The F-Class Awakening

Chapter 5 : The First Price

For two weeks, Yuna had been C-Class and had been careful about it in every way except out loud.

She finally told him at the depot the next evening, standing on the loading step with her hands on her hips, in the tone of someone delivering a verdict.

"Emberhold," she said. "I hold heat in my hands. I can warm up a pot. I can warm up a pot very confidently."

"There's more to it than that."

"There is not."

"There's always more to it."

"Evan, I held a Registry technician's lunch for four minutes and he wrote PROMISING on a form." She hopped down. "I'm going to be a very expensive space heater."

He laughed. It was the first time in days, and it hurt his ribs. Which are probably part of the bill, he thought, and then didn't know why he'd thought it.

They walked along the depot road together. Yuna worked in an old goods shed down on the Cut: a long brick barn with a slate roof, half full of crates off the piers and half full of damp and pigeons.

"How's your mother?" she said.

"Same."

"Same meaning worse."

"Same meaning same." He'd been lying about it for six years with the flatness of long practice. "The specialist says the nerve damage is stable. Stable's not nothing."

Yuna didn't answer that, which was one of the reasons he liked her. She'd never once tried to fix it for him.

At the gate she stopped.

"You look like something the tide left."

"I fell down."

"You fell down."

"I fall down a lot."

"Fine." She hooked her arm through his for two seconds and let go. "Come in for an hour. I've got a flask and nobody's on till ten. You can tell me about the girl."

Evan turned his head. "What girl?"

"The one who turned up at Pier Nine." Yuna was already walking. "The whole pier's talking about it, Evan, in case you thought that was private."

Which is how Evan Vale came to be standing thirty meters inside the goods shed at nine forty that night, arguing with his best friend about a girl he'd known for six days, when the roof came down.

*  *  *

It didn't come down all at once.

He would be grateful for that later. It took four or five seconds and came with warning: a long grinding creak from the tie-beams, then a string of pops, like firecrackers, as hundred-year-old iron pins let go one after another.

The report said afterward that the shed had been carrying too much for decades. A week of rain on a slate roof already past its life, and the eastern third of the span had simply decided it was finished.

Yuna was standing under it.

She was fifteen meters away with a crate manifest in her hand, and Evan was looking straight at her when the first pin went. He saw her look up.

He had time for three thoughts. The first was don't run, it's coming down right here. The second was you can't reach her.

The third was the one that mattered. He never forgave himself for it, because it wasn't save her and it wasn't I love her. It was the thing his notebook had been teaching him for two weeks:

A difference has to go somewhere.

*  *  *

He got four steps.

He had his hand on a stanchion. Yuna had her arms over her head. The whole eastern span was coming down on her in a wall of slate and pine and a hundred and thirty years of dust.

Evan connected them.

Not the roof to the floor. He'd tried that on the quay, and it had cost him an arm and a fault line through the concrete.

He connected Yuna's body to his own. The two of them, one link, door open.

Links have no measurable effect on living tissue.

He would think about that line in the pamphlet for the rest of his life. About how many things the Registry had got wrong, and how the wrong ones were always the ones they'd decided in advance.

He felt the link take. He felt the whole onrushing difference between standing and about to be hit by a roof, and he felt it decide, with the stupid mechanical tidiness of a scale settling, that it had somewhere to go.

And then it went to Evan.

*  *  *

He didn't lose consciousness. He wished he had.

Instead he lay on the floor of the shed under a heap of broken slate and watched Yuna, thirty feet away, standing in a rain of debris that parted around her as if she were standing behind glass. And he felt, in his shoulder, in his ribs, in the place under his ribs where things were now arranged incorrectly, exactly what had been taken off her and put on him.

She didn't even fall.

That was the part he could never explain to anyone. The roof came down on Yuna, and Evan took the roof, and a dozen people watched a girl walk out of a collapsing building with dust on her shoulders. They would tell that story for the rest of their lives.

Evan lay in the dark under the wreck and bled quietly and thought, with strange detached clarity: This is what it does. It doesn't heal. It doesn't fix. It takes what was going to happen to someone and lets it happen to you instead, and it charges you for the delivery.

Somebody was shouting his name.

Then Yuna's hands were on his face. She was saying his name over and over and pulling slate off him with her bare hands, making a sound he'd never heard her make. He wanted to tell her he was fine, and what came out was a laugh, which frightened her more than the blood did.

"I'm all right," he said. "Yuna. I'm all right."

"You're not all right —"

"Hey." He got a hand on her wrist. "You held onto the manifest."

She looked down. She still had it. She'd walked out of a collapsing building with the crate manifest in her hand and hadn't noticed.

"Evan —"

"Don't tell anyone." His eyes were closing. He fought it. "Yuna. Look at me. There were people here. Tell them the truth. The truth is fine. The roof came down and you were lucky. Just don't put me in it."

"Why?"

Because you'll end up on a list, he thought. Because there's a code that says DO NOT RE-TEST, and a man who tore a page in half to keep me off one, and because I don't know what I am yet, and I won't find out with you standing next to me.

"Because nobody asks," he said, "about a boy who fell down."

*  *  *

They kept him at the county ward for two nights.

Broken collarbone. Three cracked ribs. Something wrong with his shoulder that the doctor kept calling impressive and couldn't name. His mother sat by the bed the first evening and held his hand and didn't say much, which was how she did things. He fell asleep looking at her: the thin wrists, the grey coming in at her temples, the way she sat like sitting cost something.

The second morning, Yuna came with a bag of oranges and a face like a locked door.

"I'm not going to ask," she said, sitting down.

"Good."

"I'm going to ask one thing, and then I'm not going to ask anything again."

"All right."

"What did it cost you?"

Evan looked at the ceiling.

"That's the problem," he said. "I don't know yet."

For two days after he got home, that was true. He slept. His collarbone ached. His mother made the soup she always made, thin and grey and dependable, and Evan ate it and did everything one-handed and waited for the bill.

It came on the second night, in his own kitchen, over soup.

"Your father used to eat it like that," his mother said. "Straight off the spoon, standing up, like a builder. He never sat down for soup once in his life."

"Mm," Evan said.

"Remember the day we got the radio? He put it on the counter and it was far too loud and you were tiny and kept saying higher, higher —"

"Mm," Evan said. Then something in the shape of her sentence caught, and he looked up. "The radio?"

She smiled. "The blue one."

"The blue one."

"The blue one that lived in that corner for nine years, Evan. Your father brought it home from the yard when you were four. You used to sit under it."

Evan sat with his spoon in the soup and his whole body very still.

He looked at the corner where the radio had been. He knew, the way you know facts, that there'd been a radio. He could have told a stranger: There was a blue radio in that corner. My father brought it home. It was in his head like the date of a battle.

He couldn't remember it.

Not the counter it sat on. Not the noise it made. Not being four years old underneath it, or the shape of his father's coat the day it came. He reached for it the way you reach for a stair that isn't there. Twice. Three times.

His mother was watching him.

"Evan?"

"Nothing," he said. "I'm tired."

*  *  *

That night he sat on the floor of his room with the lamp on and the notebook open and did the arithmetic. He couldn't leave arithmetic alone.

Connection couldn't create. That was the first rule. It couldn't make a wound vanish or stop a roof or save a girl from something she shouldn't have survived. All it could do was move a difference from one side to the other.

And every move had a f*e.

He had paid for the container with his arm. He had paid for Yuna's life with his shoulder and his ribs. And he had paid for something else with the radio, and with whatever else was missing that he couldn't see.

He flipped back through the notebook, looking for the rule he'd written the day of the quay. He found it. Then he found it again, two pages earlier, in his own handwriting, in the same words.

He had no memory of writing either one.

He didn't know how much he'd already spent.

He closed the notebook and put his head back against the wall. In the other room he could hear his mother moving around, putting things away, quiet as always. She'd asked him about the radio and he'd looked at her as if she were speaking a foreign language.

That was when he understood that the price wouldn't always be his to choose. The ability would keep finding the cheapest thing in the house and taking it. And the cheapest things in Evan Vale's house were the ones he had nobody left to tell.

He was still sitting there when the knock came.

Three slow, deliberate raps at a quarter past one in the morning. Nobody in the Narrows knocked quietly. People either had a key or had a reason not to knock at all.

Evan got up.

Through the peephole he saw a man on the landing in a plain grey coat. Not the grey of the woman in the gallery, but close enough that they might have been cut from the same cloth. He stood with his hands folded and his face turned slightly toward the door, as if he'd heard the footsteps coming and knew exactly how long they'd take.

The man said through the wood, in a voice pitched politely low:

"Good evening, Evan. I'd rather not wake your mother."

A pause.

"My name is Cassian Thorne. I work in the Archive."