Chương 76: Ceiling Heights

He went back the next morning, to a room in that building he had never been in, and he did not tell anybody at home where he was going. He could have run it stopped and been through the north gate before the house was up. He took the bus instead and paid for the seat. Riddell was in the shop on a Saturday.

Abe had decided in the car on Friday night that he would stand at the bench and tell him the two strangers had turned out to be a job, and then Saturday came, and the shop was one way up the hill and the bus stop was the other, and he went to the bus stop. The man on the door looked at his card, and then at him, and then wrote a time in a book and handed the card back. Nobody had ever put his name in a book to let him in anywhere before.

It was four rooms with steel shelving and a table in each, and a smell of old paper going soft. The depth readings were in ring binders by district and the pictures were in flat drawers. The drowned north was in a card index somebody kept by hand until 1994 and then stopped. He had gone looking for the drowned streets on his phone in October and gotten a tourist picture of a cathedral and two men arguing about tides. The free part of the internet is small and he had read all of it twice before he ever Awakened.

And a phone is dead in a stopped room. He had stood in a stopped street above the drain for an hour and a half once with the bars at the top of the screen sitting at nothing. So what he had ever had to read was a school library, a cupboard of dead men's paperbacks, his father's manual, and one archive in January that he got to the end of in eleven days. Somebody had stood up in a boat with a weighted line and written down one number, and then moved the boat and done it again, for nine years.

Every sheet had a date on it and two initials in the corner, and on about a third of them the initials were the same. One of them was an M. He found Water Street in the second room, in a binder with a rubber band around it. There were eleven pictures, all of them taken from a boat. Every one showed roofs and the tops of windows and a gray line where the water was. In four you could see the building, because it is bigger than the ones on either side and its stone goes a different color wet.

The hatch was not in any of them. The hatch is in the sidewalk, and the sidewalk had been eleven feet down for eighty years. He sat with that for a while. The ceiling heights were a folder on their own, and it took him most of an hour to work out why a survey unit would measure a thing like that. A room with a low ceiling has no air in the top of it. A room with a high one might. So somebody had gone along a street in a boat and guessed at the insides of houses he had never been in.

How much air a man might find in each one, if he ever got through a door. Two hundred and some entries, every one of them a guess, and every one done properly with the reasoning written underneath in small handwriting. There was no entry for a basement anywhere in the folder. He did not stop the world once. He could not have explained that to anybody. He had fifty hours available to him in that room. He sat and read at the speed a person reads, for nine hours, with his coat on the back of a chair.

The still would have gotten him through it faster. It would not have gotten him through it better, because he did not understand a third of what he was looking at. At about four in the afternoon he was halfway through a folder of ceiling heights when the screen came up. Study · Novice Lv 8 (0 / 3, 200) Then, on top of it, before he had finished looking at the first one: Mind 6 reached.

Mind 6 Realm 1 · KINDLED · Mind 6 Foundation: 0 / 3, 600 (Mind 7) Abe sat in a room with no windows and put both hands over his face, and laughed once, and then had to sit still for a while. Study had been sitting at Novice 7 since November. He had thrown two months of stopped hours at it and it had crawled. He could not follow nine years of survey. One level and a whole layer in one afternoon, sitting still, in a room with a radiator.

The Trance had paid him a level in a dark kitchen the night before, for a night he spent failing, and he had been too tired to look at it properly. Somewhere in the sitting still he caught up with the arrest, and with the seven o'clock they had picked for it. He had expected minding about that to take longer. He put his hands down and looked at the folder of ceiling heights. He had known since the archive why Study had stalled.

Nine floors of new pages had moved that bar further in eleven days than every school book in Calder had moved it in a year. The bar pays for the hard part. It does not pay for the rest. What he had never done was turn that on the rest of his life. In a stopped yard he picked what he did. He had picked the stance and the forms and the sword, and he had picked all three because he was already halfway good at them. He had come in off that concrete soaked most nights and gone to bed sure he had done something.

Fifty hours a day since October, and he had chosen every single one of them himself, and every one of them was a thing he could already do a bit of. He had liked it that way, though. That was the bit he did not want to look at. Hours had gotten him money. Hours had gotten him through a locked door. Hours had gotten his name up off the bottom of a board. This room was nine years of somebody else's work in somebody else's handwriting.

It was the first thing anybody had ever put in front of him that he could not follow at all, and it would still be too hard for him in March. Unless he learned to read it. Then he thought about the reading room door. A case of content theft: this narrative is not rightfully on Amazon; if you spot it, report the violation. It was two floors down in a building nobody let him into without a card. A woman he had met on Friday could shut it any week the office told her to.

He did not do anything about the door, and he did not do anything about learning to read the survey either. He got up and got the next binder, because there were two rooms of them he had not opened yet and a bus home to catch. He got home at ten and June was at the kitchen table with the green book beside her elbow, where it lived now.

"Where were you."

"Reading." She looked at him, and then at the clock, and then back at him. The sheet was on the wall by the window over her shoulder, in her own handwriting, and the cheapest line on it was four hundred marks. He had spent that some time after seven the night before, sitting on a plastic chair, on a man in Prescot who was never going to know his name. He had been right to. He was still sure of it, standing in his own kitchen with his coat on. Being sure did not do one thing for him.

"All right," June said, and went back to her page. She used to keep going. In November she had carried a contract out to the hall light and read it until she found the line that was going to hurt, and then said it out loud where Peg could hear. Tonight she asked him once, and he said one word, and she let it go. That was worse than the two days in Manchester had been. Sunday he went out with the crew, because it was Sunday. He had thought about not going.

He got as far as working out what he would say to Dobbs on the phone. Then he put his boots on instead. On Thursday Peg had stood on that landing and told two strangers to go and ask his crew about him. Her voice had gone up half a tone. It had carried in through every open door in the building. Nobody said anything about it at the shed. Cottle came past him at the rack, took the wet rope off his shoulder and put a dry one there instead.

"Wrong one," he said. Then he went on down the shed. Nobody else said anything to Abe at all before the boat, and he carried the dry rope down to the ramp and was ridiculously pleased about it. Then Purnell started talking on the ramp and did not stop until they were in the punt.

"My sister's husband has bought a van," she said.

"Nineteen years old, and there's no floor in the back half of it. He's delighted."

"No floor?"

"You can see the road going past underneath. He says it's for drainage." Purnell laughed like a gull.

"He drove it to Prescot on Tuesday with a dog in the back." Nobody in that boat wanted to know one thing about that van, and she told them all of it anyway, for twenty minutes. By the time they got out onto the open water everybody had their gloves on and nobody had asked Abe anything. Dobbs put him on the pole for the first hour, which is the end of the boat where the man in charge can watch you work. At about eleven they came over a roof ridge in four feet of water.

Abe looked down at the gutter and the slates and the black gap where a window used to be. The room under him had air in it or it did not. Nobody in that boat knew. Somebody forty one miles north had guessed at it in small handwriting and filed the guess.

"You're quiet," Dobbs said.

"I'm always quiet."

"You are." Dobbs went on watching the water.

"Permit's still good, by the way. In case you were sitting there wondering about it." Abe put the pole down and picked it up again, for something to do with his hands.

"Thanks."

"Don't thank me. My name's on it too." Monday morning the school did the February read. He knew what he was walking into before he got as far as the gym. Two strangers had walked him down four minutes of Salt Row on Thursday morning, at the hour they had picked because the street would be full, and Ada Bewley had stood on the stairs and asked him what she was supposed to say at school. Whatever she said had gotten around by Friday and had the weekend to improve.

Amrit was telling people Abe had spent the weekend in a cell in Manchester. Ottley was telling it as stealing, and people laughed at Ottley, and Ottley was the one who had it right. Nobody asked him about it. He had spent the whole walk in getting an answer ready and nobody wanted one. They did it on the first Monday, before homeroom, in the gym, which was cold at that hour. Forty people stood on a floor in their coats and waited for a machine on a cart to warm up.

Nell Mott went first, because Nell Mott always went first. Croft got on the pad, got off it, and said "You're still under me, Ottley," across the whole gym.

"Machine's broken," said Ottley, who had not moved a rung since October and said that every month. Ada Bewley moved a rung and pretended she had not. Naylor did not move and took it well. Amrit did not move and did not take it well. Then Tench said "Dolan" without looking up from the cart, in the flat voice he used on the register. Abe stepped onto the rubber pad. The screen changed. DOLAN, A. · Layer 22 · Body 16 · Mind 6 Ellis Naylor said "twenty two" once, flatly, and went back to doing his coat up.

In January Abe had stood in Tench's doorway and asked for a pad at break, off the rotation, because Prescot was full on the Saturday. Forty people had come to watch that one. This morning he had asked nobody for anything and it took about nine seconds, and then forty people put their coats on and went to homeroom. Nobody in that gym knew where the twenty two had come from.

It came out of a room with no windows under a parking lot, forty one miles north, off a folder of guesses about how much air was in other people's houses. Tench got the machine back onto the cart on his own and did not ask anybody for a hand.

"Dolan." Abe stopped.

"Whatever you're doing," Tench said, to the cart, "you're doing it somewhere I can't see it. That's your business and I'm not asking." He got the strap over the handle.

"I'd rather know you were being careful, that's all."

"I'm being careful."

"Right," said Tench, and wheeled the cart out through the fire doors. Ada Bewley was waiting where the corridor turns by the equipment cage, with her bag on both shoulders.

"Are you all right."

"Yes."

"Right." She did not move out of the way.

"My mother's asked me about you twice and I've had nothing to tell her either time, and she's going to ask me again tonight." Croft stopped because Ada had stopped.

"Somebody's saying a cell," he said.

"Ottley's saying a cell."

"I know what Ottley's saying. I'm asking you." Croft got a shoulder on the wall.

"Were you in one."

"No."

"Right," said Croft, and let go of the wall.

"Don't tell them," said Ottley, arriving.

"Honestly. Don't. Nothing has happened in this school since October and you're about to ruin the one thing."

"Twenty on the twelfth of January," Naylor said, to nobody, counting it off the wall with one finger.

"Twenty two this morning. Gone two days in the middle. I've been telling people he's on something since before Christmas and if it turns out to be a permit that's my whole month wasted."

"You cannot get a rung off essence, though." Amrit had not gone up that morning and had not taken it well.

"That is not how it works and everybody keeps saying it like it is. Nobody in this corridor has read the-""Amrit," said Ada, without turning around.

"Tables," said Amrit.

"Except me. I'm saying what it is." So Abe gave them the part he was allowed to give, because Ada had asked first and had waited for it.

"I've got a license," he said.

"And a permit. There's a survey unit out of Manchester and I go in the water for them one day a month, starting in March. That's all it is." Nobody said anything at all. He got the card out of his coat, because it was easier than saying it twice. Croft took it off him and read both sides of it and handed it to Ada without being asked.

"That's a government card," Croft said.

"I know."

"A permit," said Ottley, to nobody, and went quiet for the first time that morning.

"Which water," said Amrit.

"All of it. The flooded part."

"Oh," said Amrit, and had nothing after that. Ada read the card, and gave it back, and shifted the bag on her shoulders.

"I'll tell her tonight," she said, and that was the end of the cell. Croft had not said anything for a while.

"I've been under you since November," he said.

"That's fine if you earned it."

"It is."

"Two days, though. For a permit."

"Yes."

"No," said Croft.

"Not two days." Then Nita Sowerby said, from behind all of them, "What do they want you for?"

"I can't say."

"I've asked you for one word since October." Nita said it the way she read out a total.

"Can't, or won't." Two people laughed. Danforth did not. He had come up the corridor with his bag on one shoulder and had been standing there long enough to have heard all of it.

"Nobody sends two people up Salt Row at seven in the morning about a permit," he said. Nobody laughed at that either.

"They walked you four minutes in front of your own street, on a Thursday, at seven in the morning, when the whole street is out. You could have signed a permit on a Saturday and none of us would have heard about it." Danforth said it quietly, and to Abe, and not to the corridor.

"I've done four years of this the way you're supposed to. I'd like to know what Thursday was." Abe had the true answer in his mouth the whole time. It started with four loaves off a rack on Marley Street, so it stayed there.

"I can't say."

"No," said Danforth.

"I heard." He went to class, and held the door for a freshman on the way.