Wick started working on the seventh day and nobody asked him to.
Rurik came down at six to open and found the ground floor tables wiped, the chairs squared, and the boy sitting on the end of the couch he had been sleeping on with a rag in his hand and his strapped foot up on a crate.
“You’re supposed to be off that.”
“I’m not on it.” Wick lifted the crate slightly to demonstrate.
“I hopped.”
“You hopped.”
“On the good one.”
“Wick—”
“You said the glasses go rim-down on the tray,” the boy said, “and they weren’t rim-down, and I’ve been lying on that couch for four days watching you do everything on your own, so.”
He said it to the rag rather than to Rurik.
Rurik stood there holding his keys.
“Okay,” he said.
“Okay, but you don’t hop.
Anything above the counter, you ask.”
“Yes, sir.”
“And don’t call me sir.”
By the middle of the morning the boy had wiped every surface he could reach from a chair, sorted the board games by the coloured dot on the spine without being told the dots meant anything, and worked out on his own that the people coming in through the door for the first time do better if somebody says a sentence to them before they look up.
At noon Rurik went behind the counter and said, to the air, “How do I put him on staff.”
[ You may not.
]
“He’s already doing the job.”
[ The Founding Staff Provision permitted one (1) selection.
The selection has been made.
It is permanent and it is singular.
]
I’m trying to add—”
[ There is no provision for a second.
]
“That’s not fair.”
[ -1 credit.
]
“That wasn’t a question either!”
[ It was not.
] [ -1 credit.
]
Rurik put his palms on the counter.
So he had a nineteen-year-old with a crushed foot, no company, no family that anyone had been able to find, and nowhere to go, living on a couch on the second floor of a building that did not exist, doing the work of a member of staff that he was structurally incapable of hiring.
“Wick.”
“Yes, s— yeah.”
“Come here a second.”
The boy came over, hopping, which Rurik had told him not to do and had already given up on.
“I can’t put you on the books,” Rurik said.
“It’s complicated and it’s not about you and it’s not going to change, so I want to say it out loud once instead of you working it out later and thinking it’s something else.”
Wick’s face did not do anything much.
“Right,” he said.
“So here’s what I’ve got instead.” Rurik counted it off on the counter with his knuckle.
“You sleep here.
That’s not a favour and I’m not taking it back.
You eat what I eat.
Library’s open to you, whenever, no charge, and when you want to learn to read properly there’s a man upstairs who was a sergeant for nineteen years and will absolutely teach you if you ask him in the right tone of voice.”
“You can read like I can cook.”
Wick looked at the counter.
“And the screen?” he said.
“What about it?”
“It’s a credit.”
“Wick, you were the first one.” Rurik picked up the cloth.
“It’s never going to be a credit for you.”
The boy nodded once, quickly, and turned around and went back to the tables and started wiping one that he had already wiped, and Rurik let him.
Across the room, Mira had the cards down in rows on the four-seater again.
She had been at it on and off for six days and the rows had gotten longer.
“You have hired him,” she said.
“I can’t hire him.
You heard it.”
“I heard what it said.” She was watching the street.
“You have hired him.”
“It’s not the same thing.”
“No,” Mira said.
“It binds harder.”
She put a card down at the end of a row, considered it, and moved it one place to the left.
Out on Marrow Street, a woman had stopped in front of the grey frontage.
She was not in chapter-house grey and she was not in anybody’s surcoat.
She was in a merchant’s coat with good stitching and she had a wax tablet in one hand, and she was not looking at the door.
She was looking at the building next to it, and then back, and then at the building on the other side, and she was doing it the way a person does when they are measuring something.
Then she wrote on the tablet.
“Rurik,” Mira said.
“I see her.”
“That one is counting your walls.”