He found out about the grant the way the system had said he would, which was by standing up.
Rurik had told him not to.
Ansel had told him not to, in more words.
The foot had eight more days on it by the board-strapping and everyone in the building knew the number.
But it was the third morning after the bridge, and Wick woke before anybody and lay there for a while listening to the shop not being awake yet, and then he decided he wanted water and there was nobody to bring it, and rather than call out he put his good foot down, and then, without deciding to, the other one.
He stood.
He stood on both feet on a foot that had been crushed under a cornerstone twelve days before, and it held, and it did not hold the way a thing holds when you are lucky.
It held the way the knight held on the bridge when Wick finally understood where the weight went – low, and forward, and spread, so the break was carrying nothing the rest of the leg could carry instead.
He had not learned that from a healer.
He had learned it from two days of a small man on a screen being cut in half until the weight went to the right place, and his body had taken the lesson and kept it, the way Dain’s hand had kept the breath, the way the shop kept doing this to people and telling only Rurik.
Wick stood in the grey light and put his hand over his mouth.
Then he walked.
Badly, and it hurt, and he went along the wall with one hand on it, but he walked the length of the third floor and back, past the shelves and the screens and the dark mouth of the stairs, and he was crying by the end of it and had not noticed, which was becoming a thing that happened to people in this building.
That was where Mira found him.
She had come up for a book, the volume she had been reading in pieces for a week, and she came off the stairs and stopped, because there was a boy who could not walk walking.
She did not say congratulations.
She looked at his feet, and then at the booth chair still sitting out with the grips on it, and then at his feet again, and she did the arithmetic that she was better at than anyone alive when it was arithmetic about how a body wins or loses, and Rurik, coming up the stairs behind her with the boy’s water, saw the exact moment she got the answer. Visit g.com for the full chapter.
She did not look impressed.
She looked the way she looked at the cards when a hand came out wrong.
“That is not how footing is taught,” she said.
“He didn’t get taught,” Rurik said.
“He got put back on the bridge until he had it.”
Mira turned and looked at him.
“How many times.”
“I don’t know.
Hundreds.”
“Hundreds.” She looked back at Wick, who had reached the wall and turned and was standing there holding it, breathing, grinning at nothing with his face wet.
“He was cut down hundreds of times and stood up hundreds of times and now his body believes a thing about weight that took me forty years to make mine believe.”
“…Yeah.”
“And it cost him a shill.”
“It cost him nothing.
He works here.”
Then she went and got the book she had come up for, off the low shelf by the reading chair, and she had it open before she reached the top of the stairs, and going down she slowed and then stopped on the third step with the whole of her attention gone into it, and her mouth came open a little, and she stood there on the stair reading with a boy learning to walk behind her and did not move for a long time.
Wick watched her.
“What’s she reading?” he asked Rurik.
“Don’t,” said Rurik.
“What?”
“Just – don’t ask her.
Trust me.”
But Wick was nineteen and had just walked, and there was nothing in the world that could hurt him that morning, so he said, across the third floor, in the clear glad voice of a boy who had been given his feet back, “Mira!
What’s the book?”
Mira’s face came off the page.
For a quarter of a second, before the flat came down over it, every one of them saw it – whatever the book had been doing to her, caught in the open, undefended, on the stairs.
Then it was gone, level and pleasant, the name tag crooked underneath.
“A book,” said Mira, and went down the stairs and out of sight.
Wick looked at Rurik.
“Told you,” Rurik said.