Wick learned to run the screen the way he learned everything now, which was out loud and with his whole body.
“You press it and it waits,” he said, to no one, to the room, to the dead black rectangle that was about to not be dead.
“It waits for you.
That’s the part I can’t— it just waits.
It doesn’t care how long.”
“It does not care at all,” Mira agreed, from the four-seater.
“It is a screen.”
“That’s what I said.” He got the screening running — episode five, because he had made Rurik swear on the register that no one would watch ahead of him, and Rurik had sworn, because Rurik understood — and he settled onto the couch with the specific care of a boy whose foot has recently decided to be a foot again and doesn’t entirely trust it.
Which was the moment the door admitted a swordsman.
He came in the way men who are very good at one thing come into rooms — as though the room should already know.
Silvered edge, good coat, the walk.
He stopped two steps in and looked at the ground floor with the flat assessment of a man pricing a threat, and found none, which visibly unsettled him more than a threat would have.
“I am told,” the swordsman said, “that this place makes a man better.”
“It can,” Rurik said.
“Depends what at.
First hour’s free if you’ve never been.”
“At the sword.”
There’s a game upstairs that— actually.” Rurik came around the counter.
He had been waiting for this exact man since a boy with a crushed foot had walked across a bridge that wasn’t there.
“You want the game.
You beat the game, you get what it teaches.
Kid over there did it in a couple of days and he’d never held anything sharper than a bucket.”
The swordsman looked at Wick.
Wick waved, without taking his eyes off the screen, where a very great teacher was explaining to a class of delinquents that the point had never been the lesson.
“Him,” the swordsman said.
“Him,” Rurik agreed.
The swordsman went upstairs the way a man goes upstairs to prove a point.
He was down again in forty minutes, and his coat was wrong now, off at one shoulder, and there was a look on his face that Rurik had seen exactly once before, on a college kid, in October, in another life.
“The gate would not open,” the swordsman said.
His voice was very level.
“The first gate.
The tutorial gate.
It said — the writing said — press the shown key to advance.
I pressed it.
It did not advance.
I had pressed it.”
“You have to press it while you’re moving,” Wick said, from the couch, still not looking.
“Not stopped.
It only counts if you’re already going.”
The swordsman stared at the back of the boy’s head.
“Forty years,” he said, to no one.
“I have trained forty years.”
“It’s a hard tutorial,” Wick said, kindly.
Behind the counter, Rurik wrote something in the paper ledger and did not say what it was, and up on the second step, Mira turned a card over, and her mouth did the thing at the corner, and was flat again, and the very great teacher told his delinquents that a man who cannot lose a small thing will never be trusted with a large one, and the swordsman, who had come in to be made better, sat down on the far end of the couch to watch the rest of the episode, because he did not have anywhere he needed to be that was better than finding out what happened.
[ -1 credit.
]
“I didn’t ask you anything,” Rurik said.
[ You were going to ask whether he counts as a customer.
He does.
]
Rurik looked at the swordsman, who was now leaning forward slightly, absorbed, forty years of the sword folded up on a couch in front of a cartoon.
“Yeah,” Rurik said.
“Okay.”