Chương 58: Nothing Left to Take

He walked the whole city on the third, to be sure. It took him nine hours of his own legs and no world time at all. He went up one side of every street in Prescot and down the other, in a stopped gray morning, with the sleet hanging in the air like grit in water. Forty shops, the warehouse on the Prescot road, the two yards behind the bus stop with pallets in them. He had the list in his head and he went into every one of them again. The corner store had a shelf of dish soap and a shelf of birthday cards.

The big one by the bus stop had its cooler standing open at the back with nothing in it but the racks, and somebody had stacked the empty trays neatly, which takes longer than throwing them. The ninth shop had the woman and the baby in it. She was behind the counter with her hand on the register and her mouth shut this time, and the shelf Abe had taken eight tins off was holding paper napkins now. There was a piece of card taped to the front of it in marker. It said ONE PER PERSON.

He stood in front of her for a while. At the end of nine hours he was in the market lane where the table used to be. There was a wet patch where its legs had stood and that was all there was. There was nothing left in Prescot that he had not already taken. Abe sat down on the curb in a stopped street and worked out what he had. Three days of food in the bag. Eleven tins of essence, which at one a day was eleven days against a bar wanting twelve thousand. Two hundred and sixty marks.

A coat and a radio and New Year's Day had taken the rest of Riddell's twelve hundred. A green core the size of both fists that nobody in Calder would touch. He was going to be hungry on Monday with money in his pocket. Riddell was up a ladder with a box of window latches, counting them into his hand.

"Give me a minute," he said, without looking down.

"If I lose this count I start it again." Abe waited. Riddell got to the end, said a number to himself twice, and came down. Abe put the green core on the counter. Riddell looked at it for a long moment and did not pick it up.

"No," he said.

"You haven't heard a price."

"I've not got one. That's the trouble." He put a finger down next to it, close, and still did not touch it.

"Four men off the crews bring me gray. I know what gray does and I know what it's worth on a Tuesday. I have never seen one go green, and I don't know a man who has."

"So you won't sell it."

"I can't buy it." Riddell went around behind the counter.

"Somebody can. Not in this city."

"Who?"

"I don't know a name, and I'm not inventing you one." There was no apology in it at all.

"A place with a real market has somebody in it who prices what nobody has seen. That is what a market that size is for. I sell window latches." Abe put the core back in the bag. Then he asked the other thing, because he had come for it.

"How much essence can you get me. Cash, today, as much as there is."

"How much do you want?" Abe told him the number. Riddell stopped with his hand on the till.

"That's more than this shop sells in a month," he said. Abe walked home along the Corn Road doing it in his head. Riddell had said yes to the number. A tin on the Corn Road cost about what four days of June's doses cost, which was never enough money to be worth stealing. He did the rest of the walk doing sums about a city he had never been to. June was in the chair by the window when he got home, with her legs over the arm of it, and she had the school notebook open on her knee. She did not shut it this time.

She looked at him. Then she held it out so he could read it.

"Go on," she said. It was dates down the left margin in her writing, small and even, one line each. 13 Dec. Peg's shifts moved to Tuesdays. A case of theft: this story is not rightfully on Amazon; if you spot it, report the violation. 17 Dec. Mrs. Ellery on the second floor, the one with the cart. Her name is Mrs. Ellery. 24 Dec. The clinic moved my Thursday to a Friday. You were there. 31 Dec. The dog is called Trevor. There were four pages of it.

"June."

"You keep asking me the same stuff." She had her thumb in the corner of the page and she was not looking at him.

"Not on purpose. I know it's not on purpose."

"How long have you been doing this?"

"Since the fifth of December." She said the date flat, in her hospital voice.

"You asked me what Peg's shifts were and then you asked me again after tea. Same day. You said it the same way both times, that's the bit." Abe looked at the page. He remembered the cart. He did not remember Mrs. Ellery.

"So I started writing them down," June said.

"Then you'd have them. That's all it is." He sat on the arm of the chair and read it properly, and June let him, and neither of them said anything for a while. He read all four pages looking for the line where she said he had changed. It was not in there. Four pages of Peg's shifts and clinic dates and a neighbor's name and a dog. She had made him a copy of their week and kept it outside his head.

"You could have told me," he said.

"I did tell you." She took the notebook back and shut it.

"That's the whole problem, isn't it." Then she put her legs back over the arm of the chair and picked up the pen.

"Peg's on the late shift Wednesday," June said.

"Write it down or don't." He went out that night after the worst thing left within reach of Prescot. He had known where it was since the twenty-ninth of December, because everything out on that marsh knew where it was. There was a mile of standing water south of the channel that nothing else went into, and the reason was sitting in the middle of it. Abe cased it for eleven hours. He walked the whole mile in a stopped world, twice, and he still could not tell where the animal stopped and the water started.

It lay along the bottom like a sunk barge. What came up above the surface was a ridge of back the length of a bus, and it was the only part of it he could measure. He found four ways out of that water and he stood in each one of them. He worked out where the head had to be from the flattened reeds. Then he set his feet on the one piece of hard ground in a mile and picked his spot, four feet from where the head had to be, and he stood there for a long while before he let go, and he was honest with himself about why.

The world came on. The whole mile of water stood up. Abe got the opener in and it went in clean and he did not see what happened after that, because the water came over him from behind and took him off his feet and rolled him into the reeds. He came up in it. He could not tell which way the bank was. Something went past him under the surface that was still going past him four seconds later.

Then his boot found the bottom, and he got a shoulder down into the mud and drove himself up off it, and the head came around out of the dark at him and he put the blade up into it with both hands and all his weight and every hour he had ever spent on the drill. It stopped. Not all at once. It stopped the way a truck stops. Abe went down on his knees in three feet of freezing water with the grip still in both hands, and stayed there.

Realm 1 · KINDLED · Body 13 Foundation: 3, 260 / 14, 400 (Body 14) He read it kneeling in the water with his hands shaking so hard the screen jumped, and he laughed, once, out loud, in an empty marsh at two in the morning. It took him two more days of his own time to cut it up. He went back into the still and worked. He ate what was left in the bag and slept on the flattened reeds and got up and worked again, and somewhere in the second day the bar filled up under him without any ceremony at all.

Realm 1 · KINDLED · Body 14 Foundation: 1, 900 / 16, 900 (Body 15) Body 14 beside Mind 5, and the board adds them together. Nineteen. Abe stood in a mile of stopped water at the bottom of a marsh forty miles from his own bed, and he was the deepest person he had ever heard of, and there was nobody inside a day's walk to tell. Nita's board in the school corridor went up to twelve. He had watched her rule the lines herself, in green marker, with a meter stick off the science room wall.

There was no line on it for this. Then the menu came up. EVOLUTION · DRILL HAND Choose one. This choice is permanent. LONG HAND · Common The drilled opening runs eight seconds instead of four. Twice the work, and twice the ground it covers. COLD START · Fine The first exchange goes your way against a person you have never watched move. You do not need to have seen them. You only need to have drilled. SECOND MEETING · Rare Anyone who has landed a blow on you may be met again. Not as they are now. As they were then.

Abe read it three times. LONG HAND · Common was eight seconds instead of four. It was the best four seconds anybody alive had against him, doubled, and he could feel his hand wanting it. COLD START · Fine was better. Every person he had ever fought out here he had watched first. Take that one and he would not have to. SECOND MEETING · Rare he read twice and could not make worth anything. It only worked on a person who had already landed one on him.

He would have to lose an exchange first to get any use out of it at all, and the first exchange was the one thing on Earth he could not lose. But a Rare pays two points at a rank crossing where a Common pays one. Croft had told him that in Riddell's shop in October, leaning over somebody else's blade with his hands behind his back. Our family's sword is a Rare, and that's the whole reason we're anybody. Abe had stood in this exact spot once already.

In October he had read DEEP WELL · Rare for four seconds and picked something else, and he still did not know what he had put down. He was not doing that twice. He stood in the marsh with the menu open in front of him and thought about the one boy in Calder whose family owned a Rare, who would be in the corridor on Monday morning looking at a board. Then he did what he had done on a wet roof in November, and left it.

DRILL HAND · Adept HELD · no progress while a choice is open Where the bar should have been filling there was an empty outline and nothing moving in it. That was going to cost him, and he knew roughly how much, and he shut the screen anyway. He came out of the marsh at first light on the fourth with a bag he could barely lift and no food in it at all. Prescot had two ways out of it. He had taken the south one about sixty times, because the south one went to Calder.

He walked up to the north one and stood at the end of it. Nothing was moving on it in either direction, as far as he could see. A place with a real market. Somebody in it who prices what nobody has seen. Whatever was up there, it was nine hours of his own legs, and it would not take a minute off the clock in Peg's kitchen. He thought about June writing 31 Dec. The dog is called Trevor in a school notebook so he would have it. Then he got quiet, and turned north, and started running.