Chapter 28 Two Hands, Two Answers

Evaluation room four has a reinforced floor, a measuring plate set into the middle of it, plus an observation window with six people behind it.

The evaluator is a woman named Odile, the same assessor who filed Dreadweight as scrap a month ago, and neither of them mentioned that once.

"One demonstration," she read from a form without looking up, "one result, one band, and a claimant whose equipment produces a range gets his Gate access suspended pending review."

Suspension means no Gate work, no salvage claims, no contracts, plus a guild four weeks old with rent falling due every month regardless.

'She can end the company from behind a clipboard... and she wrote the note that started this,' Ossian stood on the plate with both arms down, 'nothing personal in here.'

Paloma sat in the corner as the registered officer, allowed to speak twice, and she spent the first of those before the machine was switched on.

"My client requests that both demonstrations be recorded as one submission," she said it in the tone she uses when the answer has already been decided somewhere else.

Odile agreed to it, which surprised the room and did not surprise Paloma at all.

A corrected capability annotation sits in that woman's file from four days ago, and nobody enjoys writing the second one of those in a fortnight.

The problem with this demonstration lies nowhere near the machine, and it never has.

Machines measure what happens on the plate, while the thing Ossian has to avoid is the six people behind the glass working out where any of it comes from.

Calista is the only living person aware that a system speaks to him, and nobody at all knows a man may own masks without limit.

'Two hands doing two jobs, nothing else... nobody in here learns how either of them got there,' Ossian flexed the fingers on the plate, 'shit, keep every word on the gauntlets.'

He gave them the right hand first, since pursuit reads as ordinary and every guild in the city has somebody who does it.

The rig they use for pursuit is a weighted sled on a rail, released at random, meant to be caught before it clears eleven metres.

Jackal Right locked onto the damaged corner of that sled before his eyes had found it, and Grave Rush put him on top of it in two steps.

Four point one metres, a noise came out of the observation room, and the operator pressed the button again to get an identical figure.

"Capability Four," Odile wrote it down, "pursuit, equipment-assisted, consistent across two attempts."

Then he gave them the left, and the printed form stopped being useful before the weight had even landed.

The impact rig drops a two hundred kilogram weight from four metres onto a plate, and a claimant's job is to survive it.

Surviving it means bracing, taking the shock through a stance, then standing up while somebody writes down how long it took.

He caught it open-palmed and did not brace at all, since bracing is what a man does when he intends to pass a load into the floor.

Ironback Left took two hundred kilograms and kept every gram of it, while the measuring plate underneath him recorded no transmitted force whatsoever.

'The machine says nothing arrived... two hundred kilos went into my hand and the floor never heard,' Ossian held the weight above the plate, 'that reading breaks them.'

Zero transmission counts as neither a good result on that rig nor a bad one, given that the equipment has no category for a claimant who absorbs.

The operator ran it twice more with the same result, then stopped pressing the button and looked at Odile instead.

Behind the glass, six people had begun talking over each other, and one of them was writing on the window with a marker.

"Capability Two by transmitted output," Odile said it slowly, "which is a labourer's band, and the number is obviously wrong."

The city's measuring trap sat exposed on one form in front of the woman required to sign it that same morning.

Every band in the schedule measures what a claimant puts out, while no line anywhere records what one takes in.

'No word anywhere for a man who catches things... so the paper calls my best hand a labourer's band,' Ossian read the form upside down, 'keep the number, give me the card.'

Paloma spent her second permitted sentence there, and she had been holding it since the sled.

"Then record both," she stood up for the one and only time, "a Four in one hand, a Two in the other, then let the Directorate decide which of its own numbers it believes."

Provisional Variable Profile is what Odile wrote, in a box she had to draw herself, since the form has no space for a claimant with two answers.

That word carries a review at ninety days, a restriction to Class Four and below, plus Gate access which stays open until somebody closes it.

It also puts a written record in the city archive covering a man who measures two ways depending on the hand.

'Every guild in this district reads those filings... and by Friday somebody will want to know what the second number is,' Ossian took the card at the desk, 'that was never going to stay quiet.'

Six people came out from behind the glass and three of them wanted to know who built the gauntlets, in the voice buyers use.

'They watched a labourer's band catch two hundred kilos and now they want the armourer's name... damn it, and she is blacklisted,' Ossian gave them nothing at all, 'Paloma handles this.'

Odile handed him the card without any warmth and said one sentence off the form.

"I inspected your equipment in a corridor for four minutes," she looked at him for the first time, "and I have thought about those four minutes more than you would expect."

Nobody in that building apologised to anybody, and the card in his pocket is worth a great deal more than an apology.

Paloma took two cards from three strangers and gave out nothing beyond the depot address, which is the entire reason a company has one.

'Buyers on the steps of a Directorate building... a month ago the same people would not have looked at me,' Ossian watched her work the corridor, 'hell, the card changed the room.'

Bastien was waiting outside with the van and asked no questions at all until the doors were shut on the street.

Rent went out six days ago, the account survived it for the first time, plus a capability band sits printed on a card in his coat.

'A profile, an address, three cards on a wall... damn it, we are a company,' Ossian sat in the van looking at the card, 'somebody is going to test that.'

Maelle wanted the impact rig figures before anybody had taken a coat off, and she read them standing in the depot doorway.

Zero transmitted, three times running, on a machine calibrated by a department that does not believe such a reading is possible.

Then Dreadweight opened a panel on the depot floor that evening, with no monster inside three miles of the building.

[Two hands have learned two jobs and neither has been tested against the other]

[A pack that has never been broken does not know what it is]

[Two-handed mastery trial available]

[Find something that can break both your arms at once]

'It wants me hunting an animal that can take both arms off... and it called that an opportunity,' Ossian read the last line on the depot floor, 'damn it, of course it did.'

Maelle cannot see a panel and never will, so she had that last line read aloud twice before copying it into her notes.

"That thing does not want you safe," she said it with the pen still moving, "it wants you finished, and those are not the same word."