The F-Class Awakening

Chapter 4 : The Useless Ability

The Registry's official description of Connection was three hundred and forty words long, and Evan had read every one of them.

He'd read them the week after the Awakening, sitting on the floor of his room with the pamphlet under the lamp. There's a particular kind of person who, when told he's worthless, goes and reads the fine print to check.

Connection (Class F). The user creates a temporary link between two inanimate objects in physical contact. Linked objects remain joined for approximately six seconds. Links do not persist beyond that interval. Links do not transfer energy, mass, or properties. Links have no measurable effect on living tissue. The ability is of limited practical use and is not recommended for advancement.

Not recommended for advancement.

Evan had underlined that. He'd underlined a lot of things.

Now it was half past two in the morning, four days after the drowned church, and he was standing in the back alley of Pier Nine with his coat over his head against the rain, running tests.

He had thirty-one entries in his notebook. He'd added three since Tuesday.

Entry thirty-two: Pipe to puddle. Puddle did not stop leaking. PIPE stopped leaking. 4 seconds.

He'd stared at that one for a long time.

The pipe had a crack in it. The alley had a puddle under the pipe. He'd touched the pipe and touched the water, because touching two things was the only move he had, and he'd expected nothing. What happened was that the water inside the pipe went into the puddle. Not leaked. Crossed. Fast. As if the puddle had been part of the pipe all along.

It took him an hour to work out what he was looking at.

He wasn't joining two objects. He was joining what was different about them. The pipe was under pressure. The puddle wasn't. He'd put his hand in the middle of that difference and opened a door, and the difference had gone through.

Entry thirty-three: Kettle to sink. Cold water from sink went INTO kettle. Kettle got cold, sink water got hot. 3 seconds.

Entry thirty-four: Coffee cup to window glass. Cup still hot. Glass fogged from inside. 2 seconds.

Two seconds.

He'd gone cold when he wrote that down, because the first week it had been six. Six, six, six, seven once. Now it was two and getting shorter, and the only thing he'd done differently in between was open a door in a drowned church and let another life pour through it.

He was still standing there thinking about that when the grid bell went.

*  *  *

The bell meant clear the deck.

Evan came around the corner of the warehouse at a run and saw the whole thing happen in a way he would never manage to reconstruct properly afterward, however many times he walked it back frame by frame.

The number four crane had been hauling containers all night in weather it should have been shut down for. A forty-foot box hung three-quarters of the way over the ship when the sling's left bridle let go. There was a sound like a rifle shot. The container came off in a long, wrong arc, tipping, and it was going to land across the apron where two men were still walking, because the bell had come three seconds too late.

Evan knew both of them. One was Ayo, a kid two years younger who worked the lashing crew and never shut up about football. The other was Steadman, a big quiet man with a bad back and a sick wife, who had never once been unkind to Evan.

He was twenty meters away. Too far. His body knew it before his mind did, and something in him refused to accept the arithmetic.

He ran.

He was not fast. He'd never been fast. But in the last four days he'd discovered he could feel a difference: pressure, heat, motion. He could feel where a thing was high and where it was low, and the shape of the door between them.

The container was falling. Its state was motion. Beneath it was the quay, poured concrete on piles, heavy and completely still.

Evan got his hand on the deck rail twelve meters from the impact point and did the thing that was supposed to be impossible.

Links do not transfer energy, mass, or properties.

He opened the door.

*  *  *

Later he would say it was like grabbing a rope tied to a train.

The container's motion came through the link and through Evan and out his hand into the deck. The deck wasn't interested. The whole difference had to go somewhere, and the only thing in the circuit was him.

His right arm lit up.

Inside his own head, without hearing it, he heard a hundred crowbars being struck at once.

The container hit the quay.

It hit hard and it hit wrong. Instead of punching through the apron and taking two men with it, the box came down nearly flat and the concrete didn't fail. The crack went sideways instead: a long crooked fault running twenty meters along the quay, opening a seam in the pavement a man could have put his arm into.

Ayo and Steadman were thrown off their feet, and stayed down, and stayed down whole.

Evan's arm was on fire, and then it was nothing. Not numb. Missing, like a piece of him had gone off the map. He pitched forward onto the rail. His mouth filled with something hot and metallic and he spat it onto the deck between his boots.

Four seconds, he thought, with the small part of his mind still working. It held four seconds.

Then the second wave hit, and he understood, in a way he hadn't before, what he'd just paid.

Not the arm. The arm would come back. It always came back.

Something else had been taken. He could feel the shape of the gap without being able to see what was missing.

His right hand closed on the rail. He made himself stand. He made himself walk. He got eight steps before his knees quit.

*  *  *

Steadman found him ten minutes later, sitting against a bollard behind the west warehouse with his dead arm in his lap.

"You," Steadman said.

"Me."

Steadman stood over him for a while. His face didn't do much. Evan had spent a week deciding he liked him.

"What did you do?"

"I don't know."

"You did something."

"I don't know what it's called." Evan wiped his mouth with the back of his good hand. "I put my hand on the rail."

Steadman looked toward the rail. Then at the crack in the quay, which had already drawn four men with torches. One was the foreman. One was taking pictures.

"Boy," Steadman said quietly, "they're going to want to know how the concrete split."

"It split because it was cracked."

"It wasn't cracked."

"Then because of the rain." Evan spat again, and it came out red. "I fell down and hit my head. I was nowhere near the rail."

Steadman looked at him for a long moment. The foreman's voice carried across the quay, calling names.

"Your arm's out," Steadman said.

Evan looked down at it. It hung off his shoulder like something he'd bought and not paid for.

"I've had worse."

"You haven't." Steadman put his hands in his pockets. Then, with no change in his voice: "My wife's name is Nell. She's been sick nine years. The kid, Ayo, he's nineteen and he's an idiot, and if that box had landed he'd have stayed nineteen." He turned away. "I don't know what you are, and I don't want to. But I'm going to remember this.

"You understand? I'm going to remember it."

He walked off into the lights.

Evan sat there with his arm gone and his mouth tasting like a coin. It was the first thing anyone had given him since the Awakening: an IOU he hadn't asked for and couldn't refuse.

*  *  *

He didn't get home until almost five.

He took the long way, along the water, because the water was the one place in Halcyon that didn't ask anything of him. By the seawall his arm had started to come back. Pins and needles first, then a slow horrible roar that made him want to peel the whole limb off. By the end of the piers it was there again, weak and shaking, but his.

The sky was greying over the estuary, the fog thinning to a low band on the water. He was passing Pier Nine's old outer dock, the one nobody used, where he'd done all his testing that first week.

He stopped.

There was a bollard at the corner. Eleven days ago he'd sat on it with a bent nail and a scrap of canvas and touched them together, out of ideas, just to check the ability did what the pamphlet said.

The canvas was still there. It had blown against the base of the bollard and wedged into the gap between the iron and the wood.

The nail was still in it.

Evan crouched beside it and looked at the two of them stuck together, canvas and nail, the way they'd been for eleven days.

Links do not persist beyond that interval.

Six seconds. Eleven days ago.

He laid his good hand on them.

The link was still live.

It was there the way a rope is there. Not glowing, not humming, just there, a thin tight fact between two pieces of junk, holding for eleven days without telling anyone. His hand closed on it and it felt like every link he'd ever made. And then he felt something he had never felt in any of them.

There was tension on the other end.

Something was pulling back.

Evan sat back on his heels in the grey beginning of the morning, his right arm singing and the fog coming apart around him, and looked at a bent nail stuck in a scrap of canvas.

Then he looked up.

The bollard was set in the ground. The dock was bolted to the bollard. The dock ran a hundred and forty meters out over the water to a derelict pier head, and the pier head was tied into the seawall, and the seawall ran the length of the Narrows and disappeared under the Registry Tower at the center of the city. Every bolt of it was one continuous piece of iron and stone, laid down over thirty years by people who had never thought of it as a single thing.

Evan's hand was on a thread he had tied eleven days ago.

And somewhere at the far end of it, in the middle of the city, something was holding on.

He let go of the nail. He stood up and started for home, fast, his arm hanging useless at his side, and he didn't look back at the dock. He had the distinct and unpleasant feeling that if he did, he'd find the canvas had moved.