Chapter 239: Bring the Map

Arthur cleared the table himself and laid the map out.

He had been a Rank-2 Ironclad Tamer before an ambush took his beast and most of his left leg’s usefulness, and he read the sheet the way someone reads a language they have not spoken in a decade and never forgotten.

"Hundred and ten meters," he said. "Two approaches. That’s the cut you told me about."

"That’s it."

"Show me where E-8 came in."

Jin put his finger on the eastern branch and traced it down the center to the casualty transfer point, and Arthur followed it and then stopped.

"That’s your evacuation route."

"Yes."

"So they crossed your eastern branch, which was your web boundary, and then went down the middle of your sector while you were fighting on both sides of them."

"Yes."

Arthur sat back.

"How far were the wounded from the emergence when the Ridgeback got past your western line?"

Jin had to think about it, and then he did not like the answer.

"Eleven meters. Maybe twelve."

"And who stopped it?"

"Glitch. He got to it eleven meters short of the retreat channel and put it into the wall. Kestrel’s beast pinned it afterward."

"Where were you?"

"Next to him."

Arthur looked up from the map for the first time.

"You moved with your beast to intercept a Bronze burrower."

"I moved with my beast to be where I could see it," said Jin. "I didn’t fight it. I couldn’t have."

"Mm." His father went back to the map, and traced the western branch, and stopped at the amber section. "What’s this?"

"Fourteen meters where the foundation’s disconnected. Glitch can’t read it. Anything that goes in there stops existing until it comes out."

Arthur was quiet for a while.

"That’s why they put you there," he said. "The two approaches need different answers and neither of them is a wall. Somebody in a planning room looked at a vibration reader and a web controller and matched them to the ground."

"That’s what you said in the corridor."

"I know what I said." Arthur tapped the join. "Now tell me about the relief."

"One hour forty-one. Neris brought reserve teams down the center and rotated us out zone by zone rather than pulling everyone at once."

"Zone by zone." Arthur’s eyebrows went up slightly. "Whose structure was that?"

"Mine. She used it because it was already there."

"Then say the rest of it."

Jin did, because there was no version of this where he told his father half a thing.

"I gave Lysa the east with three triggers, Kestrel the west with two, and Runner the evacuation route as her whole job. That part worked — the sector was still organized when relief walked in, and that’s what got marked highest."

"And?"

"And every cross-zone emergency from E-8 entering at minute fifty-nine until relief at one-forty-one was answered by me and Glitch. Every single one. By the time Neris arrived, his foreleg couldn’t load properly and I had no reserve I was willing to name. If relief had been twenty minutes later, I’d have had nothing left to send anywhere."

Arthur nodded slowly.

"There were two functional pairs standing in your center by then."

"I know. I used neither. My evaluator said the same thing and she was right."

"She was." Arthur folded the map along its creases and pushed it back across the table. "The delegation’s the hard half and you did the hard half. The other one’s a habit. Break it before it costs you something you can’t replace."

He said it flatly, without trying to turn the warning into a speech. Jin took the map back and left it folded between them.

Jin told them the rest before he left.

That Glitch had been hurt — foreleg and throat, treatable, fully recovered — and that he had reached 6-Star nine days ago. That Flicker was stable and not healthy and could complete a short supervised circuit, and that he was refusing to accelerate her because there was no safe way to do it.

Elena made him show her a scan of Glitch on his slate and looked at it for a long time.

"He’s enormous."

"He’s a hundred and forty kilos."

"He was in a box," said Elena, "in this room, four months ago."

Then Jin transferred two thousand Credits and there was an argument about it, as he had known there would be.

"That’s your hazard pay," said Arthur. "You bled for that."

"I got a bruised rib and my beast got a strained tendon. Nobody bled." Jin turned the slate around. "The academy covers my room, my meals, and most of Glitch’s feed. I’m keeping twenty-one hundred as a buffer because his consolidation could go wrong or Flicker’s situation could change and I’ve done the version where I have three hundred Credits and I’m not doing it again."

"That’s still—"

"It’s two thousand Credits in this household versus two thousand Credits sitting in an account where I don’t need it." He looked at his mother. "Buy food. Buy Dad’s medication for the whole cycle instead of stretching it. Buy whatever the flat’s behind on."

Elena’s mouth did something complicated.

"You’re getting very hard to argue with," said Elsa.

"I’ve had practice."

He did not say the thing he was actually thinking, which was that two thousand Credits was two thousand Credits and reconstructive work on a decade-old crush injury cost somewhere north of two hundred and forty thousand, and that he had checked the figure again last week and it had not moved.

Not this year. Not next year either. But it’s a number, and numbers are things you can work toward.

Elsa caught him at the door.

"Call me before the next one," she said. "Not after. Before."

"It might not be an exterior—"

"Before, Jin."

"All right," said Jin. "Before."

He walked back to the tram with an empty map case and found, to his mild irritation, that explaining the distances to his father had been considerably harder than standing on them.

Because he knew what they meant. Nobody else who asked did.