Chương 49: Rest Without Sleep

Abe went into the still at nine on Monday morning to find out where the bottom was. It was the twenty-ninth of December. Seven days to the fifth of January, when the pad in the school corridor would read him for the first time since the term ended. Nineteen days to the competition in Prescot. He was not going. Gault had said no on the Monday after the fitting.

Coates had said Gault picked up on Sundays, so he called her on the Monday and she picked up anyway, on the second ring, with a lot of people talking behind her.

"You're not going to Prescot," she said.

"It's a bracket. All day, one bout after another, against boys who have been at it since they were eleven."

"I want to go."

"I know you do." Something got put down at her end and the noise behind her went away.

"You've got an assessment in March and a number on a public listing. I'm not putting either of them on a mat in January."

"Fifth in the region," said Gault. Then she said it again, slower.

"One bad Saturday moves that number down and it stays down until March," said Gault.

"Ask me again in April." He had four tins, a loaf, a bag of oats and two bottles of water in a bag by the wall. He had the yard, the bar, the sword, and a form with three steps in it. He had no idea how long any of that was going to last him. The yard went quiet. The sleet stopped in the air. He started with the bar. The first six hours were the best six hours of his life. He worked until his arms would not close on the bar.

Then he sat down against the wall and did the sit, and the tiredness went out of his arms while he sat there. Not all of it. Enough. He got up and worked again, and it happened again, and it kept happening. That was what the wheel did. He still got tired. He got tired exactly the way he always had, and then he sat down and put it back. The thing that used to end a session was a twenty minute job now, and he could do it as often as he liked.

Realm 1 · KINDLED · Body 7 Foundation: 3, 051 / 3, 600 (Body 8) It had said 2, 940 at the sink that morning. Abe stood in the middle of the yard with the bar in his hands and laughed out loud in a city where nobody could hear him. He got frightened the first time he wanted to sleep. Nobody had ever told him whether you can sleep in a still. There was nobody who could have.

Everything he knew about the inside of his own power he had gotten by going in and finding out, and he had never been in there long enough to want a night. He sat down against the wall with his back straight and did the sit instead, and let it go all the way down. It was not sleeping. He knew where he was the whole time and he could hear his own breathing. But he came up out of it after what felt like a night, and his head was clear and his legs were new, and the yard was exactly where he had left it.

He checked the sleet twice, because he did not trust it. Then he got up and did another six hours. By the third of them he had stopped counting in hours. He ran the Croft form until the three steps stopped being three separate things.

"Give it a year," Croft had said, the first Sunday, watching him get it wrong.

"Two, if you keep dropping that shoulder." He had it by the afternoon of the second day. He drilled the opener until his back foot went where it belonged on wet ground with his legs shaking. It had not done that in November, or in any month before it. He did squats until he could not, and sat, and did more. Realm 1 · KINDLED · Body 7 Foundation: 3, 388 / 3, 600 (Body 8) Two hundred and twelve to go.

He ate the last tin standing up, looking at that number, and it was somewhere in there that he understood what was actually going to stop him. The bag was empty. Abe turned it over and shook it and got a bay leaf and some oat dust out of it, and stood in a stopped yard not liking what that meant. Nothing in the still gets used up, because nothing in there is going anywhere. His body was the exception.

It had gone on being his body the whole time, and it had worked like a dockhand, and it had eaten four tins and a loaf and a bag of oats doing it. Three days of food had bought him three days. He was two hundred and twelve points off Body 8 and he could not get there on a bay leaf. The kitchen was thirty feet away and there was a full cupboard in it. It was also Peg's cupboard, and Peg had counted the bread on Thursday.

"Somebody in this house is eating like a horse," she had said, to the cupboard, without turning around. Abe had eaten his supper and said nothing. He could let go, walk in, eat, and come back. That was fifty seconds and a cupboard and it was the obvious thing. It was also a week's shopping for three people, and it was in his own house, and it belonged to a woman who stood up for nine hours a day to put it there.

This content has been unlawfully taken from Royal Road; report any instances of this story if found elsewhere. Marley Street was ten minutes the other way. He knew the back door on the grocer's at the top of it. He had gone through it in November and come out with four loaves, and eggs, and a block of cheese, and a bag of the cheap oats. He had stopped there on purpose. He stood in the yard and worked out what he actually needed. The bag by the wall had held three days.

He knew that for a fact and not as a guess, because he had just eaten every part of it and then stood there watching his foundation stop moving. He picked the empty bag up and thought about what it would weigh full. Then he thought about the straps, and about a road at the end of it with nobody to take a turn carrying anything. Three of that. Maybe a bit over, if he stopped caring what it did to his shoulders. Nine days, then.

Nine days of eating, for a boy doing what he had just done to himself, was not four loaves off a markdown rack. It was most of a shelf. A shop that size would know by Tuesday morning. The man who owned it would stand in his own storeroom and count, and then he would start thinking about who. Marley Street was four streets from his own front door. He walked up it to get to the bus. There was no version of it where he took that much out of a small shop near his house and nobody was worse off on Wednesday.

Abe stood in the yard for a long time. Then he picked up the empty bag and went out through the gate, and held on to the still the whole way out, and started walking north. Calder's north gate stood open the way it does on a Monday morning. Abe walked out through it past a guard who would never know he had been there. Then he was outside the wall, on the Prescot road, on his own, under a sky that had said nine o'clock since he stepped out of his own yard.

He had been out here twice, on the sixth of December and again nine days ago, both times on a train somebody else had paid for. It took about an hour. He had a window seat and he had watched the wall go past and not come back. Walking it took him most of a day. The road ran up out of the marsh and onto the flat, and there was nothing out there at all. A car sat halfway along it with its lights on. Two people sat inside it with their mouths open and one of them had a finger up.

Farther up, a gull hung over a ditch with its wings out, three feet off the water, going nowhere. He had never been outside a wall by himself. Nobody his age had. There are things in the fields between the cities. That is what the wall is for. He met one about two hours up. It stood in a flooded ditch a couple of hundred yards off the road with its head down in the water. Its back was higher than a bus.

The legs were four, thin, folded high, and the wrong shape for carrying that much, and the animal was the gray-green of the reeds around it. The head on the end of the neck was mostly beak. The beak was open. There was an armful of pondweed hanging off the side of it that had not finished falling. Everybody in Calder gets the card at about nine years old. Six pictures, six names, and what to do about each one, which is the same for all six and is get inside and get low. This was a heron.

There is a proper name for them on the card and Abe had never heard a person say it out loud. He had met one of the six before and it had not been this one. The thing in October had come off a heap at the bottom of a flooded stairwell, nine feet out from the step he was standing on, and it was plated like a boiler, and it used its front legs the way a person uses hands. Killing it took a long time and it broke his left hand in two places. Afterward he had wanted to be sick and had not been able to manage it.

He had never seen one standing in a field being alive. It did not move, because nothing moved. Abe stood on the road and looked at it until he was finished looking, and then he went on. Four hours out, the walking started to bother him. Two days on this road, there and back. Every hour of it was an hour he was not lifting anything. He was spending training time to go and fetch the food that bought him training time, and doing the math made him want to sit down right there on the road. So he ran.

Not well and not for long. He got maybe a mile before his chest caught, and had to walk it off with his hands on top of his head, and got less than that out of the second try. Running · Novice Lv 1 (0 / 50) Abe stood on an empty road and looked at that. He had been walking since he was one and the Weave had never once had an opinion about it. It had an opinion now, because he had done it at the edge, on an empty stomach, with somewhere to be.

So he did it at the edge for what should have been the rest of the night, except that there was not going to be one. Run until his chest caught. Walk until it stopped catching. Sit down on the shoulder of the road with his back against a post and let the sit put back what it could. Then get up on legs that did not want any of it and go again. He never got fast. Not at any point in all those hours. But somewhere around the fifth hour he turned into a boy who did not stop, and the road went past underneath that.

The marsh ended and the open ground started, and the light did not change at all. It was the same thin gray Monday morning it had been in his yard, and it was going to stay that way for as long as he wanted it to, and after the fourth hour of it he stopped looking up. Past a bridge with a car on it. Past a burned-out shed, and a mile of hedge with nothing behind it, and a field gate, and another field gate, and another one. He ate nothing, because there was nothing to eat.

His legs stopped hurting somewhere in the seventh hour and that frightened him more than the hurting had. Running · Novice Lv 4 (0 / 800) The other screen had moved as well, which he had not expected. Realm 1 · KINDLED · Body 7 Foundation: 3, 568 / 3, 600 (Body 8) A night on that road had paid him more than a day on the bar had, and the reason was the one it always was. He had lifted and drilled and carried for three months, and he had never trained at running, not for a single hour of it.

Every mile was the hardest thing he had ever asked his legs for. Thirty two points off a layer, and nothing left in the bag. Prescot came up out of the fields inside its own wall, gray where Calder's is brown, with the four cranes standing on top of it. He walked in through a gate that was standing open because it was nine in the morning and Prescot was going to work. He picked the place carefully and took his time about it, because he had all the time there was. It had to be somewhere big enough not to feel it.

That ruled out a house. It ruled out any corner store with one register and a family name over the door. He walked the back of a covered market until he found the loading side of something big. A chain place, with a name he had seen in Calder too. There were pallets stacked in the yard and a roll-up door standing a foot off the ground for the delivery. Nobody in that building knew him. He went under the door on his back and stood up in a stockroom the size of the school gym, full of stopped dust.

There was a camera in the corner above the racking with a small green light on it. He could not pick up a single thing in that room without starting the clock, and the clock came with two men behind the plastic curtain and a radio. So he did the other half first, and took as long as he liked over it. He had never been anywhere with that much food in it. A whole aisle of cereal. A wall of chips. A chest freezer the length of the room full of pizzas and ice cream that were no use to him at all.

At home there was bread and there were tins, and on a Thursday there were vegetables. Peg fed three people out of a school kitchen wage and had never said the word money in front of them. Abe walked that room for a long while and was angry, and then stopped being angry and started counting steps. Peanut butter, second bay, chest height. Energy bars in a carton already open. Dried fruit and nuts on the end.

Powdered milk and sugar low down, tuna in the next bay along, and the sports drinks on a pallet by the door where he would pass them last. Eleven steps. He walked it twice with his hands at his sides so his feet would know the way. A month ago he had stood in a storeroom on Marley Street with four loaves of somebody else's bread in his hands. Getting out of that room again had taken him everything he had, and a thought about his father he had not wanted to have. He walked the route a third time.

Then he walked it a fourth and added the sports drinks at the end, because he had the time and because he wanted to. On Marley Street he had walked in, picked up four loaves, and needed fifty seconds on a storeroom floor before he could get quiet again. Here he had walked the route four times and knew where the sports drinks were. He went and stood at the first bay.