Across Infinities: The Twelve Games · Book 5

The Salem Gate

Chapter 1: The Line

Channel One. Round one of Hold the Line, and the first drifter of the season walks past three grown men to get to our boy at ten past five in the morning. Eternals, that’s not a monster, that’s a fan. Then the medic turns his hand over and stops. Odds on her knowing more than she’s saying: one to nine. Odds on her saying it: off the board.

The drifter came out of the light at ten past five in the morning, when everybody had started to think the night was done, and it walked straight past three men to get to Marco, as if it had been sent with his name on it.

Marco saw it first because he was always looking. He was on the left end of the Line, where the chalk ran out into the reeds and the ground went soft, and he’d been standing there since eleven the night before with his hands wrapped and his shoulders up around his ears against the wind off the marsh. The Gate had been low all night. Not a full breach, just a shallow: the long white seam hanging thirty feet over the spartina instead of forty, and every so often a slow pale drip of light coming down out of it like honey off a spoon, touching the grass, going out. Four drifters before midnight. Two at three. Then nothing for two hours, and the sky going the color of a bruise over the dunes, and Amos down the Line starting the one about the Revere Beach lifeguard again, which had no ending, because Amos had never once been allowed to reach it. Then this one.

It came down the light the way they all did, not walking exactly, more being poured. It stood up on the grass at the bottom of the drip and was a shape: man-high, man-wide, the color of breath on a cold morning, with a suggestion of a head and a suggestion of shoulders and, where the hands should be, a suggestion of hands. You could see the reeds through it. You could see, if you looked, the lights of the Authority trucks at the end of Marsh Road through its chest. The cold came off it in a wave you felt before you saw it move. The grass where it stood went white with frost in a ring.

“Left,” Marco said, not loud. “Mine.”

“Yours,” said Dee, two places down.

He went out to meet it. You always went out to meet them. You didn’t let them come to the chalk, because the chalk was the last thing between the marsh and the road, and the road went to the town, and the first house on the road was the Pelletiers’, and the Pelletiers had three kids. So you went out. You went out over the wet ground with your hands up and your chin down, the way Darius had drilled into you in the gym for two years until you did it in your sleep, and you watched its shoulders, because it was the shoulders that told you, the same as a man.

It reached for him. They always reached. That was the thing about them that you never got used to: they weren’t angry and they weren’t hungry, as far as anybody could tell; they just reached, slow, the way somebody reaches for a coat on a hook in the dark. The suggestion of a hand came up toward his face, and the air in front of it went so cold his eyes watered. He slipped it.

There was nothing in the world like hitting a drifter. Guns didn’t work on them. Guns didn’t work anywhere within half a mile of the Gate, for that matter; the cold got into the actions and froze them solid, and in the first month the National Guard had found that out the hard way and gone home with a lot of very expensive rifles that wouldn’t open. Knives shattered. Fire wouldn’t catch. But a warm fist, a living, wrapped, bare fist with a man’s whole weight behind it, went into a drifter the way it would go into a cloud of steam on a cold morning, and the drifter came apart around it, and you felt the cold go up your arm to the shoulder and stop there, like a hand on a door, and then the shape lost its shape and went back up the light it came down, slowly, like smoke going up a chimney when somebody opens a window.

That was the theory. In practice your arm hurt for an hour and your knuckles turned blue under the wraps, and if you weren’t careful, if you let one touch you instead of you touching it, you lost something.

This one he didn’t let touch him. He put his right hand through where its chest was, all the way, and turned it, as you’d turn a key, and felt the cold go up his arm, and pulled out. The shape folded around the hole he’d made like a curtain in a draft. It went up the light. The light went up after it, slow as a tide going out, back into the seam, and the seam closed down to a line, and the line hung there in the dawn over Gallows Marsh, white and quiet and forty feet up, the way it hung all day, every day, the way it had hung for two years.

“Time,” said somebody down the Line. It was Darius. It was always Darius who called it. “That’s time. Good night, everybody. Good morning. Amos, you can finish the lifeguard at the gym. Nobody’ll be there.”

Marco stood out on the grass a while longer with his arm aching. He couldn’t have said why he did that. He always did it. Everybody else went back to the chalk and broke off and started unwrapping and stamping and joking. He stayed out where the drifter had stood, in the ring of white frost, and watched the seam until he was sure.

Behind him somebody said, “You’re bleeding.”

He looked down. He was. Not from the drifter. From his lip, which had split again in the cold where he’d split it sparring on Tuesday. There was a little line of it down his chin.

“It’s nothing,” he said.

“It never is,” said Doc. “Come here.”

The first-aid table was at the end of the Line, under the Authority’s floodlights, which didn’t work this close to the Gate and so were just big dead black eyes on poles. There were two kerosene lanterns on it instead, which did. There was a folding table with a white cloth, a steel box of dressings, a thermos of coffee that was always hot even when nothing else was, and Doc.

Nobody on the Line used her name. She was Doc on the roster and Doc on the thermos, and if she had a first name, she’d never once offered it. Nobody knew how long Doc had been the medic for the Line. A long time. Since the beginning, Darius said, though Marco had a feeling that wasn’t right, that there’d been a time before her, and couldn’t think when it was. She was small and neat and somewhere between forty and sixty, with gray hair cut short and a gray cardigan buttoned up to the throat whatever the weather, and she sat at her table every breach night from the first drip to the last, and patched fighters, and poured coffee, and watched the Gate with an expression Marco had never been able to name. She didn’t talk much. When she did, people listened, the way you listen to the one person in a room who isn’t trying to make you like them.

She sat him on the camp stool and took his chin in her fingers and turned his face to the lantern.

“Lip,” she said.

“Lip.”

“Hand.” He held it up. She unpicked the end of the wrap with a fingernail and looked at the knuckles underneath, which had gone the color of a plum. She pressed one. He didn’t flinch. She watched him over it.

“You went out a long way,” she said.

“It was coming for the chalk.”

“It was coming for you. You always go out further than you need to.” She let go of his hand. “One day you’ll go out and it’ll be one more step than you’ve got.”

“I’ve got plenty of steps.”

“That’s what worries me.” She dabbed his lip with something that stung like a grudge, and held a square of gauze there, and made him hold it himself. Then she poured him a coffee from the thermos and put it in his good hand and sat back and looked at him the way she always did, as though he were a letter written in very small print and she’d only just found her glasses.

“Be careful what you carry, Marco,” she said.

She said it to him most breach nights. She’d said it to him the first night he ever stood the Line, two Septembers ago, when he was twenty-two and scared out of his mind and had gone out after the first drifter he ever saw without even wrapping his hands. He’d asked her what it meant, then. She’d said, You’ll know, and he still didn’t.

“I don’t carry anything,” he said. “I travel light. Ask my mother. Ask my landlord. Ask the three girlfriends who said so in writing.”

Doc smiled, a little. It didn’t reach anywhere much.

“Go home,” she said. “Sleep. Darius has got news, and you’ll want to be awake for it. And Marco…” She stopped. “Wrap properly. Somebody’s going to notice.”

“Notice what? What news?”

But she’d turned to Amos, who’d come up with frost-burn on two fingers and a long story about it, and Marco knew from experience that when Doc turned away from you, you’d been dismissed.

He didn’t go home. He never went home after a breach. He went to the gym.

Harbor Street Boxing was a long brick building at the bottom of Harbor Street, where it ran into Marsh Road and gave up. It had been a rope-walk in seventeen-something, then a cannery, then a furniture warehouse, then nothing for twenty years, and then Darius Beale had bought it with the money from his last fight in 1994 and put a ring in the middle of it, and heavy bags down one side, and speed bags down the other, and a hand-painted sign over the door that said HARBOR STREET BOXING, NO EGOS, NO EXCUSES, NO SPITTING. Two years ago, after the first breach, after the Guard went home with their frozen rifles and somebody had worked out what a wrapped fist could do, it had also become the headquarters of the Harker Line, and the Authority had put a dead floodlight on its roof and a sign on its door that said COMMONWEALTH GATE AUTHORITY, DESIGNATED DEFENSE STATION 1, which Darius had let them put up under his own and which nobody ever called it. Everybody called it Darius’s.

Marco let himself in by the side door with his own key. The gym was dark and cold and smelled the way it always smelled: leather, sweat, liniment, old wood, the sea. He didn’t turn on the lights. He went to the back, past the ring, to the little room behind the office where there was a cot, and lay down on it with his boots on and his wraps on and the coffee going cold on the floor beside him, and slept.

He dreamed what he usually dreamed, which was nothing he could ever remember, except that there were stairs in it, and somebody’s hand.

When he woke the light was coming in yellow through the high windows and somebody was in the gym.

He could hear it before he was properly awake: the slap of a rope, quick and even, the way only somebody who’d skipped for years could skip. Then the rope stopped, and somebody laughed, a woman, short and surprised. Then a baby made a noise, the kind that isn’t crying yet but is thinking about it seriously.

He sat up. He swung his legs off the cot. His arm still ached. His lip had stuck to itself. He went out through the office into the gym, blinking.

Darius was standing by the ring with his arms folded, in his old gray sweatshirt with the sleeves cut off, looking pleased with himself, which on Darius looked like a man trying to hide a whole orange in his mouth and failing. Next to him was a woman Marco had never seen before.

She was maybe thirty. She had dark red hair pulled back hard, and a face that had been out in a lot of wind, and the kind of shoulders you only get from twenty years of throwing punches for a living. She was wearing a black sweatshirt and old sweatpants and running shoes held together with tape. She had a jump rope in one hand. On her other hip, sitting there like she owned it, was a baby: fat, solemn, bald except for a single surprising copper curl on top, in a yellow sleeper with ducks on it, holding a roll of white athletic tape in both fists and gnawing the edge of it with tremendous concentration.

Around the woman’s neck, on a thin silver chain, there was a ring. A plain gold band. Not on her finger. On the chain, against her breastbone, outside the sweatshirt, as if she wanted people to see where it wasn’t.

“Here he is,” said Darius. “That’s the one I was telling you about. Marco Ruiz. He’s always here. He sleeps here. I’ve told him to stop. Marco, this is Rowan Pierce. Rowan’s going to be running the hands.”

“Running the hands,” said Marco.

“Wraps. The roster for the Line. Training. Everything I’m too old for and you’re all too stupid for.” Darius beamed. “She’s the best there is. New England Golden Gloves at nineteen. She was going to go to the Olympics.”

“I wasn’t,” said Rowan Pierce.

“She was. Then she married a Harker boy, which nobody can help, it’s in the water. And now she’s back.” He considered the baby. “And this is Lily. Lily’s going to be running everything else. She’s already better at paperwork than me. She eats it.”

The baby took the tape out of her mouth and looked at Marco. She had gray eyes, very round, very clear, the color of the marsh on a morning when you couldn’t tell water from sky. She looked at him for a long time, the way only babies and Doc ever studied anybody: without any wish at all to be liked. Then she put the tape back in her mouth.

“Hi,” said Marco.

“She doesn’t talk to fighters,” said Rowan. “She doesn’t talk to anybody. She’s eleven months old. But she especially doesn’t talk to fighters.” She looked him up and down. He was suddenly aware of the boots, and the wraps, and the lip, and the fact that he’d slept in all of it. “You stood the Line last night.”

“Yeah.”

“You went out a long way.”

He looked at Darius. Darius eyed the ceiling.

“Doc said,” said Rowan. “I came in at six. She was packing up. She said, The one who went out too far is asleep in the back.” She shifted the baby on her hip. “Hold out your hands.”

“What?”

“Your hands. I’m doing the hands. I’m going to see everybody’s hands this week, and I’m going to see how everybody wraps, and then I’m going to wrap them properly, because I’ve just been looking at the wraps in the bin out back and somebody in this gym wraps like he’s tying up a Christmas tree.” She held out her free hand. “Come on.”

He held them out. Both of them. She considered the wraps, which he’d done himself at ten the night before in the dark, and her mouth went thin. She put the baby down on the canvas apron of the ring, where the baby immediately set off at a determined crawl toward the corner post, and took his right hand in both of hers, and started unwinding.

She had good hands. That was his first thought, and he was a little ashamed of it, the way it came, quick and plain. Square, strong, dry, with the knuckles flattened the way fighters’ knuckles flattened, and a white scar across the back of the left one. They knew what they were doing. They unwound the wrap in three turns, quick, and didn’t drop it, and laid it over her shoulder without looking.

Then she turned his hand over, palm up, and stopped.

He knew what she was looking at. Everybody looked at it, the first time. There was a callus across his palm and the pads of his fingers that wasn’t like any boxer’s callus, a shape like the inside of a glove, the seams and all, as if he’d worn the same pair every day for a year and they’d printed themselves on him. He’d had it as long as he could remember. And in the heel of his hand there was a little white scar, curved, the length of his thumbnail.

She ran her thumb along it. She frowned. It was a small frown, not much more than a line between her eyebrows, and it went away almost as soon as it came, but he saw it. He saw it because, for no reason at all, his whole chest had gone warm, the way your hands go warm when you’ve been out on the Line all night and somebody puts a coffee in them.

“Bottle?” she said.

“Bottle,” he said. “I was eight.”

She looked at it for a moment longer. Then she said, “Hm,” and turned his hand back over, and picked up a fresh roll of wrap from the stool, and started.

He’d been wrapped by a lot of people. His first trainer, in Lynn, when he was fourteen. Darius, a thousand times. Himself, ten thousand. Nobody had ever wrapped him like this. She went over the wrist three times, firm, and up across the back of the hand, and through the fingers, between each one, the way some old trainers did and most didn’t bother, and back down, and across the knuckles in a pad she built as she went, without measuring, folding it on itself like a woman folding a sheet; and her hands kept going over the white scar on the heel of his hand, once, twice, with her thumb, as if checking it was still there.

The baby had reached the corner post and was pulling herself up it.

“Lily,” said Rowan without looking round. “No.”

The baby sat down hard, unbothered, and started on the turnbuckle pad with her gums.

“She escapes,” said Rowan. “Constantly. You put her down and she’s gone. It’s her only hobby. Her other hobby is eating things that aren’t food.”

“Mine was the same,” said Darius. “My mother used to tie me to the porch rail with a dish towel. That’s how they did things in Lynn in nineteen sixty. Look how I turned out.”

Rowan looked at him. Marco watched him. Darius looked at the ceiling again, which was getting a lot of use this morning.

“I’m not tying her to anything,” said Rowan. “Left hand.”

He gave her the left hand. It was the same: the glove-shape, the knuckles. No scar on this one. She did it the same, quicker, and the same warm thing sat in his chest the whole time, steady, not getting bigger, not going away. He had no idea what it was. He thought maybe he was just tired. He thought maybe it was just that he’d been out on the marsh all night in the cold and here was somebody with warm hands. He looked at the ring on its chain and looked away.

She tore the tape with her teeth. She pressed the end down with her thumb, firmly.

“There,” she said. “That’s a wrap.”

Behind her, on the wall over the office door, the old electric clock with the Narragansett beer sign on it said twenty to seven. It was evening, he realized. He’d slept all day. The light through the high windows wasn’t morning yellow; it was the long gold of October going down over the harbor, and the gym had filled up around them without his noticing, with the evening class coming in, and Amos on the heavy bag, and somebody’s radio on low by the door that had gone to static and come back the way radios did in Harker.

She was still holding his left hand by the wrist. She seemed to notice that at the same moment he did. She let go.

“Tomorrow,” she said, “you’re on the bag at six, and I’m going to watch you, and then I’m going to tell you everything you do wrong. And then I’m going to fix the roster for the Line, because I’ve seen that too, and it’s a mess, and somebody’s been standing on the left end every single night for two years without a break, and that stops.” She turned and scooped the baby off the turnbuckle in one movement, without looking, as you’d pick a glove off a hook. “Say goodnight, Lily.”

The baby took the turnbuckle pad out of her mouth and gazed at him over her mother’s shoulder with those gray marsh-water eyes, and said nothing at all, and Rowan Pierce carried her out through the front door into the gold evening with the ring swinging on its chain.

Marco stood by the ring and glanced at his hands.

“Well,” said Darius. “That’s me retired.”

“She’s good,” said Marco.

“She’s the best there is. I told you.” Darius studied the door. His face did something complicated. “Her husband was James Pierce.”

Marco knew the name. Everybody in Harker knew the name. He’d stood the Line with James Pierce for most of a year, before. He hadn’t known James had a wife who’d nearly gone to the Olympics. He hadn’t known about the baby. He’d known James was the one who talked too much on quiet nights and could do every voice from The Simpsons, and that one September night last year at the sixth breach James had gone over the rope after a drifter that had hold of Petey Kowalczyk, and the light had come down, and James hadn’t come back, and that was all anybody said.

“I didn’t know she had…” He stopped.

“Nobody did. She moved to her sister’s in Worcester after. Had the baby there.” Darius picked up the old wraps from the stool, Marco’s Christmas-tree wraps, and looked at them, and threw them in the trash. “I wrote to her. Answer came Tuesday. She said, I want to come back. I want to work. I want to be where he was.” He shrugged, a huge slow shrug, a whole mountain range moving. “So she’s here.”

Marco looked at his hands again. The wrap was perfect. It was so good it was almost a shame to hit anything with it.

His chest was still warm. He put it down to the coffee, which had been cold for twelve hours, and to the long day’s sleep, and to October, and went to find something to eat.

It was the first of October. On the thirtieth, at the dark of the moon, the Gate would come all the way down to the grass for the first time in a year, the way it had the night James Pierce went over the rope; and it would take what it was given. Marco had twenty-nine days. He didn’t know yet that he was counting.