He should not have let Wick be first.
He knew it going up the stairs and he did it anyway, and the reason he did it, when he was honest with himself later, was that Wick had spent nine days lying still in a chair with a strapped foot and a book he could not read, watching every other person in the building be handed a door that was shut to him.
The library needed reading.
The screens Wick could have, and did, and loved, but the screens gave a man nothing he could carry.
And the boy had started to get the look.
Rurik had seen the look on his own face in a bathroom mirror in Kentucky and he was not going to watch it come up on a nineteen-year-old in his own shop.
So he brought a booth chair out to where Wick was, and he brought the knight on the bridge, and he put the grips in the boy’s hands and said, “You don’t have to read anything.
I promise.
Just hold these and look at the screen.”
“What is it.”
“It’s a game.
You’re a knight.
You have to get across a bridge.”
Wick looked at the grips.
“Why is there a man in the way,” he said, which was a reasonable first question, because there was.
“Because it’s a game.
He’s trying to stop you.
You stop him first.”
“With what.”
“With-” Rurik pointed at the left grip.
“That’s your sword.
Press it.”
Wick pressed it.
On the screen, a very long way from the man, the knight swung a sword at nothing.
“He’s over there,” Wick said.
“You have to walk to him.”
“How.”
And that was the next forty minutes.
The thing nobody had told Rurik, because nobody had needed to, was that Wick had never in his life operated a machine that responded to him.
He had operated a bucket.
There is no bucket that does a different thing if you press the top of the handle instead of the side, and there was no moment in Wick’s nineteen years that had prepared him for the idea that the small motions of his two hands could be a language, and so he learned it the way you learn a language, which is badly, out loud, and with the whole body.
He leaned when the knight leaned.
He said “no” to the knight.
Twice he tried to hand the grips back because he thought he had broken it, and both times it was only paused.
When the knight finally reached the man on the bridge, Wick was so surprised that he forgot to press anything, and the knight stood politely in front of the man and was cut in half.
The screen went red and then dark and then showed the bridge again, from the start.
Wick sat very still.
“It put me back,” he said.
“Yeah.
That’s the whole thing about it.
Nobody dies.
It just puts you back.”
Wick looked at the screen, where the knight was standing at the start of the bridge, whole, the man in the distance whole, the whole problem laid out again exactly as it had been and waiting.
Something happened in his face that Rurik did not have a name for and did not try to find one.
“Again,” Wick said.
He was on the bridge for two days.
Not the whole of two days.
He still slept, and Ansel came and made him eat, and the foot was the foot.
But whenever he was awake and upright he was on the bridge, and the shop learned the sound of it, the boy going quiet and then saying “no” and then the red-screen chime and then the little breath he took before he started it again.
Dain watched him do it from the rail on the second afternoon.
“He is getting worse,” Dain said.
“He’s not.”
“He was cut in half at the start of the bridge an hour ago.
He was cut in half in the middle of the bridge just now.
That is further, but he is still cut in half.”
“That’s not worse.
That’s the middle of the bridge instead of the start of the bridge.”
Dain considered this with the seriousness he gave everything.
“When I trained levies,” he said, “we had a man could not hold a line the first month.
We did not stop him.
We moved the line back until it was a line he could hold and then we moved it up a foot at a time.” He watched Wick die.
“This machine moves the line up by itself.
It does not tell him it is doing it.”
“No.”
“That is either very good,” said Dain, “or the cruelest thing I have seen in a building full of cruel things.”
On the evening of the second day the shop went quiet in the wrong way, the way a room goes quiet when the sound it has learned has stopped, and Rurik came out from the counter and looked up.
Wick was sitting with the grips in his lap and the screen showing the far side of the bridge, and a door on the far side, open, that none of them had seen before because none of them had ever been to the far side of the bridge.
He had crossed it.
The screen was doing something gentle with light.
Wick was not looking at it.
Wick was looking at his own two hands.
Rurik felt the report come in before he read it, the way you feel a step that is not there.
[ WICK.
THE BRIDGE AT ANDR – CLEARED, LOW ROAD.
] [ FOOTING.
GRANT: ENTRY, CAPPED.
] [ HE WILL FEEL IT WHEN HE STANDS.
TELL HIM NOTHING.
]
“Tell him nothing,” Rurik read, quietly, to himself.
“What,” said Wick.
“Nothing.” Rurik came over.
“You did it.
You got across.”
“I got across.”
“You want to try the harder one?”
Wick looked at him like he had said something obscene.
“There’s a harder one?”