Chương 43: Chapter 42: Two Marks

June came down on Sunday morning with a list, and read it out while the porridge went around.

"Hairdryer. Blue top. The gray top with the collar. The coat." She folded the list and put it by her bowl.

"There's other bits too, but if the bits don't come back I'm not going to die about it."

"The coat is the reason anybody's going," said Peg.

"Eat." June had set it all up by text, lying on the kitchen floor, thumbs going faster than Abe could read. Nadia's mother ran the soup stall at the winter market on Sundays. Nadia would be on it from eleven, and the bag would come down in the van with the bread rolls.

"And what am I for?" Abe asked.

"Exactly?"

"Decoration." June didn't look up.

"You stand a bit off and be famous at people, and nobody listens to us." They went down at ten, into a cold clear morning, Saturday's snow gone like it had never happened. June sat her minute in the bus shelter at the bottom of the hill, her rule going anywhere now, and Peg spent it redoing her shopping plans out loud. The market's last day was busier than its first. The soup stall was halfway up the road, with a pot on it the size of a washtub. Nadia's mother was three customers deep at the pot.

Nadia stood at the end of the trestle in an apron, wearing the face of a girl who'd been told to act normal and was working hard at it. Nadia had been June's best friend since the two of them were seven. Half of June's growing up had happened in the house past the top of Gill Street, in Nadia's room, with Nadia's mother shouting up the stairs that there was food. That was why forty marks of June's stuff lived up there. And Gill Street went at the end of October.

For six weeks June hadn't been able to walk to her best friend's house, and she hadn't told her best friend why, or much of anything else. The bag was under the trestle, a blue duffel with one sleeve of the coat caught in the zipper. June saw it and then didn't look at it again.

"Hiya," said Nadia. June put her elbows on the boards and went straight into being funny, because that was what the two of them had always done, and she'd clearly decided no time had passed.

"Good morning. I'm here about a hairdryer, I was told this was the place." She got the list out and smoothed it flat on the boards.

"I've brought paperwork." It was the voice that always made Nadia laugh, but this time Nadia didn't.

"You're doing the funny thing," she said.

"I'm being normal."

"You're being funny at me like it's October." Nadia wiped her hands on the apron, slowly.

"It's not October."

"I've come for my stuff, and I'd like us to be normal about it."

"Yeah." Nadia pulled the duffel out and set it on the end of the boards, hard enough that the pot lids jumped.

"I carried this to yours in November. All of it, and the coat over my arm, the length of Salt Row in the rain." June went still.

"Your aunt said you were out." Nadia's voice stayed level, which was worse than shouting would have been.

"Your shoes were inside the door, June. I could see them from the step."

"I was out."

"You were not." Abe watched his sister get caught in a lie. In sixteen years he had never seen anybody manage it. June opened her mouth, and Abe could see the next one lined up in it, something quick and funny that would have worked on Peg. She didn't use it. She folded the list in half, and in half again, until it wouldn't fold anymore.

"Okay," she said.

"Here's the true bit. It's short, and when it's done we're never talking about it again. That's the deal." Nadia crossed her arms.

"I can't get up Gill Street anymore." June said it the way she read out lists.

"Not won't. Can't. It's not new, and it's got nothing to do with you, and that's everything you're getting." Nadia's mother took a customer's money with one sideways look at her daughter, and left the girls to it.

"Since when?" said Nadia.

"October."

"That's not asking anything. That's dates."

"The end of October." Nadia looked at her for a long time. Kerry, somewhere behind them, had gone completely quiet, and Abe had not known Kerry could.

"You could've put that in a text," Nadia said.

"Seven words. I counted them while you were saying it."

"I know." June's voice finally moved.

"I started that text about forty times. You should see my drafts folder. It's a disaster in there."

"I waited a week and then I decided you'd gone off me."

"I know."

"I decided it about four different ways."

"I know," said June.

"I'd have decided the same." Nadia looked down at the duffel. Then she pushed it the last six inches along the boards, onto June's side.

"Mom washed the coat. Twice." She shrugged, one shoulder.

"She kept saying you'd be down for it before it got cold. Then it got cold." June took the coat out of the bag and put it on right there, over her jacket, and did the buttons up to her chin. Straight, every one of them.

"Tuesdays I finish at four," said Nadia, in the voice of a girl who had just decided something.

"So Tuesdays I'm coming to yours. And if your aunt says you're out, I'm coming in anyway and sitting with the shoes."

"She'll feed you."

"I've factored that in." June reached into the bag, moved a folded top aside, and came out with the book about horses. It had been read so many times the cover curled back on itself like a leaf. She'd been promising for months to deal with it separately, and this was the dealing. Enjoying this book? Seek out the original to ensure the author gets credit.

"That's yours now," she said.

"Don't make a thing of it. You've had it since March. It knows where it lives." Nadia held the book in both hands and looked like she might make a thing of it after all, so Kerry started talking loudly about the smell of the soup, and everybody let her.

"You'll have gone past the good part," Nadia said, tapping the book.

"The race is the good part. You always quit before the race."

"I've read it more times than you."

"You've started it more times than me." Nadia put the book in her apron pocket.

"Tuesday. I'm bringing it. We're doing the race out loud, your aunt can listen." June leaned over and looked into the pot like an inspector.

"What's actually in the soup?"

"Everything Mom couldn't sell on a stick this morning."

"We'll take four." Abe stood a little way off, being decoration, and watched his sister get her best friend back, standing up, in a market, with soup going over her shoulder. It had taken him nine days and a duel to fix less than that, once. Nadia's mother came around the trestle with the cups and no interest in being paid for them. Peg's rule from the night before held, and the soup was worth the yes.

Peg told her the price on her board was an insult to soup this good, and the two of them got into it like women who had argued happily before. Over the cups, Nadia's mother asked Abe exactly one thing, which was when the board read again.

"Fifth of January," June answered for him, chin up, like it was her own name going on it.

"Twenty-two days." They carried the bag home between them, and in the afternoon Abe walked back down to the market alone. He told himself he was going to look at the stalls properly, but what he actually did was stop at the secondhand table, where a man sold books by the armful out of fruit crates. There was a fat one about the sea. Pre-Arrival, nine hundred pages, a schooner on the cover leaning through weather that should have killed everybody on board. Three marks, the man said, because of the water damage.

The water damage was one wavy corner, fifty pages deep, on a book about the sea. Abe paid out of Saturday's wages and stood a moment getting used to the feeling. He had never bought a thing in his life that wasn't food or doses or a tool. Riddell's doorway was a few steps on, shut and dark, the shop asleep for its Sunday. Abe stepped into it, put his back against the door, and got quiet. It took longer than it took in the yard, though. A market is a lot of eyes, even when none of them are pointed at you.

Then the noise stopped. All of it, everywhere, like a hand coming down flat on a piano. He came out of the doorway into the middle of the Corn Road. Half of Calder stood in it, stopped. Steam hung over the soup pot without going anywhere. A juggler at the top end owned three oranges, and two of them were in the air. A little kid was mid-jump over a coil of rope, flying, and would go on flying until Abe let her down.

He sat on the curb in the middle of the stopped market and read a hundred pages about a schooner race, some of it out loud, because nobody was moving to hear him. The Weave paid nothing for made-up boats, and the still held all the same, just as it held for the tide tables and the diver's manual. Abe grinned at page after page. When the noise came back he was thirty feet from the doorway, and a woman selling gloves told the man at the next stall that the Dolan boy had just come up out of the ground.

Abe put the book inside his coat and went up the road still grinning. The feeds could have that one too. The light went about four, and the top end of the road woke up. The man in the good coat had his trestle up, and his scale, and his row of little dented tins. A line was already forming, men off the early shift, and Abe watched the first of them buy a tin, crack the lid at the board, and set off up the hill at a run. Abe joined the line. Nobody in it talked.

When his turn came he picked a tin up, and the label lit in the middle of his head. Essence Shard · BODY Burn remaining: 2 hours (17 Foundation)"Two hours in that one," the man said. He had a voice like his scale.

"These are tonight's, son. By morning you've paid for an empty tin."

"How does it pay?"

"It burns whether you work or not, and it pays you for what you train while it's burning. That's the trade." He tipped his head at the hill.

"Work every minute of a two-hour tin and it's seventeen points. Nobody alive gets every minute. You jog home, you eat, your mother wants a word. Call it eight and don't cry about it."

"And if I bought two?"

"Then you've wasted two marks. A body starts one a day, and these don't keep. By the time you're allowed your next start, the second one's dead on your shelf. The Weave counts your hours, not the clock. Midnight doesn't reset it. Every winter somebody clever tries."

"Two marks each?"

"Two marks each." Abe bought two, one to find out and one for if the answer was yes. The man counted the coins without looking at them. His eyes stayed with the line and the road. Abe didn't jog. He walked home with a tin in each pocket, and was in the yard with his coat still on before Peg had the pans out. He sat on the step with the flat bar across his knees and the first tin in both hands, so both would come through with him, like the flashlight always did. He got quiet. The yard stopped.

He kept the lid on a moment longer, because there was a question to ask first. Out there, an open tin burns away on the world's clock, whether you train or eat or argue with your mother. That was why the men on the hill ran. But the world's clock was the thing Abe had just switched off. So either the tin would hang frozen mid-burn, like the drip under the gutter. Or it would burn along with him, on his hours, and then not one minute of it could ever get away from him. He cracked the lid.

A gray warmth stood up off the tin, like the air over a road in summer. And on the label, the burn line was falling. He watched it to be sure. The drip hung where it had hung all evening, and the burn line moved. Everything on Earth was stopped except Abe Dolan and a two-mark tin, spending their hours together on his clock. He got up grinning and ran the opener at it, the same four seconds he had been building since the crossing, half an inch at a time. With the tin standing open, every run landed like it mattered.

He worked it to the bottom, every minute, the thing the man said nobody alive gets. His tin had nowhere to leak, so it could only pay him. Wednesday night he had worked a stopped night end to end on the Mind ladder, done properly, and it had paid seven points. The dying tin paid seventeen, all of it, in two hours of standing in his own yard. Abe laughed out loud at the trash cans and let the world back in, and the cold landed on him all at once, and he didn't mind it a bit.

He put the empty tin and the full one on the kitchen table at supper.

"Dusk lots," said Peg, in the voice she kept for lottery tickets.

"It worked. The empty one already paid."

"That's what the lottery says the first week," said Peg, and put two more potatoes on his plate anyway. June turned the full tin around and read its label twice, and saved whatever she was going to say for later. The rest of the night was the usual. The yard, the drills, an hour of the schooner book in a stopped kitchen, and his count running under all of it, because tonight the counting had a job. The second tin sat shut on the kitchen shelf through all of it, out in the world's weather.

A little before four in the morning he took it down and read what the night had done to it. Essence Shard · BODY Burn remaining: 1 hour (8 Foundation) Half of it gone, wasted away exactly as advertised. A shut tin goes off slow, like milk left out, and the label had kept score all night. The man had not been selling them short. The rule said a body starts one a day, and by the clock over the stove, Sunday's tin was barely eleven hours behind him. But the man had said it himself: the Weave counts your hours.

Every man on that hill lived the same hours the world lived, breakfast to bed. Their day and the world's day were always one and the same, so none of them had ever had to ask which was which. Abe's wasn't. He had lived a day already since the first tin, most of it in a yard where the world's clock wasn't running. He stood in the kitchen and asked it. Whose day? He took the tin and the bar out to the yard, held them, got quiet, and cracked the lid. The gray warmth stood up. The pull came on. The answer was yes.

Since the first tin, the world had gone eleven hours. Abe had gone twenty-four, and he knew it exactly, because he had counted. The Weave agreed with Abe. At the stall he had thought about buying every tin on the trestle, with the market packing up for the year in the morning, and it would have been money wasted, just like the man said. Tonight's tins were dead by morning wherever they sat, and even his days only came around so fast. Two was as many as one night could hold.

Before he cracked the second tin he walked out to the top of Salt Row, where the hill lets you see down onto the Corn Road. They were taking the market apart. Vans idled with their lights on, and a flatbed sat where the soup stall had been. Two men walked a dead string of bulbs between them, coiling it as they came, and stall by stall the road got wider. Abe stood at the railing with one empty tin in his pocket and one live one in his hand, and watched until the last taillights pulled away up the hill.

The market was gone like the snow, and the tin in his hand still had an hour in it. He went back down to the yard and worked the last hour out of the second tin between the trash cans, and it paid its last eight points and went empty. Two marks, and now he knew whose day the Weave was counting. Everybody else alive got one tin a day. Abe could make more days.