Chapter 123: Handshake Test

Chapter 123: Chapter 123: Handshake Test

The airship came down on the roof of the TIG tower a little after sunset on the second day, and Evelyn was waiting at the edge of the landing pad, exactly where she had waited the last time.

Donald stopped at the top of the ramp and looked at her.

She looked the same. Her black hair was tied back, Starfall hung at her hip, and a healing scratch ran along her jaw where one of the Bailiffs had caught her. When she saw him, her face did the thing it always did, the small smile at one corner of her mouth before the rest of her face caught up.

The Faceless on the airship had worn Sylvia’s face just as well, down to the scar on the back of her hand.

"Donald?" Evelyn said. She had stopped smiling. "What’s wrong?"

He walked down the ramp and took her hand.

The moment his skin touched hers, warmth came up through his arm and into his chest, the way it had every time since the night in the bunker. His Dual-Cultivation Synergy woke at once and locked onto her, and a second later his Compound Interest settled over him too, as it always did when she was close. No Faceless could have copied that, because the skill only answered to the real Evelyn.

The tightness he had carried in his chest since the airship let go, and he pulled her in and held her.

"Something tried to wear Sylvia’s face on the way home," he said into her hair. "I had to be sure it was you."

Evelyn went still against him. Then she leaned back and looked at him for a long moment, and he could see her working through what that meant.

"And how do you know now?" she asked quietly.

"Because I can feel the tether," he said, which was true, and also not the whole truth.

---

Sylvia opened her storage in Garrick’s workshop on the twentieth floor, and two bodies in charter company uniforms slid out of the dark onto the steel worktable.

Garrick took one look and swore, while Aris, who had come down from the fortieth floor with her tablet, went pale and stepped back. Neither body had a face anymore. Where the faces should have been there were smooth gray ovals, each with a single crack running across the middle.

"Faceless," Donald said. "They copy the face and two skills of anyone they touch, for about ten minutes. The one that touched Sylvia could use her shadows."

"And you killed it how?" Garrick asked.

"I turned on a light."

Garrick looked at him, then at Sylvia, and decided not to ask.

Donald laid his hand flat on the gray chest of the nearest body and let Purifying Touch run into it. He hadn’t used the skill in weeks, not since it had cleaned the curse out of Garrick’s arm and the taint out of the old Bloodhound’s Fang. Soft white light spread out from his palm across the dead Faceless, and wherever it touched, the gray skin hissed and gave off thin gray smoke. Through his hand he could feel the skill finding Abyssal flesh under the uniform and burning it clean.

"It burns them," Sylvia said.

"It burns anything from the Abyss." Donald took his hand away, and the smoke stopped. "A stolen face is still their own skin underneath, so if one of them shook my hand while I was using this, I’d know."

"Then shake everyone’s hand," Aris said at once. "Everyone in the building."

"Starting with you," Donald said, and held out his hand.

Aris looked at it for a second before she laughed, a little shakily, and took it. The white light ran over her fingers and found nothing to burn.

"Clean," Donald said.

"I’m insulted," Aris said, but she didn’t let go of his hand right away.

He went round the room after that. Garrick’s huge, scarred hand was clean, and so was Sylvia’s, though she rolled her eyes at him for asking. On the floor below he found Leo doing his homework at the kitchen table and ruffled the boy’s hair with the skill still running in his palm, and when Leo complained that his head felt cold, Donald knew the light had found nothing in him either.

---

Damian was out on the Glass Field, standing at the edge of Helena’s ring.

The ring had grown since the morning she found the black sun. It now filled most of the center of the Field, a wide circle of chalk symbols drawn in three bands, one inside another, and in the middle of it Helena knelt with both hands pressed flat against the glass over the anchor. Her eyes were closed and her lips were moving, and she didn’t look up when Donald came out onto the Field.

A window opened as he reached the outer band of chalk.

[Genesis Anchor Turn: Day 3 of 10.]

[Turn Progress: 26%.]

[Resonance: Holding at 82.8%. Rise suspended during turn.]

"She hasn’t stopped since Evelyn gave the word," Damian said. He stood a few meters from the ring with his coat buttoned up against the wind. "She sleeps an hour at a time, sitting up right where she is, and she eats when I put food in front of her."

"Has anyone else come out here?"

"Garrick brought a generator on the first day, Aris came once with papers to sign, and Evelyn checks on her twice a night." Damian looked at him. "Why?"

Donald told him about the airship, and Damian listened without moving, his face giving nothing away. When Donald had finished, he held out his hand.

"Go on," he said. "You’ll want to be sure."

Donald shook it with Purifying Touch running in his palm, and the light passed over Damian’s hand and found nothing but skin.

"You’d tell me if you’d seen anything strange out here," Donald said.

"I was Sterling’s secretary for six years, so strange is the only thing I ever see." Damian let go of his hand. "But no. Nothing has come near her that shouldn’t have."

Donald couldn’t step into the ring without breaking Helena’s concentration, so he crouched at the edge of the outer band and waited. After a while she opened her eyes and looked at him across the chalk, and smiled tiredly.

"You came home," she said. "Good. Did you bring your lady from Hanseong?"

"She’s staying with her family."

"Then she’s wiser than you." Her voice was hoarse. "Evelyn told me about the airship. If you want to shake my hand, you’ll have to wait seven days, because if I lift my palms from this glass I lose a whole day’s work."

"I’ll wait."

"I know you will." She closed her eyes again. "Now go away, Investor. You’re very distracting."

---

That night Donald sat on the roof of the tower with Evelyn beside him and his tablet on his knees, going down the list of every person who had entered the TIG tower in the last three weeks.

It was a long list. The four hundred and twelve Awakeners of the Vanguard Barracks came and went every day, and so did the golem crews, the kitchen staff, the cleaners and the couriers. Lady Reed’s legal team had been in twice. Harrow’s assistants had arrived from Aldmere the week before to set up an office on the thirty-second floor.

"You can’t shake all their hands," Evelyn said.

"No," Donald said. "But I can try."

"They’re Dantalion’s, the Thousand Faces. Aris pulled the old Breaking records while you were away, and his name is all over them." She was looking out at the Glass Field, at the small white lamp of Helena’s generator in the middle of it. "They’re spies, not soldiers, and whatever Dantalion wants in this tower, he’s had a long time to get it."

"Then why send two more on the airship?"

"To make you look at your own people." Evelyn pulled her knees up and wrapped her arms around them. "To make you shake hands with Aris and Garrick and wonder about them. A spy doesn’t need to win, Donald. He only needs you to stop trusting the people who’d die for you."

Donald sat with that for a long time, until the tablet buzzed in his hands.

It was Damian, and his voice was very calm, which was how Donald knew something was wrong.

"Evelyn just walked out onto the Field," Damian said. "She came up from the Wall and she isn’t answering me. She’s crossing the outer band of the ring now, and she’s walking straight toward Helena."

Donald looked at Evelyn, sitting next to him on the roof with her arms around her knees.

She looked back at him.

"I’m right here," she said.