Chapter 4Middle of the Board

The envelope was still on the bed when he woke up, so last night had happened.

Small bills, with Kessler’s thumb on every one of them. Two screws and a chain lay by the door where they’d fallen. Wes rolled onto his side and lay there with all of it.

At 6:02 an email had come in from the Sink Authority. LICENSING TRIAL · SITTING 412 · CANDIDATE 22 OF 31. The rules came under that. For once in his life somebody had written down the rules of a thing before he had to do it.

The Trial ran one day: the Lift and the Run up on the Rim in the morning, then an hour on Shelf Four, where a hunter needed one clean kill and a gleaner needed to bring the gauge on his own patch of air down four points. Lower down, in the small print, a kill or rescue above the candidate’s Circle earned extra credit if a proctor saw it. The Houses scouted the top ten off the live board.

His name would sit somewhere on a board of thirty-one until the internet died. Fourteenth, Wes thought. Anything with a one in front and another number after.

He got up, stepped over the screws, put the chain back in the frame and watched it hold for as long as it took him to let go of the door.

Kessler’s envelope stayed in a drawer until Friday, and without a license he couldn’t go near the shaft, so every night he knelt at the four-inch window with a thread he couldn’t see the edges of and nothing to tell him whether he was doing it right.

On Friday night Pruitt came up the stairs, slower than Kessler had, with a six-pack under one arm and a week of Dolly’s shifts behind him.

“Sit down before you fall down,” Wes said.

“I’m fine.” Pruitt sat on the bed. “Hamid’s fine. Petra’s fine. We pulled the whale’s last twenty-one teeth, and nothing came out of the fissures. We had a new warden, a woman called Osei, and she stood where she was put.” He opened a beer on the edge of the bed frame, took a swallow and held something up between two fingers: a lapper petal, darker than the one on Wes’s hand, with the same sheen under it.

“Yours,” Pruitt said. “The one you hit in the head. It was lying out there in the dark half with its face glowing, and nobody from Vahl had so much as kicked it. A House doesn’t bend over for a Common drop.”

The card was there before Wes’s fingers closed on it.

“Two of three,” Wes said. “There’s a set bonus. Nose.”

“Put it on, then.”

Wes wrapped it around his right hand to match the left. The ends found each other and held, but nothing changed until he breathed in.

Beer, Pruitt, a laundromat that hadn’t been renovated. Under those was something faint and cold that smelled of pennies and rain, coming in through the four-inch gap in the window. His head had turned toward it before he’d decided to, toward the haze over the street, the thin stuff, the leftover of a leftover, three blocks off and drifting. He could smell it. He turned his head the other way and sniffed, then sniffed again. Pruitt had it on him too, under the beer.

“What?” Pruitt said.

“You smell like dinner.”

Pruitt lowered the beer. “I expect I do,” he said.

The gauge on the sill had come from the Grate that afternoon, a storm drain with stalls in it at the bottom of Kettle Street, where a woman called Mags sold masks and filters off a card table. It was an Authority wrist unit with the serial filed off its back. On the way down Wes had fed the Fairweather kiosk five hundred and fifty-five dollars of Kessler’s envelope and watched the balance go up anyway.

“Sticks at the top,” Mags had said, counting two hundred out of what was left. If the needle ever went all the way over, it stayed there. “Nobody needs the top.”

Now it sat on the windowsill with its strap undone, its needle just off zero on the haze coming through the gap. Pruitt sat under it, back to the wall, bad knees out straight, where he could see Wes’s hand and the needle both. “Sandwich,” he said.

Wes put his left hand through the gap and thought about a sandwich until the thread came. On the sill the needle dipped a hair and came back, then dipped and came back again.

“Stop.” Pruitt waited until Wes had closed his hand. “You’re breathing it. Every time you breathe in, you want it, and every time you breathe out you don’t. A gauge sees a pulse as a pulse, and Tate’s got a reading that goes down to the second.”

“So how do I not breathe?”

“You don’t want it.”

“That’s the whole—”

“You expect it.” Pruitt said it slowly, finding the words. “The way you expect the bus. You don’t stand at the stop wanting the bus. You stand there knowing it’s coming, and it comes. Took me a year to work out that’s what I was doing.”

Standing at the bus stop turned out to be harder than the sandwich. He had to want it, then stop caring that he wanted it. Twice the thread came as a rope and dropped the needle a full point. On the ninth try it came no thicker than fishing line and did not pulse. The needle on the sill sat a fraction below where it had started for a minute, then five.

“There,” Pruitt said quietly. “That’s a gleaner.” Wes found himself grinning at the window.

Pruitt moved the gauge three meters into the room. The needle climbed back to where it had started while the thread kept coming. “What’s near a gauge counts for most,” he said, and put it back. “A whole shelf of spill going at once is a cliff from anywhere. A thread from the back wall is a hair. At the Trial you sit next to the gauge post and take your four points like a good boy. It’s after the Trial I’d think about the back wall.”

Then Pruitt slapped the floor with the flat of his hand, hard, like a door slamming. The thread turned into a rope.

Across the street the haze leaned as the needle went down three points. Wes shut his hand so fast he hit the window frame.

“That’s what I thought,” Pruitt said from the wall. “On a shelf, things slam. Somebody drops a saw. A hunter kills something ten meters off and shouts about it. And every time, that’s what your hand does.”

“So what do I do about it?”

Pruitt opened his mouth and shut it again. He looked at the gauge.

“I don’t know,” Pruitt said. “Nobody’s ever had too much Draw before. If it was me, I’d think about Will. The sheet says Will’s for holding. Holding on and holding out. I never had anything that needed holding, so mine’s twenty-one and it’s never mattered.”

“You told me not to spend my free points.”

“I told you not till you knew what you were. You know a bit more. It’s your account.”

Wes peeled the left petal back from the ring and pressed his thumb to it. Free points: 18. He thought about the kiosk screen going up while he fed it, about a needle going down three points because a man had slapped a floor.

He put six in Will.

If six points of Will did anything, he couldn’t feel it. He put his hand out the window again and let the thread come. Pruitt slapped the floor the moment it did.

The thread jumped and thickened for a second before it thinned again. The needle dipped half a point and came back.

“Again,” Wes said.

“My hand hurts.”

“Again.”

Pruitt slapped the floor. The needle didn’t move at all while the thread ran on into the cellar, where it never made a sound. “Huh,” Pruitt said.

Wes stayed at the window until the haze over the street was gone, leaving nothing to make a thread of. Twelve left, he thought. Now he could feel what a point was worth: the difference between holding a glass and holding a glass on a bus.

Pruitt’s last test was his own hand. “Give me the left,” he said. Wes held out the wrapped hand, which Pruitt took by the back and squeezed.

Pruitt’s grip closed on nothing. The hand was out of it before his fingers finished, and he was left holding air with a surprised look. Both hands together did the same thing. His grip held fine by the forearm, above the petal. “So it’s a glove,” Pruitt said.

“It’s a glove.” That explained Kessler’s squeeze: he’d taken Wes by the shoulder, where the petal didn’t reach. Knowing why didn’t make the squeeze any smaller, but now he knew where the slipping stopped.

Pruitt finished his beer. “You’ll get offered a quest down there,” he said. “Sooner or later. Everybody does. The shelf has a feeling about you, and it puts up a card. Shelfnotes has a list of what sets them off. Shelf Four’s got two on the wiki, and both of them are for hunters.”

“What did you get?”

“My first? Thin this shelf by a tenth.” Pruitt stood and found his coat. “Took me a month. Draw plus one.”

“What happens if I don’t take one?”

“Nothing. It’s not a landlord.” At the door he stopped and touched the chain where it hung from its two screws. “You asked me what Tate does if a gauge line sags while you’re near it. I didn’t answer.”

Wes waited.

“Nineteen years ago, a man got Marked on Shelf Two with a ring the readers couldn’t grade. Just a blank where the class goes. The Authority kept him in Authority House for fourteen months to find out why.” Pruitt did up the top button of his coat. “He came out a blank. No ring. Like it had been sanded off. He sells phone cases on Kettle Street. I buy one off him every Christmas.”

He went down the stairs one at a time.

After the footsteps had gone, Wes stayed at the window with the gauge in his hand. The sill was two slabs of concrete that had never quite met, with a seam between them a finger wide that he’d been meaning to fill with something for two years. He put the gauge down, put two fingers together like Saskia Vahl had on Shelf Nine, and drew them along the seam.

Something rolled over down in the cellar, like it had when she cut the baleen, then settled again without waking. The concrete under his fingertips didn’t so much as scuff.

Nothing moved the second time, or the third. He tried the seam, the frame and the edge of the table until after midnight and got a man pointing at furniture. In the end he set the gauge back on the sill and went to bed mostly sure he’d imagined the whole thing.

Danny’s funeral was the next day, a Saturday, in Hollis, up the hill. The hall was a community center with a kitchen at the back. There was no coffin. There hadn’t been anything to put in one, so the Authority had sent a certificate instead, which lay on a table beside a photograph. In the photograph, Danny Ferro was twenty-six, in a baseball cap, with his neck tattoo half hidden by his collar, grinning at somebody off to the left.

Dolly, who had paid for the hall and sandwiches, wore a black coat over the cast. Hamid and Petra stood by the wall while Pruitt sat. Jules sent a text that said tell his mom im sorry. tell her properly.

His mother was a small woman in her fifties who had done her hair for this. She shook everybody’s hand, but when she got to Wes, she held on.

“You’re the one who was down there,” she said. “With him. Dolly told me.”

“Yes, ma’am. I was close.”

“Did it hurt him?”

A flashlight spinning on the rock. A scream from somewhere far back, and then none.

“No,” Wes said.

She nodded, looked at the photograph and let go of his hand. “He said the boss yelled,” she said, “but it was the good kind.”

At eight on Sunday morning, Wes stood on the Rim in a numbered bib and found out what the city did with its only flat hundred meters. The Authority’s Trial Ground had been cut into the rich side of the Sink: a strip of track with grandstands on three sides, the shaft on the fourth. Over the far stand the big screen showed the board, thirty-one names and no numbers yet. The House boxes along the top of the stands had glass fronts and heating. Somewhere a woman was selling pretzels.

The reader at the gate read what the one at Authority House had read, in the same font: CALLOW, WESLEY · GLEANER · COMMON · FIRST CIRCLE · 9/9. Nobody gave it a second look, including the proctor, Lund, a long grey blank in a mask, who checked the line against his list.

By the track the candidates stood in a loose crowd, four of them in armbands with House crests. Three others had gleaner’s white on their hands. One of them, a square man in his forties with a roofer’s tan, saw Wes looking and came over.

“Benny Sato,” the man said. “You’re the Shelf Nine one.”

“Wes.”

“Lappers. I read about it.” Benny held up his hand: a white ring, two notches lit. “Forty-four years a blank. Then I go down to my basement for the Christmas lights and there’s a scuttle in it, in a box. I hit it with the box. The Drain’s got cracks. Nobody tells you.”

The Lift was a steel bar across a pit, with plates stacked by Circle and level, so a proctor could load it for you off your bib. Twenty-one people lifted before Wes. The ones from the Houses made it look like nothing. A woman with a Dray armband, BRANDT · FIRST · 5/9 on the board, pulled her plate to the knee and held it there. Then she skipped four plates and asked for the Second Circle entry plate, which she got off the ground for exactly one second. The stands made a noise about that.

“Twenty-two. Callow. First, nine.”

Once Lund had loaded the nine plate, Wes crouched and gripped the bar. It came up like a sofa with somebody on it, and getting it from the floor to the knee took all he had. He held it there, counted three and put it down slowly.

“Want the next one?”

“No, thanks.”

Under his name the number went up on the board, in the middle of the lift column. Wes stayed at the bar until somebody behind him coughed.

The Run was a hundred meters down the strip, timed off a beam, two at a time. He drew Brandt, who sized him up once at the line like a cone she was going to run around. The beam went. She went. Wes chased her on legs that wanted to eat up the ground.

Five steps in, he felt the speed the lappers had run into on Nine: a reserve past everything he had, like the RES on the fuel tap of his old delivery bike, waiting for him to say so. He could have beaten her by thirty meters and crossed the line before the cameras found him. Nothing would have felt better.

Be a nine, he thought, and eased off. It was the hardest thing he’d done since the whale. Brandt finished a body length ahead of him and didn’t look back.

Fourteenth in the run, fifteenth in the lift. The two numbers sat side by side on the big screen under CALLOW, W., as ordinary as a phone bill. Wes stood under them on the track with his hands on his hips until Lund read the shelf assignments.

“Shelf Four,” he said. “Candidates twenty through thirty-one. Second warden, Osei.” He turned a page before he read the last one. “Warden of record, Kessler.”

Kessler stood at the Rim cage gate in Authority greys, with a new short sword on his hip and his earbud out. He raised a friendly hand to the group and found Wes in it. The smile that had looked back over its shoulder in Wes’s doorway came out again.

Nobody had stolen the bulbs out of the Authority’s cage, which was clean right down to the plastic cover on its gauge. Twelve candidates and two wardens rode down in it with Lund and a camera on a pole, none of them talking much.

Beside Wes, Kessler leaned on the gate as the daylight went up over them. “Shelf Four’s mine on sitting days,” he said. “Didn’t I say?”

“You said you’d look after me.”

“And here I am.”

Shelf Four was a quarter the size of Nine: a ledge a hundred meters long, with the Authority’s own floodlights bolted along all of it but the far end, every bulb present. A scree of fallen rock ran along the back wall, where the scuttles lived. The post stood halfway down the shelf from the cage, a steel pole with a camera on top. The shelf gauge hung on it at head height, a dial as big as a dinner plate, numbered from nought to fifty with yellow, orange and red painted round the top half. Three smaller dials hung under it, one for each of the yellow circles painted on the rock around the post, each reading only the air inside its own circle.

“Hunters,” Lund said. “Sixty minutes from the first kill. One scuttle each, clean, and you drag it to the post for the reader. Gleaners, you’re in the circles. Your hour starts with the first kill.” He glanced down at his clipboard. “Wardens have the shelf. Nobody goes past the lights.”

Kessler walked to where the floodlights ran out and stood with his back to the candidates and a hand on his sword, watching the scree. Osei went on past him to the dark end. With a camera on him, Kessler was a very good warden. He never once took out his phone.

The hunters went into the scree with House-made weapons, hammers and borrowed Authority spears. In less than a minute a big man with a hammer came back out, dragging something by one leg. It was flat, plated and as wide as a car tire, with a bedsheet of gold cloud rising over it. “Clock,” Lund said.

Wes sat on his circle with his wrapped left hand on his knee, palm up. Benny had the next circle; the third gleaner, a quiet woman with her hair in a net, took the last. Above them the post gauge stood at eleven and climbing as the hunters got going and more clouds came up along the shelf.

He wanted it a little, then stopped caring that he wanted it. From the big man’s cloud the thread crossed the rock and went into the back of his hand, as thin as it had been at the window. It did not pulse. Beside him Benny breathed in with his eyes shut, a faint shimmer of burn-off coming off the back of his hand like heat off a road. Nobody could see that past three meters. Nobody could see that Wes didn’t have one.

Over the next ten minutes the needle on his dial crept down. Lund watched it and made a note.

A smell crossed the shelf the wrong way.

It took Wes a moment to understand what the Nose was telling him. The clouds smelled of spill and came from his left, where the hunters were. This was the same smell coming from his right, from the dark end past Osei, where the scree ran out into bare rock beyond the last of the lights.

He turned his head to find a little cloud hanging over the rock at the very end of the shelf, where a hunter had dropped his scuttle to re-grip it. Half of it was rising. The other half had found a crack in the floor, a hairline you’d have stepped over without seeing. Spill was sliding into it in a thin gold ribbon, like it had slid toward the fissures on Shelf Nine.

But Shelf Four was a First Circle shelf, only two hundred and sixty meters down. Nothing lived under it to lap the spill up.

Kessler was watching the scree with his sword hand ready, like a man in a brochure. The post gauge’s needle was holding, with the camera above it pointed at the hunters. Benny still had his eyes shut.

Shelf Four had two quests on the wiki, both of them for hunters. Wes looked at the crack. Something under the rock at the far end of the shelf was eating leftovers, too far from the post for its gauge to notice, behind a camera that wasn’t looking. His leftovers, the Sink seemed to think.

Less spill meant fewer things came up for it; that was the whole gleaning trade. Two Second Circle wardens held this shelf. Whatever lived on the leftovers of leftovers under a First Circle shelf couldn’t be much. He could put his hand up, tell Lund there was a current at the dark end and sit back down. Then he could answer Lund’s next question, which would be how he knew.

He had fifty minutes to keep a needle honest, with a man who’d left him on a shelf once already standing twenty meters away.

Yes, Wes thought, and the card went away.