Free Web NovelChapter 30: THREE DAYS
The first morning he did not know anything was wrong until he looked in the water.
He woke against the bench leg where he had pulled himself up to sitting and not gone further.
Half a year in his vision. The egg in its box above him, grey, sealed, incubation pending. His chest raw the way a chest was raw the day after it had coughed for the first time in weeks.
He got up the way an old man got up. He noticed it.
He had got up off this floor a hundred mornings and the getting up had been a thing his body did without consulting him.
This morning it consulted him.
His knees asked first. His hands took weight they had not been taking. He stood and the standing took a beat longer than standing had taken. He registered the beat, and he did not have a clean thought about it.
He went to the basin to put water on his face.
He looked in the water.
The basin held the grey morning light and his face in it, and the face in the water had a thing in it that the face had not had.
Above the left temple. A line of hair gone from dark to the no-color the basin gave everything, except this was not the basin doing it, because he tilted the bowl and the light moved. The line stayed.
He put his fingers to it.
A streak. Above the left temple, running back. Not wide. The width of two fingers. The hair in it had the texture his mother’s hair had taken the last year, the dry texture, the texture of hair a body had stopped spending on.
He stood at the basin with his fingers in it. He did not have the dry close. He did not file it.
He looked at it in the water. He looked at it with his fingers. Then he put water on his face, because the water was what he had come to the basin for.
Sixteen months. It took the months off the figure and it took this off me too. The figure is the part the system shows. This is the part it doesn’t.
He dried his face.
He went to work.
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He did the route slower.
Lamp two took longer. Lamp three took longer. The wire work on lamp eleven’s housing, which his hands had done in the dark for two years without his attention, asked for his attention.
His fingers did not have the thing they had. The fine motion was a half-step behind where he put it. He fixed lamp eleven and it took him the time lamp eleven had taken him in his first month on the route, before his hands had learned it. His hands had not unlearned it. His hands had been spent.
The herbalist at lamp seven looked at him.
"You all right, lamplighter?"
He had answered the herbalist’s morning greeting for weeks and the herbalist had never asked him anything past the greeting. The herbalist was asking him something past the greeting. The herbalist was looking at the left side of his head.
"Long night," Aiden said.
"You look like my father looked," the herbalist said. The herbalist had heard himself say it and stopped. Then he looked like he wished he had kept the greeting to the greeting, and he turned back to his shutters.
Aiden lit lamp eight.
You look like my father looked. The herbalist’s father was not in the conversation anywhere else. The herbalist had reached for the nearest thing that matched what he saw and the nearest thing had been a man further along than Aiden was, and the herbalist had heard himself say it and stopped.
He filed that one. It went in a column. The column was what the streak does to people who see it, and the column had one entry now, and he understood there would be more.
The boy was not on the step at lamp seventeen.
The third morning the boy had not been there. He had stopped expecting the boy. The bakery door was closed. He lit lamp seventeen and did not look at the door and did not slow down, and the not-slowing-down was harder than it had been, because the slower body did not have pace to spare.
He finished the route.
It took him a half-bell longer than the route took.
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The second morning was worse.
He woke and the getting up consulted him longer.
The streak had not spread. He checked, with his fingers, in the water, the way he had told himself the first morning he was not going to do every morning. But the face around it had changed. The skin under his eyes. The set of the mouth.
He looked, in the basin, like the herbalist’s father, and he was twenty-four years old. He stood at the basin and put water on his face and went to work, because the route did not care what a man’s basin showed him.
He carried the egg with him.
He had not planned to. He had meant to leave it in the box on the bench like he had left the relic. But the relic had pulsed and the egg did not pulse.
The egg did nothing.
Incubation pending, on its own clock, and he found on the second morning that he did not want it on the bench while he was three streets away being slow at lamps.
He wrapped the box in the wax paper, put it in the kit bag, and carried it, the way he had carried the things he had stopped being able to leave behind.
Miasma rode his shoulder.
She had stayed close since the bond. Not the working rhythm and not the relic’s rhythm. A watching rhythm.
She watched the kit bag the way she had watched the wall in the chamber, and she watched him, the slow getting-up and the half-step hands. She did the thing she had done in the gutter, which was to hold his gaze and wait for him to catch up to a thing she had already finished working out.
He did not know what she had worked out. He knew there was something. He had learned to read that she had worked out something the way he had learned to read tool marks. The reading never gave him content. Only that content was there.
He worked the route slow. At lamp eleven his hands took the time they took now. The herbalist at lamp seven did not greet him on the second morning. Just looked at the side of his head and looked away.
That went in the column too.
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The third morning he stopped at the basin.
He had been putting water on his face for two mornings and not looking because a man did not look at a thing he had decided he could not afford to spend the morning looking at.
This morning he had the half-year in his vision, the egg in the bag by the door, and a route that was going to take the long time.
He made himself look, because he had spent sixteen months and a thing was happening to him for it, and a man should know the shape of what he bought.
The streak had not grown. Two fingers wide, left temple, running back. The dry texture.
The face had changed since yesterday. The skin under his eyes had come back half a shade. The set of the mouth was his again. The streak stayed. The streak was the scar. Everything else was the deficit draining.
His hands closed once and opened. The fine motion was back. He stood at the basin a beat longer than the basin needed.
He was twenty-four years old with a white mark above his left temple that was never going away. The rest of him was coming back.
All right. That’s what it cost. The figure says half a year and the basin says this and both are true. I signed them with my hands on the shell. I am seeing it now.
He did not look away from it for a count he measured.
Then he put water on his face.
He picked up the kit bag with the egg in it.
He put Miasma on his shoulder.
He went to the door.
He stopped at the door.
The egg in the bag had not done anything in three days. Three mornings of carrying a box that did nothing. He had half a year and a streak and no hatch and a network looking for a man who handled material.
He put his hand on the bag through his coat.
The box was the box. The wax paper was the wax paper. The egg did nothing.
Then it moved.
Not a pulse. The egg did not pulse, it had never pulsed. That was the relic. This was weight. The weight in the bag shifted against his hip the way the weight of a thing shifted when the thing inside it had, for the first time, of its own accord, moved.
He stood at the door with his hand on the bag.
He did not open the bag.
He did not open the bag. The route did not care what the bag did, and the thing in the egg had moved on its own clock. He had learned that the things on their own clocks did not answer to him.
He took his hand off the bag.
He went to work with it moving against his hip.
