Chương 44: The Last Day

The last two Arrival reports happened on the last morning of term. Amrit went first, on the first radios: a working crystal set built out of a kit his father had ordered, and a genuine hurt astonishment that the class was not more moved by it. Mrs. Farrant gave the crystal set a long look.

"First working exhibit in twelve years," she said. Amrit sat down repaired. The other one was Sam Ottley's, which the class had been looking forward to since the schedule went up in November, the way you look forward to a derailment. It was about the first winter after the Arrival, and it was actually good, which annoyed everybody.

Ottley had found a diary in the town archive from a man who spent that whole first January arguing with his neighbors about a shared wall, while the sea rose and the world ended, and Ottley read the arguments out loud with a voice for each neighbor.

"They spent the whole apocalypse arguing about a wall," Ottley said, at the end, shrugging, like it was obvious.

"That's the report." Mrs. Farrant looked at him for a moment over her glasses.

"Thirty-one reports since November," she said, to the class, "and the last word of the term goes to Mr. Ottley, correctly." She looked back down at her list.

"Go to lunch." The building had that last-day feeling, loose at every joint. Teachers gave up at half past eleven and put on movies, or didn't bother, and let the noise happen. Somebody's little brother ran the length of the science corridor with tinsel on him like a mane, and no adult anywhere considered stopping him. In the lunchroom, Nell Mott was still getting congratulated by people who had heard it secondhand, four days on, and was still not tired of it.

She had slept on it the way Tench told her to, and taken the boring one, and she was extremely pleased with herself about that too. Abe went through the day with his bag already packed for the break. Seventeen days to the board. Everybody else in the building was counting down to Christmas, and he was counting past it.

After the last lesson, the corridor by the board filled up, because Nita Sowerby was up on a chair with the green marker, squaring off the term, and a crowd at that board had stopped needing a reason months ago. She wasn't changing anything. She was going down the rows making the letters good, because the board would stand exactly like this for two weeks, over an empty corridor, and Nita had opinions about what it should look like while nobody was watching it. DOLAN, A. · Layer 10 · Body 7 · Mind 3 DANFORTH, P.

· Layer 9 · Body 6 · Mind 3 The top of the board said what it had said since the first of the month, because a board only knows what the pad tells it. Halfway down, Nell Mott's fresh three still looked like wet paint, though it had been dry since Monday. Just under the black line that cuts off the top ten, Ada Bewley's line read what it had read since November, every number on it earned the long way, all of them still filling their bars where a board can't see.

Abe was reading his own row when Miles Croft arrived in the corridor at volume, bag first.

"Dolan. Good, you're findable." He planted himself, bag on one shoulder, and said it loudly enough for thirty people.

"Christmas Day. Two o'clock. My house. The whole lot of them are down for the week, so you'll get looked at like a horse, but the food's serious and we've got a proper floor." Thirty conversations stopped at once.

"You're asking me to Christmas," Abe said.

"I'm not asking you anything. I'm telling you the time." Croft shifted the bag.

"And if your feet have improved, which they'd better have, you'll finally meet the ferryman."

"The third step of the form."

"The third step." He was already leaving, bag swinging.

"Two o'clock. Don't bring anything. My mother will take it personally." He went, and the corridor did not even pretend it hadn't heard. Ellis Naylor said "the FERRYMAN?" to nobody in particular, and got no answer, and you could see him deciding to find out over the break.

"Christmas at the CROFTS'," said Nell Mott, from halfway up the corridor, delighted, to the entire school.

"They've got a gate. I've seen the gate." Abe stood there holding it. Christmas Day, at the Crofts', with the family down and the family book somewhere in that house. A year ago he'd have bet his coat against any single word of that sentence.

"That's good of him," said Piers Danforth. He'd come up through the crowd without pushing a single person, and he was smiling, and he said it warmly, to Abe, in front of everybody.

"It is," Abe said.

"No, I mean it, I'm glad." Danforth put his hands in his pockets and looked at the board, up at the top rows, where his name sat under Abe's.

"It's been a term for you. Scouts. Prescot. People who've never met you paying for your food."

"Piers."

"What? I'm not taking a shot at you." He stopped, and went again.

"I said I'm glad. I am glad. I just hope they're looking at everybody, that's all. Not only at the interesting one. They found you off eleven seconds of phone video. They can move fast when they feel like it." The corridor had gone quiet around the two of them without anybody deciding to.

"Ada Bewley's in that hall every night." He was talking at the board now, not at Abe.

"Every night. Since September. No coach, nobody buying her hours, and she's still up there, tenth, eleventh, whatever she is this week, and nobody's ever sent her a train ticket." Stolen content alert: this content belongs on Royal Road. Report any occurrences. He stopped. It had come out louder than the rest of it.

"Anyway." He got his bag up onto his shoulder.

"Merry Christmas. Enjoy the Crofts', the food's supposed to be serious." He went off down the corridor, saying merry Christmas to people as he passed, and people said it back. Behind Abe, somewhere in the crowd, Ellis Naylor said "he's got a point, though," in the reasonable voice of a boy agreeing with a reasonable thing, and three other people murmured along. Abe stood at the board with heat coming up his neck. Ada Bewley was six feet away with her coat over her arm.

She had heard every word, because the corridor had heard every word. She looked straight at Abe, and there was nothing mean in it anywhere.

"He's right." Then she went to get her bag, because the hall was hers until six, and this was the last six there was going to be until January. The last evening in the hall started the same as every evening in the hall. Ada worked her holds at the far end under the one good light bank. Abe ran the form at his end, full length, at speed, the thing forty feet of floor was for.

Nobody helped anybody and nobody asked anybody anything, per the terms, and the only sounds were feet and breathing and the radiator ticking as it cooled. The form went well. It went better than well. Six weeks ago he could not have run it past the fourth step without his feet arguing, and tonight the full line of it came out at speed, and the turn at the wall came around clean, twice, like a door his feet had finally been given the key to.

Between sets, resting on her heels, Ada watched one run of it from end to end.

"Your feet got better," she said, and went back down into the hold before he could answer. It was the first thing she had ever said to him in that hall that wasn't terms or schedule. At half past five she stopped, on her own schedule, and started her wind-down stretches. Then she said the other thing, flat, to the middle distance, while she worked her calf.

"Danforth. He was right about the ticket."

"I know."

"And he said it to hurt you. I was watching his face, not yours." She changed legs.

"Both things happened. You can stop chewing it." Abe stood there with his hands on his hips, getting his breath back, looking at her.

"You didn't have to say that."

"No," Ada agreed.

"And if the assessment people ever do send me a train ticket, I'm cashing it in and buying boots. These leak." She pointed her chin at her boots by the wall bars. It was a joke, the first he'd ever heard from her, delivered dead flat. Abe laughed out loud in the empty hall, and she almost did.

"Two weeks," he said, when he'd finished.

"What do you do with two weeks of no hall?"

"Mornings at the laundry on Corn Road, they take extra hands over Christmas." Ada didn't stop stretching.

"Holds in my room, there's floor if I move the bed. Stairs in the block, before the neighbors get up. I've got the whole run worked out from last year." She changed legs.

"And Christmas Day off, all day, because my mother says so and she's right."

"What's the day off for?"

"Dinner. Mom cooks the one dinner of the year where nobody's allowed to talk about money at the table, and her sisters come, and it's loud." She said it looking at the ceiling, mid-stretch.

"And then New Year's morning I go up the top of the hill behind the block, before it's light, and watch the year come in over the water. Did it last year with frost on everything. Best morning of the whole year."

"I've lived on that hill my whole life."

"I know you have." She got up and rolled her shoulders out.

"I've never met one other person up there. Not once, in the frost, on the best morning of the year." It was a better plan than his, which was just a big pile of hours. She'd done all of it last year too, and nobody had given her anything for it. Mr. Vane came through at six with his keys, polite as always, and stood by the doors while they got their bags, apologizing with his eyebrows the entire time.

He held the door for them like it was a favor he was doing them instead of the opposite, and wished them both a merry Christmas by name.

"Two weeks, then," he said, not unkindly, and turned the master switch, and the light banks went dark one after another down the length of the hall, bang, bang, bang, like doors shutting on a corridor. They came out into the yard and he locked the doors behind them. Heat, light, and forty feet of floor, gone in one turn of a key, until January. They walked back to the block together, actually together this time, at the same speed on the same stretch of sidewalk.

"The big press counts as training," Ada said, somewhere past the school fence.

"Shoulders, back, grip, and you can't put it down until the basket's done. It counts."

"It's laundry."

"It's loaded carries with steam." And she would not be moved off that, the rest of the hill down. At the second floor she peeled off, and stopped with her hand on the stair rail.

"Fifth of January," she said.

"Don't get soft." Her door shut. Abe went up two more flights still arguing with the pressing-machine ruling in his head, and losing. Abe went back out the long way, past the school fence, and stopped where he could see the hall windows, black against a blue-black sky. He stood at the fence and ran the old arithmetic on it, because the problem was floor. He could be inside that building any night he liked.

Fifty seconds of quiet at the fence, walk in through a stopped yard, and the doors and the dark would mean nothing. Two weeks of forty-foot floor, his for the taking, and nobody in the world would ever know. The answer was no. The locks had nothing to do with it. It wasn't the floor he'd be taking off Ada, either. The hall was shut to her for two weeks whatever he did, and she'd be doing holds in a bedroom with the bed against the wall either way, so that reason fell over as soon as he leaned on it.

The reason that held was the ticket. Strangers paid Abe's way now, and nobody had ever paid Ada's, and that hall was the one place left where the two of them were level. Same terms, same hours, same lock at six. If he took two secret weeks on that floor, January wouldn't be level either. He'd stand next to her on the fifth of January with something she couldn't have had, one more thing on the pile, and this one he'd have taken himself.

And an empty hall would teach him what the yard had been teaching him for two months. He'd learned more in one evening of training forty feet from another person than in all of it. Take away the person and the hall was just a bigger yard with a roof on it. He put the idea down. It went down easier than the bread had, back in October, and he noticed that, and was glad of it. He stood another minute at the fence in the cold, checking that the no was real. It was. He walked on.

He kept to the long way, down Fenner Street. Marek's hall sat above the shuttered shops, and the windows on the second floor were lit, all of them, yellow and warm in the cold street. On the first evening of the break. In a block where every hour was sold until Easter, months of it, paid up front, by somebody Marek never named. Abe stopped on the far sidewalk. Through the middle window he could see the top half of a boy working.

White shirt, sleeves rolled, going through the same short sequence over and over, stopping each time to put his feet back exactly where they had started. Abe stood in the cold and watched him go back to the start and do it again. Nobody was making him. Nobody was watching, as far as he knew. Somebody had bought every evening in that hall until Easter, paid up front, back in October, before Abe had ever finished top of anything. So that was the somebody. Abe stood in the dark and watched him work.

Then the boy came right up to the window and looked out at the street. The room behind him was lit and the street was dark, so all he could see was himself. He stood there fixing his collar, looking straight down at Abe and not seeing him. Then he went back down the room and started again. It was Piers Danforth, three hours after he had wished everybody a merry Christmas.