Chapter 3: Three Empty Wells

The crowd let go of him somewhere around the bank.

Not all at once. The buses pulled out of the lot first and took most of the noise with them; then the sidewalk thinned to a girl on a phone and a man standing over a dog, neither of them planning to move; and then there was only the smell of the roasters coming out of the second coffee place and sitting in his jacket, and his own shoes on the pavement.

He didn’t look back at the wall. He’d already looked at it.

At the corner where the buses loaded, he turned up into the alley behind the laundromat that had been shut since winter, walked about forty feet in, and stood still.

Then he checked. He did this every time, and the list had never changed. Grate on the left. Dumpster on the right, lid down. Nothing in the loading bay, nothing in the stairwell, no window looking into the alley low enough to matter. The place smelled like hot asphalt and old soap. Two blocks over, somebody’s radio was playing a song he couldn’t name.

Satisfied, Cal put his palm flat against his lower abdomen.

His palm pressed in. Skin, and under the skin muscle, and that was all it ever felt like. He’d had injuries — a couple of good ones — and this was not one of those, and it wasn’t his stomach either. The school’s doctors had gone over the same square foot of him six times in three years with three different machines, and all it had got them was a thicker file.

He wasn’t feeling for damage. He was counting.

Everybody knew the rules. They were the kind of thing you learned before you could read, like fire being hot, like the man in the brown uniform coming on Tuesdays. Every person was born with one well. It opened somewhere around twelve or thirteen, and whatever your aspect was came up in it — silver, water, a bear, a flame, some rare thing that got your family a paragraph in the trade press. That was the whole basis of everything. You drew power out of the well, the aspect colored it, the drawing made you stronger, and being stronger was the only currency anybody actually accepted.

The count changed twice in a life, both times a long way above a junior in a school uniform who hadn’t moved a Mark in eight months. You opened a second well when you made Sovereign, if you made Sovereign. A third at Titan. In a country this size the Sovereigns were countable on one hand, and the Titans were a rumor with a statue.

There was a footnote. Once or twice a century a kid cracked a second well early, before he’d earned it; the textbooks put it in small print and the gossip sites put it in large, and then everybody forgot about it, because it was one kid and it wasn’t theirs.

Cal had three.

Left, middle, right, set inside him like holes drilled in a board. He’d had three since he was thirteen, which made four years of alleys and bathroom stalls and locker rooms and a hand pressed to his own stomach to be sure the number was still three — the way you check your back pocket for your keys.

All three of them empty.

Blank was the word on his file. Blank meant one well, opened, with nothing in it: the saddest and most ordinary kind of nothing, a kid whose body had opened a door and then failed to put anything on the other side. Cal had one of those too. The school had it on paper — eight months with no new reading, and a line in his file that had stopped being interesting to everyone, including the people who wrote it. His well was so reliably empty that a coach had once asked him, gently, whether he’d ever considered just not testing anymore.

So: one blank well meant no future. The school had decided that when he was fourteen and had moved him down a track for it, and he had never found a reason to argue, since the decision kept producing the same results every time he stepped onto a mat. Fine.

Then what, exactly, was three?

Three no-futures? Or did the number stop behaving at that point, the way numbers do, and turn into something that wasn’t on the board at all?

He ran it in the same order every time and it came out in the same place, which was that he did not know, that there was no one to ask, and that asking would be the single most expensive sentence he could ever say out loud.

Two women came past the mouth of the alley, close, one of them hauling a bag of dry cleaning.

“—because he told me the thing about the deck—“

“He tells everyone the thing about the deck,” the other one said, and they went on down the hill. Neither of them looked in.

Cal took his hand off his stomach.

Nobody knew. He had made that call at thirteen, standing in a bathroom with his hand in the same place, and he had reopened it exactly once since — not here, not like this, but a real pass, sitting on the edge of a bed at midnight with the whole conversation laid out end to end like a sparring drill. The person listens. The person believes him, maybe, or doesn’t, and it makes no difference, because in both versions the next thing that happens is that the person knows. Then it’s out. Then it’s a thing that can be said at a dinner table, or typed, or repeated in a locker room by somebody who heard it from somebody. And nothing about three empty wells buys anything that would make being talked about cheaper.

Nothing changed either, which was the other half of it. Believed, disbelieved, carried all the way up to the people who mattered — he would still be standing in a school on a Tuesday with three empty wells and no draw. There would be more tests. There would be a great deal of interest and a great deal of paper.

He’d take that trade the day it came with power attached. Until then, the number was his.

He picked a splinter out of his cuff — there was always one, they got into the seams and stayed — looked at it, and dropped it in the gutter.

Then he walked out of the alley and kept going down the hill, toward the house, with the smell of the roasters still in his jacket.