Chương 91: Send the Boy

Dobbs walked him out of the Bell House and onto the stones. The wind came off the water, and there was nobody out there to hear either of them. For a while he did not say anything. He stood looking out at the drowned city, and Abe stood next to him and let him look. Whatever was coming had been coming since the boards last night.

"You got off a boat I put you on," said Dobbs.

"Yes."

"Don't tell me why. I know why. Everybody on that boat knows why, and if it was my street I'd want a man to do what you did." He said it without any warmth.

"That's not the point. The point is I can't send a boat out and wonder. Every boat I've got is six lives in one shell, and the man who runs it has to know that every pair of hands on it stays put. So you're no good to me on a boat, son. That's just what's true now." Abe looked at the water and took it. It was fair, but it was also the end of something, and both of those were true at once.

"Right," he said.

"I'm not finished." Dobbs turned around.

"Legs. Can you run?"

"Yes."

"How far?"

"As far as there is."

"Then that's what you are." He picked the unlit lamp up off the wall where he had set it.

"The water's not falling. The streets below the Longmarket are bad in daylight. I've got boats that can't be everywhere, and since last night no way to talk to any of them once they're out. The phones went with the power. Batteries first, then somewhere in the small hours the signal itself, and everything below the hill has been dead air since. Nobody can carry a word across this city except on foot, wading half of it. And nobody can do that fast except you.

And the day your street goes again, you'll bolt, and what I'll lose is a message. A message can be late."

"The punishment and the job are the same thing," said Abe.

"I want that understood."

"It's understood."

"Eat first, then the shed," said Dobbs.

"I mean it about the eating. You've been awake since Thursday, and in that hall just now I watched you go gray." He went back inside. At the door he stopped, with his hand on the frame.

"I'm not asking about the card, either," he said, without turning around.

"A man gets one thing he doesn't have to explain, per flood. That's yours." The day war was fought in gray light, street by street, and it went on all day. The water stood where it had stood since Thursday, and things still moved in it. Not many now, and not in waves. But enough that no crew went anywhere alone, and no boat put a hand in the water it did not have to. The crews worked the streets below the Longmarket, clearing the houses that had answered nobody since the first night.

Abe worked ahead of them, where the boats could not go. The first job was a house on the far side of a flooded cross-street. A sheet had been hanging out of its third-floor window since dawn. The street between ran chest-deep, with a current in it that had already put one crewman on his back, and the boat could not get past the fallen scaffolding at the street's mouth. The crew had been looking at that sheet for an hour with nothing to do about it.

Abe went in on foot, with a rope around his waist and the crew paying it out behind him. The current leaned on him at the middle of the street. It was the kind of push that took grown men off their feet. It found out what it was pushing on, and gave up. He set each foot the way he set it on the mats, and walked, and the water broke around his chest and did nothing else. Someone on the boat said a word his mother would not have liked, with real respect in it.

There was a family of five in the house, and a grandmother who was not climbing out any window, and said so, from the window.

"I'll wait for it to go down," she called.

"It always goes down."

"Your kettle's already across," Abe called up.

"It's sitting in the boat." It was not. The window went quiet.

"Well, which boat?" said the grandmother, and climbed out. Getting them across took most of an hour, one at a time, hand over hand on the rope, with Abe standing anchor in the middle of the current so the line had a live post in it. The smallest boy was too small to hold a rope, so he rode Abe's shoulders instead, with both hands in his hair, screaming the whole way. Halfway across, the scream changed from the frightened kind into the other kind. His mother told him off about it from the boat.

If you discover this tale on Amazon, be aware that it has been unlawfully taken from Royal Road. Please report it. When the last of them was aboard, nobody said anything clever. It had been too close for that. Fenn was at the shed when the report came back. He chalked the house off the boards, and looked at what was left on the list, and said the thing that went around the shed by dark.

"There's four more like that on the list," said Fenn, to Dobbs, flatly.

"Send the boy." So the rest of the day was crossings. A house on Tapper's Row with six people and a ceiling coming down, where the fast water was only twenty feet wide and the twenty feet had beaten two boats. A woman and her son on a roof above the fish sheds, who had been there so long the son had stopped talking, and started again halfway down the rope.

A basement with a barred window and an old man behind it, where Abe stood in four feet of current and bent the bars apart with his hands while the crew watched, and nobody even pretended not to stare. And one house where the sheet in the window turned out to be a curtain blown loose, with nobody inside, and the boat laughed too hard about it, because it was the first time all day that the answer had been nobody needed anything. Between crossings he ran.

He took the stopped way where Friday gave him one: an empty yard, a dead stretch between crews, a minute where nobody anywhere was thinking about him. Friday gave him almost none. He was the runner now, needed and expected and known by name in every street he entered. There was no being nobody anymore. So mostly he ran, in the world, as fast as his legs would go. The crews went out in pairs of boats, and the boats could not talk to each other, and the shed could not talk to anyone.

Every question and every answer crossed Calder in somebody's legs, and by midafternoon the somebody was Abe. Nine minutes from the Bell House to the shed, the first time. Eight the second, because he had learned where the water ran shallowest. After the third run, the pairs stopped leaving a man at the table to wait for answers. The answers came to them, out in the water, carried by a boy who arrived breathing easily and left the same way. The best message of the day went up to the Bell House at four o'clock.

A name off the missing column, found alive in a roof space with her cat, hungry and furious. Abe gave the name to the family it belonged to, and stood there while it landed, and got out before the crying could reach him. He had four more messages in his fist. The worst message of the day had no name in it. A man at the shed had asked him, quietly, to find out if the crews had been into a house on Nether Street yet. The answer that came back was not yet, tomorrow.

Abe carried that one word, tomorrow, back to a man who had been waiting since the bells.

"Tomorrow, then," the man said, and nodded, and went back to the end of the bench. Abe thanked whatever ran the world that the man had not asked anything else, and kept the address. June was at the children's end of the hall on every Bell House run, refereeing the rocking horse. Peg was on her chair with her eyes shut, walking a crew through somewhere, one exact door at a time. He never stopped for either of them.

Being able to not stop, because they were there and safe and would still be there the next run, was the one part of the day that felt like luck. His Foundation had not moved like this since October. He knew why, roughly. Everything he did all day sat at the edge of what he had, in the cold, with the fear riding along, and none of it was rote. He hated knowing what that meant. It meant the city's worst week was worth something to him, and it was true whether he liked it or not.

A screen came up somewhere in the middle of the afternoon. He felt it arrive, and did not stop to read it. Brammall stopped him at the shed door at five, with the slate held flat against his chest. That was not how Brammall carried the slate.

"Dolan." He said it like you steady a ladder for someone.

"Before you go back out. They found the Bewley girl this morning. Ada. Clearing the houses two streets up from your row, in a back stairwell, below the water." He did not make Abe ask.

"Nobody knew who she was till an hour ago. The name had to come down from the Bell House. She'd been there since Thursday night. It was quick, they think." The door frame was under Abe's hand. He did not remember putting it there. Two streets short. She had come down the hill at a dead run, in the dark, into the first of it, and she had gotten to within two streets of her own front door. Abe stood there for one breath. The breath had everything in it, and the day had room for none of it.

He put it away somewhere he could not feel it yet.

"Who's with her mother?"

"Your aunt. Since an hour ago." Brammall took the slate down off his chest.

"There's a message for crew four that needs running to the Longmarket."

"Give it to me," said Abe. He ran it. The water had nothing in it the whole way, and he was glad of that in a flat gray way, because there was nothing to hit. The light started going at six, and the boats came in one by one. The shed filled up with wet gear and steam and the smell of a hundred people who had worked a day past the end of themselves. Mullen had the hatch going.

He was handing out soup and telling every crew that came in that his hip said the water would start falling by Sunday, and that they could all write that down. Two people wrote it down. More than that stood near the hatch a while just to hear someone promise something. Purnell came in with the last pair, off the Longmarket at last. She found Abe by the racks and hit him once on the shoulder, hard.

"You'll tell me in the boat," she said, which from Purnell was a whole speech, and went to get her name chalked. The Longmarket had been reached, and Weaver's Row behind it, and people had come out of both alive. At ten after seven, Fenn stood at the boards with the stub of chalk and called the count, as he had the night before. Street by street. Crew by crew. Names read out, and answered, and chalked.

"Purnell."

"Here."

"Cottle." Cottle had no voice left and put a hand up instead, and Fenn counted it.

"Sefton."

"Here," said Sefton, who had been let back for the day work, and had spent it hauling like two men, and had stopped being furious somewhere around the fourth house. Eleven names got no answer. Not from tonight's work. From everything since the bells, the names that had never been answered once, standing on the board in a column that did not get shorter. Two of the names were children. Fenn did not rub anything out.

He put the chalk down on the ledge and stood looking at the column with his back to the shed, and the shed let him. Outside the light went, and the water sat in the streets in the dark. Under all of it the drains were quiet, and going into the second night, nobody trusted the quiet.