He sat down without asking. That was Prem — he had been letting himself into spaces his whole life without waiting for permission, and by seven he had refined it into something that didn't feel rude. It just felt like him.
"You're doing something now," he said. He had a piece of wire in his hands, bending it slowly. "I can work with that."
Sid looked at him.
"Before, you were just watching," Prem said. "Watching without doing is just waiting. I don't have time for people who are waiting."
"And now."
"Now you're moving." He shrugged. "So let's move together."
His mother had died when he was three. His father was still alive in the technical sense. Prem had figured out early that there was a difference between a person being present and a person being there, and he had stopped expecting the second thing around the time he learned to make his own food. He ran errands for half the bloc. He knew which vendor left bread on the corner at closing, which families had a little extra on market days, which RA officer looked the other way when it cost him nothing not to look.
He knew people. Not the way Sid knew them — not as patterns and systems. He knew them the way you know someone after you've shown up at their door enough times that they stop being surprised to see you.
"Tell me about Breslin," Sid said.
Prem almost smiled. Right question.
Breslin Oha had been in the north market since before Prem was born. Fifty-three, big through the chest, with a face that had decided a long time ago to give nothing away for free.
He sold grain and salt and dried goods. He also collected everything that passed through his stall the way other people collected debts — patiently, without making a show of it. He knew what was happening in Bloc Seven before most of Bloc Seven knew. He had a cousin in Bloc Six and vendors from Bloc Two who brought news the way people carry things when they travel, without meaning to.
"He left grain outside our building once," Prem said. "Worst week of a bad year. No note. Never mentioned it."
"He won't talk to me," Sid said. "I'm five."
"Not yet. But he watches. You're strange enough that he'll get curious, and when Breslin gets curious he starts talking." Prem bent the wire. "Give it a month."
Sid said nothing. He looked at the lane. At the market in the distance where Breslin was setting up with the slow ease of someone who had done this thousands of times and had found, somewhere in the repetition, something he didn't need to name.
"He gives without making you feel the giving," Prem said. "That's rare."
Sid touched the stone in his pocket.
"Yes," he said. "It is."
Hollis Crane had been a teacher in Zone Two for twenty-three years before a union dispute and a fifteen-year-old paperwork irregularity that nobody had cared about until someone needed to care about it ended his contract, his address, and his Gate papers in the space of eight months.
He came to the Ash with one bag. He found the ground floor room in Building Six. He started teaching.
He was sixty-one and he had the patience of someone who had already lost the thing he had been afraid of losing, which made him, in his own way, free.
He noticed Sid in the first week. Not because the boy answered fast — plenty of children answered fast. Because of what happened after the answer. The silence where Sid turned the thing over, looking for what was underneath it.
He started leaving books on the bench by the door on the mornings Sid came early. He said nothing about it.
After class one Tuesday he kept Sid back and asked questions for twenty minutes. He couldn't find the edge of what the boy knew.
He put three books directly on the table between them.
"These first," he said.
Sid looked at the books. "Thank you."
"Read them. Tell me what you think."
Four days later Sid came back with six questions that kept Hollis awake two nights working out the answers.
He put more books on the table.
This was how it went. Hollis gave. Sid came back. The questions got harder. Neither of them talked about what it was. It didn't need a name.
Outside, the Ash went about its day. Nina came home from the Bloc Three shift coughing quietly into her sleeve. Zara arranged her pebbles. The stone sat in Sid's pocket.
Tomorrow there would be more.
There was always more.