Wick woke on the next day, and the first thing he said was that he was sorry.
He said it before he had worked out where he was.
He said it to the ceiling, which was a ceiling he had never seen, painted dark with little lights set into it, and he said it in the voice of somebody who has been saying it for a while in his sleep.
“You’re fine,” Rurik said.
“Nobody’s mad at you.”
The boy turned his head.
He was nineteen.
Rurik had gotten that out of Ansel on the first night, along with the rest of it, which was that Wick had been carrying water to the wall because carrying water was what you gave the ones too new to stand in a line, and that a section of the parapet had come down on him while he was doing it.
“Where’s the tent.”
“There’s no tent.
You’re in a store.”
“You’ll get there,” Rurik said.
“Everybody takes a minute.
You want water?
It’s cold.”
The fever had broken sometime in the night and the foot was still wrong and would be wrong for a long time, and by the middle of the morning Wick had run out of things he could do.
He could not walk.
He could not stand up.
Ansel had strapped the foot to a board and told him in plain language that if he put weight on it before the month turned he would be putting weight on it with a stick for the rest of his life.
He could not read.
He had tried, because Dain had put a volume in his hands and told him it was worth it, and he had gotten through six pages before Rurik noticed the way he was holding it at arm’s length and squinting, and worked out that the boy could read about as well as any nineteen-year-old who had been carrying water since he was twelve. Enjoying the story? Read on at novelping . com.
Wick had put the book down very carefully and said that he would look at it later.
So by noon he was lying in the good chair on the third floor with his foot up on a board game box, in the coldest and quietest room he had ever been in, with nothing to do and nowhere to go and both the other men downstairs, and Rurik came up with a glass and found him staring at the underside of the shelf above him.
“How you doing.”
“Fine.”
“Yeah,” Rurik said.
“You want to see something?”
“I can’t get up.”
“You don’t have to.”