Chapter 377 — No More Limits II

"Right," said Maeve. "Split it."

She turned to the laptop by the screen and typed while she talked, and a plain document came up in place of the coverage with two headings on it.

"What we actually know." She pointed at the first. "Party size is voluntary now. Eligibility still applies, so nobody goes to a floor they haven't earned. And the encounter changes depending on how many people walk in."

Three lines. That was all of it.

"Everything else," she said, and pointed at the second heading, which was already much longer. "Whether it scales in a straight line. Whether it's just more monsters or different mechanics. Whether some floors are built so that five beat fifty. Whether a solo run gets the same floor as everybody else or a different one. Nobody knows. Anybody on television telling you they know is guessing, and some of them are guessing for money."

"So we're guessing too," said Cillian.

"We're not guessing. We're waiting until somebody finds out."

James looked at the short list.

He had ten Challengers downstairs who had been bib numbers on a training floor six months ago. Once they were eligible for the same floor as the founders, and some of them were getting closer, he could take them in.

He could bring Team One's caller and the green trainers and two of Team Two into Floor 39 behind them. He would find out in one run what the scaling did with nine, and write it up for the whole world by teatime.

It would work, too. That was the trouble with it.

He owned forty percent of the guild that had signed them. Every one of them had signed a contract with his name on the first page, on the promise that they would be trained and climb under supervision until they could stand on their own. None of them had signed to find out how a formula worked on a floor nobody had seen.

"We're not doing it," he said.

Finn looked up. "Doing what?"

"Taking the recruits up to find out how the scaling works. Not Thirty-Nine. Not as a test."

"Nobody said as a test."

"Nobody said it yet."

Finn leaned back and the chair creaked. "Fine. Not as a test. But you know it's coming, James. This thing isn't there for nothing. There's going to be a floor where one more person solves something the five of us can't. A proper second healer, or somebody who can sit on a relic all day, or somebody who can see what Maeve sees from the other side of the room. What do we do then? Go in short on purpose?"

"Then we'll deal with it then," said James. "I'm not saying never. I'm saying not today."

"That's a very convenient place to put it."

"It is."

Finn stared at him, and then huffed.

"For the record," said Maeve, "I'm with him, and not because he's right about the principle. We've spent six months turning ten people into independent Challengers. Team One is nearly a team. If the minute a useful class shows up downstairs we pull them up into Team Zero, everything we've built under them falls over. They stop being a guild and start being a bench."

"I didn't say pull them up."

"You said a sixth. Where do you think the sixth comes from?"

Finn opened his mouth and closed it again.

Ronan had not moved off the wall. "You can't just add people," he said. "The five of us have had years. I know where you are without looking, Finn. I know when Cillian's going to go, before he does. You put five good Challengers in beside us and it's not a better team. It's two teams standing in the same room."

"I know that."

"I know you know. I'm saying it anyway."

Finn put his hands up. "All right. All right. Not today." He looked at James. "But we're having this conversation again."

"We will."

Finn looked like a man who had been given half of what he wanted and was already planning how to get the rest. James did not mind that. Finn had a point, and it would still be a point in a month.

---

It went quiet for a bit. The rain ran down the window, and downstairs somebody laughed in the corridor.

Cillian had his head back against the chair and his eyes on the ceiling tiles. When he spoke he sounded like he was mentioning the weather.

"You know nobody's actually making us go tomorrow."

Nobody answered him.

"I'm only saying," said Cillian. "There's no date. There's nobody at the door. Thirty-Nine's not going anywhere."

James looked back at the frontier board.

Ireland on the top line. Thirty-Eight. Floor 39 available, and nobody else standing at it.

For months, every day they did not climb had cost them something. It had cost them ground on Korea when they were second. It had been a threat getting further up the Tower while they sat on the ground floor healing. It had been Cormac's Blood Writ with a date on it, and a Story Floor with a timer, and one thing after another that would go badly if he was late for it.

He tried to find the clock on this one.

There was no Blood Writ. There was no countdown. Nothing in the Tower had ever said a floor expired if you left it alone. The red had gone ahead of them, and it would be exactly as far ahead in two months as it was now, because it was already there.

He had been reading *available* as *urgent*.

The panel said the floor was open. It had never said anything else. Every time he saw that line he had heard a bell ringing that the Tower was not ringing.

Nothing happened if he left the button alone.

"Two months," he said.

Finn looked round. "What?"

"We stop climbing. Two months."

"Right." Finn nodded slowly. "Lighter block. Recovery, bit of tech work, then we book Thirty-Nine for, what, end of—"

"No. No Floor 39 date. Not inside the two months. No floor attempts at all."

That got a proper silence.

Cillian took his feet off the chair.

"James Ganner," he said. "Do you understand the concept of a holiday? Because I'm not sure you do, and I don't want to get excited and have you mean something else."

"I understand it."

"Say it back to me."

"We don't climb for two months."

Cillian looked at Ronan. "Did you hear that?"

"I heard it," said Ronan. He had not changed his expression at all, but he pushed himself off the wall and sat down for the first time since they had come in, which for Ronan was nearly a speech. "Good."

Maeve had already pulled the operations calendar up on the laptop. She was not asking whether. She was asking what for.

"Two months from when?"

"From today."

"Then that's eight weeks from today." Her pen was going on the pad beside the laptop at the same time as she typed, dates going down the side of the page. "I'll block the frontier slots. We keep equipment on its normal cycle, and I want the tech review done in the first two weeks while we still remember what hurt. What else is in it?"

"Train," said James. "Keep training. Run the guild. The recruits keep climbing with Ronan and Cillian's structure the way they were going to. Business, equipment, whatever needs doing." He thought about it. "And otherwise we live like people who aren't booked to die every few days."

"That's not a plan," said Maeve, writing it down.

"It's a plan."

"Then in two months we sit back down in this room and decide on Thirty-Nine," she said, and wrote that too, and underlined it.