Chapter 128 - 126 — The Other Five I

**POV: Jace**

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That first conversation with Krüger ran an hour and forty minutes and it ended with an address and a date eight days out.

I asked him why eight days. He said because he intended to read about two hundred recruitment posts properly rather than badly, and because he had assumed my hands were in a forge, which they were, and he had not asked how he knew that.

So I spent eight days not climbing anything.

I read the Bureau document twice, went through the whole Floor Two section of that site, allocated none of my fourteen points, and let my ribs get to the stage where I could take a full breath if I did it slowly.

On the eighth morning there was still nothing from Floor Three, which was expected, because eight days was the plan and not the deadline.

Then I went into the city.

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The preparation facility is four streets off the Tower plaza and does not look like anything from the outside.

Inside it is three floors of rooms people rent by the hour, and every single one of those hours is somebody getting ready to climb.

The ground floor is a hall with map tables down the middle of it. Not screens. Physical tables, four metres by two, with the Floor Two city etched into the surface and counters you move about on top of it.

There were two parties at those tables when I came in and both of them were arguing.

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"I am not going through the workshops. I have said that four times."

"And you have not said why."

"Because I do not want to be in a street with nine doorways on it."

A woman at the next table over had six counters laid out and was moving three of them and then putting them back, and doing it again, and neither of the men beside her was interrupting her.

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Along the left there are equipment lockers you can rent by the day, most of them open, most of them with somebody’s kit spread out on the bench in front of them.

Past those, a medical station with two people in it and a third being strapped across the shoulder.

And at the back, a row of doors in pairs. Two doors, then a gap, then two doors, all the way down, with a number over each pair and a light above the number.

Three of the pairs were lit.

---

I stood in the hall for a moment and listened to it, because it is not a noise I have heard before.

There is a thing people do in there that does not happen anywhere else in this trade. They say a short sentence and then somebody repeats it back, exactly, in the same words.

"North wall, two, coming down the left."

"North wall, two, left."

Over and over, all across that hall, in four or five different conversations at once.

They are not talking. They are practising talking.

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Krüger was at the third table from the end and I saw her before I saw him.

Not her face. The way she was standing.

Weight even, feet not square to the table, one shoulder turned so that she could see both the door and the room without moving her head. Spear butt on the floor beside her boot, shaft upright, held about a third of the way up.

The last time I saw that stance I was eleven metres away from it on broken paving with my ribs strapped, and it took me four exchanges to find the one thing it does not cover.

---

"Nolan."

"Krüger."

He was in a coat rather than a cuirass, and the arm that had been open to the elbow was out of its wrapping and had four days of new skin on it.

"Mara Viteri," he said, without any ceremony at all.

She put a hand out and I took it.

Tall, lean, built for the weapon. Dark hair back off her face and pinned rather than tied. There is an old pale scar under the left side of her jaw that runs about six centimetres and has been there a long time.

The spear is new. Plainer than the one I broke.

---

"You put your boot on a column," she said.

"I did."

"I had the line to where a man crossing that ground arrives, and you did not arrive there." She said it the way you would report a measurement.

"I have thought about it. There is nothing I could have done about it once you were moving. The mistake was earlier."

"Which one."

"Using the same open line three times." She turned the spear a quarter turn on the floor. "I was tired and it was the fastest ground and I took it three times. You watched me do it twice."

That was the whole of it. She did not congratulate me and she did not apologise for losing, and then she looked back at the door.

—

"Three more coming," Krüger said. "I have gone through a hundred and ninety-odd posts and met nine people. These are the three."

"How did you choose."

"I asked all nine the same question and I did not tell them what the question was for." He put a counter down on the table.

"I asked what they would do if they could not reach the other half of their party and the timer had eleven minutes on it."

"And?"

"Six of them told me what they would do. Three of them asked me what the other half had been told."

---

The first one through the door was carrying more than anybody else in the building.

Late twenties, short black hair cut close enough to be practical rather than short enough to be a statement. Light armour, well used, with a pack built into the back of it rather than hanging off it.

She put the pack down on the table and it clinked in a way that told you it was sorted.

"Hana Arai," Krüger said.

"You are shorter than the picture," she said to me, and sat down.

---

Then a younger one, who did not sit down.

Lean, quick, hands that would not stay still.

He came in, and looked at the door he had come through, and then at the door at the far end of the hall, and then at the two windows, and only then at any of us.

He did that whole circuit in about two seconds and I do not think he knew he had done it.

"Theo Marchand."

"There is a party in room nine going through the canal approach and they have it wrong," he said, immediately.

"They have the floodgate before the crossing. It is after. Also somebody has left a locker open at the end and there is a full draught case in it, which is somebody’s bad afternoon."

Nobody had asked him anything.

---

The last one came in four minutes later and did not say a word.

Broad. Not tall, and put together in the way a man is when he has spent years getting hold of things that did not want to be held.

He nodded at Krüger, nodded at the table generally, sat down at the corner, and put both hands flat on the wood.

"Anton Sokolov," Krüger said.

Sokolov nodded again.

That was everything he said for the next nineteen minutes.