I Won the Lottery and Went Back in Time!?!

The river was down and four strangers were standing on the landing at first light, and three of them were what everybody had expected.

Nara came up from Havek’s camp with a bundle on her back and the wrong kind of eagerness. Nineteen, quick, already asking questions before she had put the bundle down, and Leon watched Nayra’s face do something complicated at about the fourth question.

Selora came off the Nethvar boat and said almost nothing for two days. Renketh had chosen her and had sent no message with her, which Veya said was itself a message.

Tevi was from the fourth camp, the one that had been counted twice without telling anybody, and he was sixteen and he watched doorways.

The fourth was a woman of about fifty from Low Reed, who came last, on foot, alone, and put her bundle down in front of Nayra and said her name was Vethra and that she had not wanted to come.

Nayra did not put it as a question. "Then why are you here."

"Because they sent me."

Nayra looked at her for a while.

"Good," she said, and that was the last thing either of them said to the other for most of the morning.

***

The next morning the first lesson went badly, and it went badly on the first item.

The list was Nayra’s and Leon had copied it into the register three evenings before, in her order, not his: the four marks, the water rules, wound care, bone setting, childbirth, and the record.

She started at the bottom, with the record, because the record is what makes the rest of it survive a bad year.

Then she asked the four of them to write their own names.

Nara could not. Selora could not. Tevi could not. Vethra could not.

There was a silence on the healing platform that lasted about six seconds and cost Nayra something visible.

Leon had known this and had not thought about it, which he recognised as the same failure he had made with the soap eleven days earlier: an assumption that was true where he came from. Everybody he had ever taught anything to could already write. He had built a curriculum on the second floor of a building that had no first floor.

Nayra did not turn round. "Luma."

Luma came up from the water chain and did not ask what for.

They rebuilt the morning in about a quarter of an hour, standing up, in front of four people who were watching them do it. The record went to the end of the season instead of the beginning. Luma took the names and the marks. Nayra took everything you can be taught by having your hands moved. And the four students learned, in their first hour, that the two women running this had no plan and could produce one at speed, which Leon suspected taught them more than the record would have.

He said as much to Nayra that evening.

"Na. It taught them we are not finished. That is different and it is worse."

***

She kept her promise on the fourth day, which was the first day all four of them could sit still.

Veya came up to the platform for it and sat at the edge, and did not speak, and everybody understood that this made it a thing that had happened.

Nayra told them about the case.

She did it in about ninety seconds, flat, with no softening. There is a thing in a locked box on this terrace. It comes from the Varu’s world. It does not heal a wound and it does not set a bone. What it does is that a person who is going to die of a turned wound sometimes does not.

There are eight.

There will never be nine.

There is no rule for who gets one, she has carried that for eleven weeks, and she is telling them now, on the fourth day, before a witness, because she argued for an hour against them finding it out by accident.

"You will go home. And one day somebody in your camp will be dying, and you will remember this, and you will come up this river. I want you to know now that I do not know what I will say."

Nara asked how far a person had to be gone.

Selora asked who had had the first one, and listened to the answer about Pel’s leg all the way through without moving.

Tevi asked whether the box could be moved somewhere nobody knew about, which told Leon a good deal about the fourth camp.

Vethra did not ask anything for a long time.

Then she said: "We had this."

Nayra turned round.

"Not that." Vethra nodded at nothing in particular, in the direction the box was not. "A man. He could set a bone so it worked. One man, in a camp of ninety, and no others anywhere near, and he was the only one and everybody knew it."

"And your rule?"

"Whoever reached him first." Vethra was looking at her hands. "That was not a rule. That was what happened."

She gave them one case and only one, and she gave it plainly, and Leon understood after about four sentences that she had told it before and had decided a long time ago exactly how much of it to say.

Two people in one afternoon. One a man of thirty with a leg. One a child. The child was further away.

"He went to the leg. Because the leg arrived. And the leg walked for another twenty years and I saw him at Low Reed the summer before last and he is still walking."

Nobody on the platform said anything.

"That is not the part," Vethra said. "The part is that nobody ever said out loud that a choice had been made. We all agreed together that there had been no choice, because the leg came first, and that made it nobody’s."

Nayra sat down, which she did not do in front of students.

"What did you make afterward? What rule?"

"None." Vethra said it without any weight at all. "We argued for two summers. Then he died and there was nothing left to argue about."

***

Leon walked back down to the works in the dark and thought about it the whole way and got nowhere, which he later decided was the correct outcome.

There is no good rule. There is a rule you say out loud beforehand and a decision that belongs to nobody afterwards. That is the entire choice. Everything else is arithmetic.

He wrote it in the register and then crossed out entire because he was not sure, and left the crossing-out visible, because that was one of Nayra’s rules and it was a good one.

Then he wrote down the other thing, which was smaller and would not go away: four people were now going to spend a season learning to keep wounds clean, and he had promised their teacher a thing for their hands and had produced a jar of brown paste with a crossed mark against it.

Up on the platform, Nayra was still sitting where she had been.

Vethra had not gone to the shelter with the others.

"Show me the box."

"Na."

"You do not know me."

"Na."

Vethra picked up her bundle then, and went to find where she was sleeping, and stopped once on the way.

"Good."