Chương 52: The Night Market

Abe sat on the sprung floor of a stranger's hall with the last of his food gone. He had only ever bought essence once, back in the middle of December, two tins on a hill in Calder at two marks each.

"Crack it and it burns," the man had said, counting the change into his hand.

"Working it or not, it burns. Half of what you've paid for is gone before you get it home." Abe had asked him, standing right there, what happened if you bought two.

"You start one a day," the man had said.

"That's not my rule, that's just what a body will take. Don't waste your money finding out." Abe had worked the first tin out in a stopped yard that night and lost nothing off it at all. The second one he had left shut on the kitchen shelf, and by four in the morning it had burned half of itself away in there with nobody working it. He had taken what was left of it down off the shelf and out to the yard. Standing there with it in his hand, he had understood the seller's one-a-day rule properly for the first time.

The day in it was his own day, and not the world's. And he had days and days and days. He did not have two marks, or two hundred. Gault's money went to June's doses first, and then into the tin over the kettle, and he had promised himself in October that none of it would ever come back out for him. That promise had already cost him a warehouse in Prescot. It was not going to buy him essence as well. So it was the other thing, or it was nothing. He made himself say what the other thing was, in words.

He had not actually decided until he heard himself say it. Stealing food had a face he could live with. Nobody starved because Abe Dolan carried off nine days of food from a warehouse the size of a school gym. Essence was not food. Essence was the actual thing the whole world was short of. A rich boy's father bought it for him. A poor boy went without it, and taking it from somebody was taking the one part of them that might have gone somewhere. Nothing about that got easier for thinking about it twice.

He thought about it twice anyway. Then he got up, because thinking about it a third time was not going to change the answer. Prescot had a market for it. Every walled city did, the same as every walled city had a wall. He found it at the top of the covered market, in a lane he had not walked before, at the end of a night's trading. Six stalls. Trestles and scales, and men in good coats who all had the same voice.

There were still people in the line, off the night shift, with their last hour's wages in their pockets. Abe stood at the top of the lane in the stopped morning. A woman had a tin held out over a scale, not yet paid for. A boy about June's age stood with his hand already reaching for change he had not been given yet. The whole lane was a photograph of a hundred small transactions, all of them happening at once. None of them would finish until Abe let them.

The stall at the end had a crate under the table that the others did not. Six tins in it, dented, unsold, with a chalk mark on the wood that meant the same thing in any city on earth. Last night's stock. Worthless by this evening to anyone who had not used it up. Near the front of the line stood a woman in a coat gone thin at the elbows, with two coins held out flat on her palm and nothing else in her hand. She was looking past every good stall in that lane.

What she wanted was the crate under the last table, the same one Abe had picked out for himself. He knew that look. He had worn it in a dozen shops before he ever had a Talent to hide behind. On any normal morning she would have gotten there first. Whatever was left in that crate when the market shut was going to be exactly what two coins bought. Nothing was going to be left over for the next woman down the line after her.

Abe stood in the frozen lane and let himself know that, all the way through, before he did anything else. He walked the row twice with his hands at his sides. He had done the same thing in the warehouse in Prescot a lifetime ago. It was so his feet would know the route without his eyes. Whatever was in those six tins was going to nothing by tonight, whether Abe touched them or not. He counted the man before he counted the tins. Unauthorized usage: this tale is on Amazon without the author's consent.

Report any sightings. Late fifties. His weight was all on the right foot. The left knee was not straight, the way Riddell's shoulder sat at the end of a long delivery. There was a name chalked small on the corner of his own table, in a girl's handwriting. A customer would never think to look for it there. He was going to pack that crate onto a handcart in a few minutes and wheel it home. By tonight it would be exactly as worthless as the chalk mark said. Abe had wanted that to make it easier.

It did not, but it made the man a person instead of a stall. A person going home with a crate of dead tins under his arm was worse than an empty stall, not better. He crouched down under the table, set his feet, and put both hands under the crate's lip. Then he let the world back in. The lane came on with the man's hand two inches from where the crate had been. The man stood there a long moment looking at the bare stone under his table.

Abe had come out the far side of it and was ten feet off down the lane by then, with the crate against his chest, shouldering into the crowd.

"Watch it," a woman said, when he went past her too close. He kept going. His feet found gaps in a crowd he had never walked before, the same way they had found the door under the roll-up shutter in the warehouse. Quick and low, with his shoulder turned. He got three streets clear before he risked the still. Even then his heart would not sit for the first count. A lane full of people was not a stockroom. There had been no wall to go flat against this time, only his own legs and how fast he could make them go.

It came anyway. Nearer a minute than the forty it had been taking him all week, and the lane behind him locked mid-word. A woman's mouth stayed open on a sentence she would finish some other day, none the wiser that a boy had just shouldered past her and out the other side of the crowd. Stealth · Novice Lv 5 (0 / 1250) Six tins. He had wanted more, and taken what fit against his ribs without looking like a boy carrying something.

He thought about the woman with the two coins exactly once, walking back toward the hall with the tins against his ribs. Then he made himself stop, because there was nothing he could do about her from three streets away with the market still behind him. He kept her out of his head after that, and it was easy, and he noticed that it was easy. He got back to the hall before he let any of it start burning.

A boy learns exactly one thing the hard way and then he never has to learn it twice: work first, spend never, until you are somewhere nobody is going to walk in on you. The first tin's label lit up behind his eyes, same as it had on the hill in December, back in what already felt like a different life. Essence Shard · BODY Burn remaining: 3 hours (24 Foundation) Three hours was more than the dying dregs he'd expected off a crate under a table. He cracked the lid anyway.

A lot that size, on a normal night, would have leaked itself down to nothing on somebody's shelf by breakfast. Here there was no shelf and no breakfast, only a stopped hall and a bar with four thousand points still owed on it. He worked the whole three hours out of it standing up. He was not going to waste one training minute of a tin that had already cost a stranger a night's money. Realm 1 · KINDLED · Body 8 Foundation: 874 / 4, 900 (Body 9) Twenty four points for three hours he would have spent lifting anyway.

It was a small number and he took it, and it had cost the man on the stall the last of what he had to sell. One lot a day. He tested that rule on himself now, in his own voice, same as he tested everything else. A rule a stranger had told him on the hill had already turned out to mean something different once he had a wheel under it. He opened the second tin the next bio-day, by his own count and not the world's. It burned longer, and it paid better.

He sat with his back against the rack and watched a number climb that had nothing to do with how hard the lift felt. In three months of screens moving he had never thought about the person who had not gotten to watch one move instead. He thought about it now. He kept opening tins anyway. He took bread twice out of the same covered market while the tins lasted, off a table at the end of a shut lane. He did not stand there deciding about it either time.

He stopped flinching at the numbers after that and started adding them up instead. Looking away from what he was gaining would not have made him any less decided about it. The third tin went into the opener, the same four seconds he had drilled a thousand times that month. On a normal night it should have paid him almost nothing this deep into it. It paid him close to what it had the first week, near enough. He understood then what the man on the hill had actually been selling him. Not more hours.

Hours that counted, no matter how stale the work underneath them had gone. The fourth tin went into a different drill, one bio-day each, and he had stopped being surprised by any of it. The fifth tin burned faster than the rest and paid less for it, spent down in under two hours. Even stolen essence had a shape to it. Cheap stayed cheap, whoever was holding it. He was not going to stop. He had already decided that on the first tin, whatever he had told himself while he was deciding it.

He had known that on the hill in December, with two marks in his hand. The sixth tin was the last one. It ran out somewhere in the small hours of a day that did not exist anywhere but inside him. Realm 1 · KINDLED · Body 8 Foundation: 1, 554 / 4, 900 (Body 9) Six tins, spread across six of his own days, had paid him seven hundred points for hours that had stopped paying him anything at all.

Gault's people graded prospects on how fast they moved, and Abe knew exactly what six stolen tins had just done to his own number. He sat on a stranger's floor in a stranger's city with an empty crate at his feet. The fifth of January had not come one hour closer while he was in here. Seven days of the world still stood between him and that pad. He had no idea how many of his own days that came to, and he did not work it out. His hands still smelled like somebody else's crate.

He walked the crate three streets back through an ordinary afternoon. The lane was shut and the tables were bare. He put it under the man's table and lined it up with the leg. The chalked name was down at eye level from there, in the girl's handwriting. In the warehouse he had looked away from a name on a man's coat. He read this one. That market opened again after dark.