marek stepped back and folded his arms.

"Seven days," he said.

"Yes." He looked at Abe's feet for a while without saying anything.

"That's not gone. It's just got something newer sat on top of it. It'll be back the first time you're tired, or scared." He nodded at the floor where Abe had just failed.

"Yours is not underneath. There is nothing under there at all." Abe kept his eyes on the floor.

"So how many times." There it was, for the fourth time. This one was worse than the other three. Tench had asked out of interest, and Peg had asked out of fear, and Croft had asked because he wanted something. Marek asked it like a man reading a meter. Abe reached for the answer he always reached for. His breathing went onto a four count without him deciding it, the same as putting a hand out for a wall in a dark room. There was nothing there. There was no door. There was no place where the rain stops.

There was a man in socks standing three feet away looking at his face, and a hall with a sprung floor and Piers Danforth watching from the end of it. The world went on moving at exactly the speed it had been going. Two breaths was all it took to know. Abe had been standing in doorways for two weeks and he knew what one felt like, and this wasn't one. He was going to have to do this as himself.

"A lot," Abe said.

"Give me a number."

"I don't have one."

"You do not count."

"No." Marek looked at him for a long time without saying anything.

"Where."

"At home. In the yard behind my block." Abe heard how thin it sounded and kept going anyway.

"And at school. There's a corridor behind the music rooms that nobody uses."

"Between lessons."

"Yes."

"How long between lessons."

"Four minutes," Abe said. Something happened in Marek's face then and got put away again, and it wasn't wonder, and Abe would have preferred wonder.

"Sit down," Marek said.

"You are done."

"There's twenty minutes left."

"There is twenty minutes left and you are done." Abe sat down against the wall bars with his legs out in front of him. Marek stood over him with his arms folded and said the most frightening thing anybody had said to him since he Awakened.

"Nineteen years I have been doing this," Marek said.

"Nearly all of it with rich children. I know what a week does to a body, because knowing that is the entire job, and it is the only reason anybody pays me." He said it flatly. He was not building to anything.

"What you did just now is more than a week. It is more than a month. I am not going to pretend I know what it is." Danforth had come up the hall and stopped about six feet away, and neither of them looked at him.

"So here is what I think, and then I am going to stop talking about it," Marek said.

"Nobody gets more hours in a day than anybody else. You are not doing more than there is. Which means you are taking it out of something." He crouched down so he was level with Abe, which he hadn't done all week.

"You can't keep doing this to your body forever." He held Abe's eye.

"You're paying for this with something, and I don't know what." Abe sat on a sprung floor and couldn't think of one word to say. Danforth was standing six feet away with a towel over his shoulder, and he'd heard every word of it. Piers Danforth did not gossip. He did not have to. He was the best-liked person in the senior year and he answered questions honestly when anybody asked him anything, and tomorrow was Monday, and somebody in that corridor was going to ask him how the coaching was going. He'd tell them.

Lying had never once occurred to him in his life.

"Next Sunday I will watch you properly," Marek said.

"Not the exercise. You." Then he stood up, and told Danforth there was twenty minutes left and he might as well use it, and walked off to get the bars. Danforth did not use the twenty minutes. He sat down against the wall bars next to Abe with his forearms on his knees. For a while neither of them said anything, and that wasn't like him.

"I've never seen him stop a session," Danforth said.

"Right."

"Two years, Abe. He didn't stop the week I broke my wrist. He worked the other arm." Abe laughed, and it came out about half a laugh.

"You're welcome to be pleased about it," Danforth said.

"I'd be insufferable about it." He had said the same kind of thing on Abe's first night here, when Abe could not manage a single one of the holds and Danforth had told him nobody could at the start, which was not true. Then he asked a question that was not decent, in exactly the same voice.

"What are you on now?" Abe kept looking at the far wall.

"What do you mean."

"Your depth. What are you on." It was a completely fair question. Everybody's depth was written on a wall in green marker where the whole school walked past it. Asking somebody their depth was about as rude as asking them what year they were in.

"The board has got it," Abe said.

"The board has got the sixth of October."

"Then that's what I'm on." Danforth turned his head and looked at him, and Abe kept his eyes on the wall and let him. Then Danforth let it go, because letting things go cost him nothing either. Abe sat there feeling like somebody who's just lied to a dog.

"Bewley is going to be the one you take it off, you know," Danforth said.

"If you get there. She's had tenth since September and she's got nobody. She just goes in the hall every night and does it."

"I know who Ada Bewley is."

"Everybody knows who Ada Bewley is. That's my point." Danforth got up and put a hand down and pulled Abe up off the floor.

"Nobody would mind losing tenth to Croft. Croft's got a family." They got their things. Marek was over by the far wall, writing in a diary with a pen on a string, and he stayed bent over it the entire time they were leaving. He didn't say goodbye either. At the door Danforth said the last thing.

"Do you want the hour on the twenty-sixth as well? Only my father books him three at a time and I still can't use three."

"Yes."

"Right. Good." Danforth pushed the door open with his shoulder.

"He's two hundred and fifty an hour, so there's no sense in it going in the bin." Then he went off up the street toward the good end of it with his bag over his shoulder. Abe stood on the step outside the hall for a bit. Two hundred and fifty marks. Abe worked three shifts a week at Riddell's for fourteen a shift, and had done for two years. He put his hands in his pockets and started walking, and about a street later he understood something that stopped him dead on the corner.

Marek had given him one correction, on the twelfth of October, and it had taken about four minutes. Abe had used it a thousand times since. Every hold, every squat, every walk up an empty corridor, all of it done better than it would have been the week before, in a place where a week is not a week. Danforth had taken the same four minutes home and gotten one afternoon out of them. One correction made every hour he owned worth more, and he owned more hours than anybody alive.

But it went for two hundred and fifty marks, and he got one a week because a rich boy couldn't be bothered with his third. Fifteen days to the third of November. He went home the long way, which took him down the bottom end of Salt Row. Somebody had been at the steps. There were two boards nailed across the top of them, one high and one low, and whoever put them there hadn't had proper nails and hadn't had a saw either. The chain was still off its post. The boards didn't close the gap.

They wouldn't stop a dog and they wouldn't stop a child, and everybody who put them there knew that. Abe stood on the other side of the road and looked at them for a while. Nobody had come. It was eleven days since he had stood at the top of those steps and looked down at the thing in the water. Down at the far end of the row, three lads were standing outside the shop where the lads always stood. One of them was calling for Biscuit.

He had the tired voice of somebody who'd been at it for two days, and Biscuit wasn't coming back. Abe put his head down and walked home. He thought about two hundred and fifty marks the whole way, and he was fairly sure that made him a bad person.