Chapter 383 — Five More I

Chapter 383: Chapter 383 — Five More I

The strategy room had one long table, and that morning nobody sat at it properly.

They had pulled the chairs round to face the wall screen instead, close together, like people waiting for a film. Somebody had brought up coffee at half eight. By ten it was still on the side table in its cardboard tray, five cups with the lids on, going cold.

The screen was paused on one frame. It was the clearest one they had. The Echo was standing in the crater with its wings dragged down behind it, the floor broken round its feet, and its face turned slightly toward the camera.

The display hummed. Outside the glass, the staff had been told to leave them alone, and they were doing it so carefully that nobody walked past the door at all.

Alice stood at the end of the row with her arms folded.

"Everyone on the news is calling it Wrath," said Cillian.

"It wasn’t him," said Alice.

She said it to the screen, not to them.

"The Tower called it an Echo because that’s what it was. Something made to look like him. It had some of his face and some of his strength, and some of his Authority. It was not him."

"How sure are you?" said James.

Alice was quiet for long enough that Ronan looked round at her.

"More sure than I would have been yesterday," she said. "When we first saw the red, I didn’t have any of this. Last night I watched his face and his wings and the way he stands up, all of it together, with the Authority on him. And things came back."

"What things?"

"Pieces. Not all of it." She unfolded her arms and folded them again. "His name."

Nobody said anything.

"Turiel," said Alice. "Wrath was what the Seven called him. Before that he was Turiel."

James let it sit in the room for a second.

They had spent most of a year on one word. A dying man on Floor 30 had given it to them, and Alice had refused to give them anything after it. Now the thing had a name of its own.

"He was never high," Alice went on. "Not in the old order. He was a long way down it. People looked at where he stood and thought they knew what he was, and they kept thinking it until they fought him."

"And then?" said Finn.

"Then they stopped thinking it."

She nodded at the screen.

"You saw what the problem is. The American’s gravity worked. It worked on that thing from the first second. And it stood up anyway, because the body underneath the Authority was strong enough to carry it. That was always what made him frightening. Lots of things have power. He had power on a body that could use it."

"And that was a copy," said Ronan.

"That was a copy. The real one would have been worse. I don’t know how much worse." She paused. "I don’t remember all of him. I’m not going to pretend I do."

---

James leaned forward in his chair.

"You remember how he fought."

"Some of it."

"Do you remember how anybody survived him?"

Alice looked at him for the first time that morning.

"Yes," she said. "One thing."

She walked up to the screen and put one finger on the Echo’s shoulder, where the red had gathered the first time the American hurt it.

"The red takes the harm first. It doesn’t send it straight back. It takes in what’s done to him and holds it, and then it lets it go." She drew her finger away from the shoulder, out across the court. "And when it lets it go, it’s empty. The channels have to fill again before they can take another big hit and throw it back properly. It isn’t long, but it happens every time."

"How long?" said Maeve.

"A few seconds. Less if the hit was small. I can’t give you a number. Nobody was counting."

Finn had sat up.

"So that’s the opening," he said. "Straight after it fires."

"That’s the opening."

"So you don’t pile into him." Finn was already counting on his fingers, the way he did when he was building something. "You hold him. You give him one hit, a small one, on purpose. He fires it back, and you get out of the way of that. Then he’s empty, and that’s when everybody hits him for real. Then you break off before it fills up again, and you go round again."

"Yes," said Alice.

James was thinking about the American.

The small hits had worked. They had loaded the red with a little and got a little back, and he had stood up under it every time. It was the big one at the end that killed him. He had put everything into the Echo while it was full and given it more than he could take back.

He had found half of it on his own, with nobody to tell him.

"Hold him, bait it, hit the gap, get out," said Finn. "Repeat."

"That assumes we can hold him," said Ronan.

He did not say it to argue. He said it the way he said everything about a front line, flat and practical.

"It got to the American because once it was close, nothing he had could push it away again. Bait, gap, out, fine. And in between? There’s ten, twenty seconds in between where something has to keep that off Maeve. That’s me, and I don’t know if I can do it for two seconds."

"No," said Alice. "You probably can’t, not on your own."

She turned away from the screen.

"Knowing about the gap never made him safe. People knew. It doesn’t help you if you’re dead before the next one."

James asked it directly.

"Can the five of us do it?"

"No," said Alice.

Finn opened his mouth.

"Not reliably," said Alice. "Maybe once, if everything goes right. If Ronan gets put on the floor once, there’s nobody else on the line. If Cillian’s in the wrong place when the red empties, the gap goes unused. If Maeve has to deal with one thing, nobody deals with the next thing. Five has nothing spare."

"How many, then?"

"Ten. You five, and five more."

"And you?"

"I’m yours," said Alice. "I’m not one of the ten. I’ll be there the way I always am."

---

"It scales," said Finn. "That’s the whole update. You double the people, and it might double him."

"I know."

"So ten could be worse than five."

"It could." Alice did not seem bothered by it. "That’s why I’m not saying twenty, or fifty, or a whole country. Every person you bring, the floor’s going to build round. You don’t get stronger just by being more. You get more of him."

"Then why ten?"

"Because with ten there’s somebody to cover." She counted it off. "Ronan goes down, somebody else holds the line while he gets up. Cillian can’t take the gap, somebody else can. Maeve’s busy, and the whole thing doesn’t fall over because one person is busy. Ten is still small enough to hear one voice. Ten means the plan doesn’t die when one person does something wrong."

Finn thought about that, and sat back.

"Okay," he said. "Ten."

Maeve had a pad on her knee. She had written *TEN* at the top and drawn a line under it.

"Then here’s my rule," she said. "It can’t be the five biggest names we can get. I don’t care how hard anybody hits."

"You don’t care how hard they hit?" said Cillian.

"I care whether they stop." She tapped the pen on the pad. "Think about it. You’re in there, and it’s low, and it’s down on one knee, and somebody calls out. And you think *one more*. If you put a big hit into it at the wrong second, you’ve just filled it up. Then it fires that at whoever’s nearest, and that’s your Ronan gone, or your me."

She did not need to point at the paused screen. Everybody in the room had watched the end of that fight.

James watched the frame for a long moment.

He did not need five people who could produce the biggest numbers on a damage chart. Half the Challengers on the frontier could do that. He needed five who could look at Wrath when Wrath looked finished, every instinct in them saying *now*, and stop because somebody told them to.

That was a much shorter list. He had no idea who was on it.

"Discipline first," he said. "Then everything else."

---

They did not pick anyone. They worked out what the five had to bring.

It took most of the morning, and the coffee stayed where it was.

Somebody else had to do control, more than they had, so that holding him did not all fall on Ronan. They needed another body on the front line who could take a hit from that thing and still be standing for the next one. They needed damage that could land hard and accurately in a window of a few seconds, from range if possible, so that nobody had to be in its arms when the gap opened. Maeve wanted support who could cover for her without being her. "If I’m down, I don’t want another me," she said. "I want something that keeps people alive in a different way." And all five had to be quick enough on their feet to survive the moment it changed its mind about who it was hitting.

Maeve wrote it all down. Five lines.

Then she wrote a sixth line underneath and circled it.

*Floor 39 eligible.*

That was the real filter. Nobody went into Floor 39 who had not climbed to it. The Tower did not care how famous you were.

Right now that meant Team Zero and the four surviving members of the American clear. It might mean Korea in a week, if Korea cleared 38. Others were behind them. Some of them might get there before Guild Zero was ready to go in, and some would not.

"I’m not ringing five famous people and calling it recruitment," said James.

"Good," said Maeve. "Because if we do it in private, the story is Ireland and America built a superteam in a back room. We do it in public, and anybody eligible can apply, and we pick on what we see."

"Public, then."

"Public. But you’re not writing it."

"I wasn’t going to—"

"You were going to put it on your own account at midnight in one line."

He had been, a little.