The Grandmaster's Gambit

4. Ninety Seconds

[Day-1 (15:56)]

(Chandler Court, Weaver's Lane, Sector 9, Alexandria)

"Ninety seconds!"

The shout came up the stairwell from the street door, flattened by four floors of brick, and a whistle followed it, one long brass shriek.

Nobody on the stairs asked what it meant, which was how Kai knew what it meant. The people coming down - and there were a great many, moving with the speed of a thing that had been rehearsed and never once enjoyed. They were counting under their breath. A man a step above him muttered "ninety, ninety, ninety" like a charm, and shoved the lad in front of him on the third repetition.

Kai was going the other way.

It should not have been possible. The stair was a vertical throat with a gas jet turned low on every landing and steam pipes knocking in the walls, and it was full. But the crowd opened for him a half-second before he reached it. A shoulder dipped. A gap was there. He slid through each one without touching anyone, and understood that he was not the one doing it. The body was reading the crowd the way he read a board: what would move, where the pressure would fall. It was a skill, and it wasn't his.

"Wrong way, Aeron!" somebody shouted.

"I know," Kai said, in a voice that wasn't his, and kept going.

On the second flight a woman was trying to carry two bulging cloth bags down a staircase that wanted both her hands. One of them split as he passed, and paper slid out across the steps: deed-cards stamped in Registry grey, a folded marriage slip, a ration book with a corner chewed by something. She dropped to one knee after them.

"Esme." Her husband stood a step below, his own hands full of nothing. "Leave it. We won't need documents if we're dead."

She looked at the cards. Then at him. Then she put one bag back over her shoulder and left the other lying open on the stair, and the stream carried her papers off a card at a time, under forty pairs of boots.

On the third landing an old man stood at his own door with a ring of keys, and his hands shook too hard to bring the right one to the lock. He had come out without his cane. A younger man stepped from the next door, lifted the ring from him without a word, locked up, and put the keys back in the old man's hand. Then he gave him the cane, which he had been carrying under his own arm all along. Neither of them said anything. They descended together at the old man's pace, and the young one took a step for every two of his.

"Sixty!" The whistle again, thinner now, two floors further down than the shout.

The fourth landing was nearly empty. The crowd had thinned to stragglers, and at the turn of the stairs, where the flight below had lost three treads to a burst pipe and left a black gap with steam rising out of it, a boy stood against the wall with his bare feet flat on the boards.

Five or six years old, he held a stuffed rabbit by one ear, ragged, missing an eye, pressed to his chest. The people coming down parted round him as water parts round a post. Nobody stopped; stopping cost ninety seconds' worth of everything. He wasn't crying. He was looking at the gap, and he was not going to step over it, and he was not going to move.

Kai had come up here with a plan, and when he looked for it, it turned out to consist of a woman's voice and the fact that his feet had agreed. He had no idea what to say to a child. He opened his mouth to find out.

His arm was already under the boy's.

It did not feel like a decision. It felt like being handed something. The boy came up onto his hip weighing what a bag of flour weighs. The rabbit's single eye level with his own, and Kai found himself reading along as the body worked, a passenger with a view of the script.

Three treads gone, and the steam coming up through the hole in a flat hot sheet. The rail on the left was bolted at one end only and swung when the stairs shook. The treads on the near side had been trampled soft by forty pairs of boots.

The far side of the flight hadn't, and the body saw that and chose the wall side, where the stringer under the boards was still iron. It shifted the boy to the hip away from the jump, so that his own weight stayed over his feet. It took two short strides and not a long one. It planted the left foot on the nosing of the last good tread, not the middle, where the board would have sagged, and pushed.

Steam took his shin like a hand. Then the far tread was under his right foot, on the ball of it, and it cracked.

The body was already forward. It took the next two stairs as one, riding the failure instead of arguing with it, and behind him the tread folded and fell, ringing off the pipework all the way down. The rabbit's ear slapped Kai in the face. The boy hadn't made a sound.

Kai was still counting the treads in his head when he reached the landing below.

"Thirty!"

Riding his hip, the boy studied the front of Kai's shirt: the three long tears, the stiff brown-black.

"You've got dead blood on you," he said.

"I know."

"Is it yours?"

"Not any more," Kai said, and heard how that sounded, and didn't take it back.

At the foot of the stairs the street-grille was coming down in sections, each one a slab of riveted steel. Rattling on its chain, and a warden in a grey coat with an amber fastener at the collar was hanging off the winch with his whole weight and shouting numbers. "Ten! Ten! Whoever's in, get out!" The gap was a yard high and shrinking. Kai watched his body not run at it. It stopped three paces short, and waited, and he nearly shouted at it, until the chain paid out its slack with a clank and the section stuck for a beat on its catch.

The body went in on that beat, down on one knee and then flat on its hip, sliding, the boy lifted clear above its head in both hands. The grille's lower edge raked the back of the shirt and the steel was cold through the cloth. Then the lane was under him, and the catch let go behind with a bang that he felt in his teeth. And he was on his feet, and the woman from the doorway was there with her arms already out.

She took the boy so hard that the rabbit hit her in the face. She was turning him round, checking his feet, his hands, his head, in the order you check something you cannot afford to find broken. "Tomas. Tomas. I said stay by the door, I said -" The grille slammed home behind them. "Aeron, I -"

"He's fine," Kai said. It was the safest sentence he'd had all day.

She looked up at him, at the shirt, at him again, her mouth working on something that wouldn't turn into words. Then the siren came round for another pass and cut it off, and she hurried the boy off up the lane into the crowd the wardens were herding, the one-eyed rabbit bouncing over her shoulder.

Kai watched them go. He had not decided to do that. He replayed it the way you replay a move you didn't make, looking for whose hand had touched the piece, and could not find the place where it had changed hands.

"AERON!"

This one hit him from the side and nearly took him off his feet. Arms round his ribs, a smell of coal smoke and wool and old sweat, a chin banging on his shoulder. Then the arms let go, and a pair of large hands gripped him by the upper arms and turned him round to be looked at.

The man was big and loose-built, twenty-four or so, with straw-coloured hair that had been slept on, a gap between his front teeth, and a coat with more pockets than anyone needed, each of which made its own noise when he moved. His eyes were red at the rims. He was looking at Kai's shirt.

"You were gutted," he said. "I saw it. I watched you go down behind the dye-works, I was thirty yards off, there was so much of it - I ran for a healer. Declan's was shut. I came back and you weren't there, and I thought -" He broke off. A hand dived into the nearest pocket and came out full of grey tokens, and he counted them. Having lost his place, he counted them again. "Eleven," he told himself. "I thought, he's under something. Look at you."

"I'm fine," Kai said.

"Are you sure - ."

"I was lucky."

"Nobody's that lucky." The tokens went back in. The hand came out of the pocket in a hurry. "Never mind. Never mind that. Hands, Aeron."

One palm stayed open at his chest, and Oren waited.

Kai looked at the palm. It was broad and scarred, and it was being offered for something, and he did not know what. The siren dropped its third note. Somewhere north a roof gave way, a long dry tearing, and the lane's windows hummed with it.

Oren's open hand closed slowly over his own heart. The gap-toothed grin dropped off his face, and what arrived in its place Kai liked much less, because it was fear, and it was fear for him.

"Aeron. Say Hands."

"Hands," Kai said.

"There you go." Oren breathed out so hard it shook his whole frame. "There you go. It's shock, it does that. My uncle forgot his own name for a day once. You're all right."

Kai let it stand. Shock was a kinder diagnosis than any he could have offered. He had been handed a script, and the script had holes in it, and the next hole might not be so forgiving.

"Where are we going?" he said, because he had to say something, and *where* was the safest question there was.

"The Rest. Where else? The Alpha road goes through the Rest, everything goes through the Rest, and Doss is holding it." Oren was walking, towing him by the sleeve.

"Doss," Kai said. He tried the name for weight, and it had none yet.

"Don't." Oren looked back, scandalised. "Don't tell me you've hit your head. Doss. Lentils. Corner of the Row, eleven years, one pot, never off the boil. He short-weights it, everyone knows he short-weights it, and then he throws in a handful of dried plums so you can't stay angry at him. You could set the building on fire and he'd be telling you it was a half-pound." The tokens were out again. "He owes you six tokens. He told me yesterday he'd pay you tomorrow. He's been telling me he'll pay you tomorrow since the first of the month."

"Six."

"Six! And he's going to stand there in front of those things with six tokens hanging off him -" Oren stopped, put the tokens away, and did not finish.

The lane ahead split. South, a street ran downhill into smoke and the thin tick of a bell. North, it ran into a roar. Kai had one rule for strange streets: when the place is on fire, go where the fire isn't. South. It was a perfectly good rule, and he turned toward it.

His feet had turned north.

He watched them go, half a step ahead of him, steady and unhurried. He had the strong impression that they knew exactly what they were walking toward, and that if he stopped them they would simply wait. After a moment he stopped trying to overtake them.

He followed.