Chapter 313 - 304 — Forty Left I

Chapter 313: Chapter 304 — Forty Left I

There were forty people on James’s training floor and he did not know one of their names.

He came up the stairs to the observation level at ten past eight with a coffee he had bought on Swords Road, and stopped at the rail, and looked down into the north hall at four rows of ten in numbered bibs, standing about in the loose way people stand when they have been told to wait and are trying not to look nervous.

Bib numbers. That had been Maeve’s.

*Nobody uses a name on the floor. Ronan and Cillian score a number and the number gets matched to a file afterward by somebody who wasn’t in the room.*

Six weeks.

Six weeks since a courtyard on Floor 30, and in that time the Guild’s analysis team had gone through every frame of footage anyone in the world had of the red — theirs, the American Floor 23 material, both Caerleon debriefs — and had produced a two-hundred-page document that said, at considerable length, that it behaved consistently and nobody knew what it was. Nothing had come out of the Bureau. Nothing had come out of any other guild.

Floor 31 had been sitting available in the corner of his vision for forty-three days.

And downstairs, thirty-one thousand four hundred applications had turned into forty people in bibs.

---

Ronan was walking the lane markings.

He had a roll of tape under his arm and he was going along the taped line on the western side of the hall, checking it against the diagram, and every twenty feet he crouched and put his thumb on the tape to make sure it had taken.

Cillian was not looking at the diagram at all. He was walking the course itself, from the starting zone to the extraction line, at the speed a group would actually move, stopping twice to look back at where he had come from.

"He’s walked it three times," said Maeve, without looking up.

She had the observation console open with the scoring rubric across the whole left half of it — eleven categories, each with a mark out of five and a written definition under it, and it had been visible on the wall screen downstairs since the candidates walked in.

Finn was in the chair beside her with forty files open and was on his second pass through the floor histories.

"Twenty-two’s done more floors than I have," he said.

"I know."

"By eleven."

"I know, Finn."

James took the third chair and said nothing at all, because this was not his.

He had signed the budget for it. He had authorised the intake. He had spent four hours in a room in August listening to Ronan and Cillian argue about what a five out of five in *route discipline* actually meant, and had contributed almost nothing to that conversation, which had been correct.

Ronan handled defensive assessment and formation discipline. Cillian handled combat trials and applicant evaluation. It said so on a page in a founders’ agreement that a solicitor had made all five of them sign a year ago, and this was the first day it had ever meant anything.

---

Alice came up the stairs at twenty past and stood at the far end of the rail with her arms folded.

She had put nothing away. Wings out, halo dark behind her head, in the charcoal coat she had bought herself in Santry.

James watched about half the floor notice her over the following minute.

"That’ll be interesting," said Maeve.

"Should I ask her to—"

"God, no." Maeve made a note without looking up. "If they can’t run a lane with somebody standing on a balcony, they can’t run one with anything."

---

Ronan gave the brief.

He did it standing on the floor with the forty in a loose half circle around him, and he did it in about ninety seconds, which James suspected he had practised.

"You’re in eight groups of five. You did not pick them and you won’t get to. Your group starts at that line and finishes at that one." He pointed twice. "All five of you cross, or none of you did."

Somebody asked what the opposition was.

"Me and him." Ronan nodded at Cillian, who raised a hand. "You don’t have to beat us. You will not beat us. That’s not what’s being measured."

"Then what is?"

"Whether you can still be a party when it stops going the way you planned."

He let that sit.

"Your damage numbers are already on file. Every one of you got here because you can fight — that was screening, that was six weeks ago, we’re finished with it. Today’s about what you do when a route closes and somebody’s out of position and the person calling it gets it wrong." He turned and pointed at the wall screen, where eleven scored categories sat in white on black. "That’s the sheet. It’s been up there since you walked in and it’ll be up there when you leave. Nobody here passes because I liked them. Nobody fails because Cillian had a feeling."

"I have great feelings," said Cillian.

"He has terrible feelings. Group one."

---

The first group had number nineteen in it.

James had noticed nineteen in the files, because everybody had. Best individual combat record of the forty by a distance — eleven years on the circuit, two guilds, a Floor 22 clear with a party that had lost two people and a personal contribution line that made Finn sit up.

He was very good. That was obvious in the first fifteen seconds.

The group came off the line in a decent enough shape, made ground down the centre, and then Ronan closed the middle with the shield and started pushing them left.

And gave nineteen a lane.

James saw him do it. Ronan shifted his rear foot about eight inches and let the whole right side of his own body open, and it was so plainly a mistake that it was not one.

Nineteen took it.

He went through the gap fast, got past Ronan’s shoulder, and was thirty feet up the hall and closer to the extraction line than any candidate all morning.

Cillian did not chase him.

Cillian put two short bolts into the space nineteen had just left, where a rear position was now empty, and the four people still back there had to turn and cover it — and the moment they turned, they stopped advancing, and Ronan walked forward into a formation that had gone from five wide to four narrow.

It took ninety seconds.

Nineteen crossed the extraction line on his own with two of his group still on their feet forty feet behind him and a horn going.

`FAILED — 0/5 EXTRACTED`

"He got further than anybody," said James.

He said it out loud and then heard himself say it.

Ronan, on the floor, was not looking at the extraction line. He was talking to a staff member with the tablet and pointing back at a spot about a third of the way down the hall — the spot where nineteen had gone through the gap — and the staff member was marking it.

Finn had already rewound it upstairs.

He watched it twice at half speed and then sat back.

"No," he said. "That’s not — yeah. No."

"Say it properly."

"He leaves the four position empty for four and a half seconds." Finn tapped the screen. "Ronan closes the middle, right? So the four position is the *only* thing covering support. If that’s a floor and not a hall, then whoever’s standing in the four spot is the person standing between Cillian’s lightning and Maeve."

"So he’s gone," said Maeve.

"I didn’t say that."

---

They went through the morning at a good pace and it was not remotely dramatic.

Group two never got hit at all and never got anywhere. They were so careful about their spacing that they spent eleven minutes covering sixty feet and the clock beat them, and Ronan wrote *timid* in a box that had five marks in it and gave them a two.

Group four had more raw output than anybody. They also had three people who all reacted to the same threat when Cillian lit up the right side — three of five, turning together, on one bolt — and the entire left of the hall opened like a door, and Ronan walked through it.

Group five had a man who would not stop talking. He was not wrong, that was the maddening part; twice his correction was better than the caller’s. But he made every adjustment into a negotiation, and by the third one the caller had stopped calling anything at all, and the group fell apart because nobody was steering it.

Group six read the trap.

That was the first thing all morning that made Cillian stop and look up. Ronan leaned on the shield in the middle and left the left route wide and inviting, and the group’s caller looked at it, and looked at Ronan, and simply took them the other way — through the harder ground on the right, straight into Cillian, slowly and badly and successfully.

Three of five crossed.

"That’s a fail," said Maeve.

"That’s a fail with a five in *route discipline*," said Cillian, from the floor.