Chapter 125: Floor Thirty-Two

Chapter 125: Chapter 125: Floor Thirty-Two

Garrick met them in the lobby with a lamp in his hands and his tool belt half buckled.

It wasn’t an ordinary lamp. It was a squat brass cylinder as long as his forearm, with a thick lens at one end and a mana core screwed into the other, and it was still warm from the bench.

"I watched what your hand did to those bodies this afternoon," he said to Donald. "White light, and the gray skin smoked. I didn’t know what kind of light that was, so I spent the evening finding out." He turned the lens toward the floor and pressed a switch, and a cold, pale beam came out of it, so faint that Donald could barely see it. "It’s tuned to the same thing. It won’t hurt you or me. It ought to hurt them."

"How sure are you?" Evelyn asked.

"Sure enough to bring it," Garrick said. "Not sure enough to bet my life on it."

"Then you’re coming with us," Donald said. "And we’ll find out together."

---

They took the stairs. The lifts had been stopping on thirty-two for a week, and Donald didn’t want anything on that floor to hear a bell.

On the landing of the thirty-first floor, Donald stopped and laid his hand flat against the concrete wall and let Lesser Mana Perception spread out through it. It was the oldest of his senses and the weakest, and he had almost stopped using it once Valuation Eye could tell him so much more. But Valuation Eye needed a line of sight, and Lesser Mana Perception didn’t.

He felt the floor above him like a map of faint warm points.

There were five of them moving, and all five were wrong in the same way the steward on the airship had been wrong, their signatures shifting and settling and shifting again every few seconds. Beyond them, at the far end of the floor, there was a tight cluster of six more points that didn’t move at all. They were weak and steady, the way living people felt when they were asleep or hurt.

"Five Faceless," he said quietly. "And six people who are still alive, in the northeast corner, not moving."

"Hostages," Sylvia said.

"Or bait." Evelyn drew Starfall halfway and let the starlight show. "Probably both."

Donald nodded. Then he called up the tower’s ward controls on his tablet.

When he had rebuilt the TIG tower, the System had given him Aegis Warding along with everything else, a lattice of barrier lines built into every floor of the building. He had only ever used it to seal the whole tower against an outside attack. He had never tried to seal a single floor from the inside.

He tapped the thirty-second floor and locked it.

The wall under his hand hummed. Above them, every door, every vent, every window and both lift shafts on the thirty-second floor sealed at once behind a thin blue skin of light. Nothing could get off that floor now except through the stairwell door in front of them.

"If one of them gets loose in the building and touches someone in the kitchens," Donald said, "we’ll be shaking hands for a month. So nobody leaves that floor except us."

"And the lights?" Sylvia asked.

On the thirty-second floor, behind the glass, every light was still burning, bright and white. There would be no soft shadows up there at all.

"Leave them on," Donald said. "I want to see them."

---

Evelyn opened the door, and Garrick went through it first with the lamp raised.

The office was long and open, with rows of desks under white ceiling panels and a wall of windows on the far side looking out over the Glass Field. Five people were sitting at the desks. Three men and two women in neat office clothes looked up from their work as the door opened, and they all smiled at the same moment, in the same way.

Garrick swept the pale beam across the room.

Where it touched them, their faces smoked.

The five of them came up out of their chairs at once, without a sound, and the faces slid off them as they moved. Short hair and long hair and glasses and freckles all ran away into smooth gray, so that by the time they reached the middle of the room there were five Faceless running at the doorway in office clothes. Two of them went straight for Garrick’s lamp.

Sylvia met the first one. The bright white panels overhead threw a small, hard shadow under every desk, and she dropped into the one at her feet and came out of the one under the Faceless’s chair, and opened the backs of both its knees before it had finished turning, and then its throat. Evelyn took the second with a single cut that went through its gray blade and its gray head together.

The third reached Garrick.

Its hand closed on his wrist, and its blank head rippled. A moment later Garrick’s own heavy, weathered face looked back at him from the front of it, with his own scarred hands, and one of them reached for the lamp’s switch with exactly Garrick’s grip.

"Oh, no, you don’t," Garrick said, and hit it with the lamp.

He hit it the way only an Artificer would, lens first, straight into the face it had just stolen from him, with the beam still running. The copy screamed in his voice. The lens pressed into the borrowed skin until it smoked, and Garrick’s face peeled off the front of the Faceless in one piece. Garrick hit it again, and a third time, until it stopped moving.

The fourth one went for Donald.

He let it.

It came at him low and fast, the way the steward had, and its bare palm caught him flat on the side of the neck. He felt the touch go into him, cold and searching. The Faceless’s head rippled and changed, and in less than a second Donald was looking at his own face, down to the last line of it.

Then the Faceless stopped.

It stood in front of him, wearing his face, and its hand stayed on his neck, and the expression on his own stolen features went from triumph to confusion and then to something very close to fear.

"There’s nothing," it said in Donald’s voice. "I took your face. I can’t find your skills. Where are they? What are you?"

"Someone you can’t copy," Donald said.

He brought his left arm up between them and fired the Pile Bunker into its chest at point-blank range. The piston threw it across three rows of desks and into the window, which cracked from top to bottom behind it, but held.

He knew why it couldn’t take anything from him, or at least he knew part of it. His skills had not come from his own core the way everyone else’s did. They had come from the System, and whatever the System was, it didn’t let anyone else into its ledger.

The fifth one ran.

It went for the far wall, for the ventilation grille near the ceiling, and leaped for it with its gray hands out. It hit the blue skin of the Aegis Ward that Donald had laid over the grille and was thrown straight back off it. It landed on its back on a desk, scattering paper, and before it could get up Evelyn was standing over it with Starfall’s point resting on its gray throat.

"Don’t," she said.

It lay very still.

Donald came over, wiping blood from the side of his neck where its nails had caught him, and crouched beside the desk. He laid his hand on the Faceless’s chest and let Purifying Touch run, slowly, just enough that the gray skin began to smoke and the creature hissed and twisted under Starfall’s point.

"How many of you are in this tower?" he asked.

"Six," it said. Its voice had no face to come out of now, and it sounded flat and far away. "Six, and now none. We came with Lord Harrow’s staff. We replaced them in Aldmere, on the road. He never noticed. He doesn’t look at the people who bring him tea."

"And the six in the northeast corner?"

"The real ones. A face only lasts ten minutes, so we kept them close, to put their faces back on whenever the old ones ran out." The gray head turned slightly toward Donald. "You can have them. They’re no use to us anymore."

"Who sent you?"

"You know who."

"Then tell me something I don’t know," Donald said, and let the light run a little brighter.

The Faceless arched under his hand and hissed, and when the light eased, it lay there breathing in short, shallow gasps.

"The first of us," it said at last. "The one who wears a face in your house. It came long before us. It doesn’t need to touch anyone every ten minutes. It took its face for good, a long time ago, and the face is its own skin now. Your white light won’t find anything in it." The gray head tilted, as if it was looking at him. "It was the one who told us you would be gone to Hanseong, and which floor of your tower to take."

"Who?"

The Faceless made a sound that might have been a laugh.

"We don’t know," it said. "None of us know. That’s what makes it the best of us."

Then it went limp under Donald’s hand, and the crack ran across its head from side to side, and it was dead.

---

They found Harrow’s real staff in a storeroom in the northeast corner, six of them tied to chairs, thin and filthy and blinking in the light. They had been there for nine days. The young man with glasses was among them, with his glasses broken on the floor beside him, and when Evelyn cut him loose he began to cry. Garrick picked him up as if he weighed nothing and carried him toward the stairs while Sylvia and Evelyn helped the others.

Donald stood alone for a moment in the middle of the wrecked office, among the overturned desks and the five gray bodies, with the cracked window behind him and the Glass Field lying dark beyond it.

It doesn’t need to touch anyone every ten minutes.

Somewhere in his tower, in his house, someone he trusted was wearing a face that wasn’t theirs, and had been for a long time.

He thought of every hand he had shaken that afternoon, Aris and Garrick and Damian and the rest, and how relieved he had been each time the white light found nothing.

Every one of them had been clean, and now he knew that didn’t mean anything at all.