Chapter 3: A Stick Does Not Stand

He racked the bike behind the shop and stood a minute in case anybody needed him. Nobody did. He went up the back stairs to his room.

The window was open two fingers wide and the room was hot anyway.

The candy was where he had left it, on the shelf over the bed, twisted shut at both ends, the paper gone soft from riding around in a pocket all day. He tore it open and put it in his mouth.

Sugar. And under the sugar, faint as a rumor, the thing itself, going down with it and staying down.

He stood still in the middle of the room with his tongue flat against his teeth.

Nineteen days in this world, and not one honest word out of anybody. The candy had managed it in three seconds. He did not chew. There was no telling when he would get another one.

The light outside had gone long and orange. Down in the leaves under the window, two small voices were working their way through something.

“That’s him. That’s the one she picked?”

“Keep your voice down.”

“He’s a person, it isn’t like he can—“

“If a person hears you, it’s a report. A report is a hundred words. Minimum.”

“I’m good with words.”

“You’re not good with words.”

“I’m good at apologizing,” the first voice said. “It’s the same hundred words.”

Cinder went to the window and pushed it up the rest of the way.

Two caterpillars sat on the sill, fat as a thumb, green as the fence. Beside them, an inch away, stood a stick.

A stick does not stand.

Everybody stopped. The caterpillars froze with their front ends half up, the way they had been, mid-sentence. The stick held its position one second longer, long enough to make it clear that it had meant to do that, and then reconsidered — he could watch it reconsider — and went over flat, dead as lumber, the way a stick off the hedge lands when the wind does it.

He could have shut the window and left it alone.

He picked them up instead. The caterpillars in one hand, the stick between two fingers, by the middle, the way you carry a stick that is pretending to be a stick; and he brought them in and set all three of them on the desk.

Then he sat down on the edge of the bed and looked at them and said nothing, and let the nothing do the first part of the work.

“He’s looking at us,” one caterpillar said, at a volume that was meant to be nothing at all.

“Let him look.”

“What does he want?”

“How would I know what he wants? I have never once known what people want.”

“What are you,” Cinder said. “And why can you talk.”

They put their heads together. It took them a while; they were not built for it.

“We could tell him,” one said.

“He’s a person.”

“He’s practically not. She picked him. He’s going to be her student, so he has to know everything eventually, so telling him now is the same as telling him later, so it isn’t like telling a person at all.”

The stick stood up.

It had been a stick lying on a desk. Now it was a stick standing on a desk, on one end, and cross about something.

“You can’t count it that way.”

“You can.”

“You can’t,” the stick said. “Close doesn’t count. If close counted, everything would count, and then being picked wouldn’t mean anything.”

He had been telling himself, on the stairs, at the window, that it was the heat, or the sugar, or the body he was wearing grinding him down from the inside. He had been wrong. Bugs, wood. Probably the whole world, and the whole world had been sitting under his window arguing about paperwork.

“So what are you,” he said.

“We’re not things,” the fat one said, fast, in case he had meant it that way. “We’re not things and we’re not bugs that crawled into something. We’re born-of-the-green, same as anybody. And we have permits.”

“Filed permits,” said the other one. “With the wardens. Regular as the mail.”

“Permits,” said Cinder.

“To be here. To be anywhere. Everybody born-of-the-green has one. It says where you can go, and how long, and what you’re allowed to do where people can see you, and what you’re not, and—“ It heard itself and stopped. “And ours are fine. Ours are fine.”

“What happens if you break it.”

“Nothing.”

“What happens.”

“They take the permit,” the fat one said. “And they write to your sponsor. And then you’re not from here, and there’s a process for people who aren’t from here, and at the end of the process there’s a bus.”

“Who issues them.”

“The wardens.”

“Who are the wardens?”

“Not us,” said the fat caterpillar, with feeling.

“You’re not going to turn us in,” the other one said. It wasn’t a question.

Cinder let that sit.

“It doesn’t matter,” the stick said. “You can’t do anything to me. I’m not here.”

“You’re here.”

“That’s a stick. I left a stick in a hedge and put a little of myself in it. My real body is a tree on the other side of town, and it’s a fine tree. You could put this one in the stove and it wouldn’t reach me.”

Cinder let that sit too.

“The ones who use the green,” he said. “What do you call them.”

Both caterpillars sat up.

“Practitioners.” The fat one said it slowly, and then: “Where have you been living?”

He didn’t answer that.

“Eight kinds,” the other caterpillar said, delighted to be on solid ground. It recited them the way a kid recites the planets — proud of the list, not entirely sure what was on it. “Body work, spellwork, alchemy, runes, wards, forging, the sword, and beasts. That’s the list. That’s everybody.”

Eight kinds. Where he came from there had been eight kinds too, under different words.

Under his ribs, in the small true place where he actually lived, the flame leaned — one movement, small, the way a fire shifts when a door opens somewhere else in a house.

He had no explanation for that, so he put it with the others.

The stick had gone quiet. When it spoke again it spoke to him and not to the caterpillars.

“You still haven’t said why you’re not scared.”

He didn’t answer.

“See,” the stick said to the caterpillars. “That. People don’t do that.”

The caterpillars looked at each other. Neither of them seemed to know what that was.

Cinder knew. Somebody had been watching him the whole time, and had found the one thing about him that was never supposed to show.

“Go,” he said.

They went. The caterpillars were over the sill first, and the fat one stopped with its top half up over the edge of the outside.

“You know,” it said, “you don’t even know how lucky you are.”

“No,” said Cinder.

“She’s never picked anybody. Not one, her whole life. Everybody’s been waiting forever, and then she picks—“ it gestured with its whole front half, “—that.”

“Who,” said Cinder.

“Wow,” said the caterpillar, and went over the sill after the other one. Halfway down the wall, they could both be heard agreeing that nobody was going to believe a word of this.

The stick stayed another second.

“I’ll find out,” it said, in a friendly sort of way. “Why you’re not scared. I’ll find out.”

“I will,” it added, in case he had missed it, and dropped off the sill the way a stick does.

He shut the window.

The candy was gone. He had finished it somewhere in the middle of the conversation without ever making a decision about it, which was a habit worth keeping an eye on.

Green was here, and it came in through the mouth. Nineteen days of eating in this world, and the only thing that had ever gone in and stayed was a piece of candy.

The strike had dropped him into this world in a body that was not his. He did not intend to be here long enough to need a permit.
Cinder doesn’t chew the candy. One piece, in a world that has handed him nothing else, and he holds it on his tongue because he can’t tell when there will be another. That quiet restraint says more about him than almost anything he says out loud here — and he deliberately says very little. He never once answers the question about why he isn’t scared. If someone asked you that, point blank, would you answer honestly?

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