Chapter 129 - 127 — The Other Five II

"Right," Krüger said, and put his palm flat in the middle of the map table. "Before anything else. Functional disclosure."

Theo opened his mouth and Krüger kept going.

"Nobody has to tell anybody anything about themselves. I do not want to know where you are from or who you are registered under or what you have done. That is all yours."

He turned his hand over.

"What you do have to give this table is anything about what you can do that could get one of the other five killed by not knowing it.

"Range. Limits. What it costs. How long you can hold it. What happens to you when the mana runs out.

"If you are hiding a limitation, you are not hiding an Ability. You are hiding a hole."

"And if somebody would rather not say what a thing is called," Hana said.

"Then do not say what it is called. Tell us what it does to the ground."

He went first, which I noticed.

"Mine is directional. I put a plane out in front of one side of me and it takes an impact and spreads it across the whole of the plane rather than the point it landed on."

He said it flatly. "Nolan has been inside it. It holds a very great deal and then it does not, and there is no warning in the middle."

"How far from you," Mara said.

"That is the useful part and it is also the bad part. I can put it away from my own body. Two metres, three, over somebody else if I have to."

He held two fingers apart and then further apart. "Every metre it costs more and every metre it arrives later. Over my own arm it is instant."

"Three metres out it is not. If you are relying on me at three metres, you do whatever you are doing on my call and not yours."

"What is the delay at three."

"I do not know in numbers. It is the difference between catching a thing and watching it land."

---

Mara next, and she used eleven words.

"Two and a half metres of reach and I do not chase anybody."

"That is not disclosure," Krüger said.

"It is all of it." She put the spear across the table, shaft flat, and left it there.

"I hold a line. Give me a doorway or a corner or a stair and nothing walks through it while I am standing in it."

"Take me into an open room with three things coming and I am a woman with a stick."

"Mana?"

"Nothing. It is a spear." Something happened at one side of her mouth that was not quite anything.

"I have an Ability. It is footwork, it is D-rank, and it puts my feet where I have decided to put them slightly better than my legs would on their own."

"It has never once won me a fight. I am telling you so that nobody builds a plan on it."

---

Hana went third and put her pack on the table and opened the top of it while she talked.

"I close things. Clotting first, then the wound, and that is the whole of it."

"Range," Krüger said.

"Contact. I have to have a hand on you or on something that is on you." She took out a roll of something and put it down.

"I will keep a man breathing who should not be breathing for about twenty minutes. That is the thing I am actually for."

"And after twenty minutes."

"He needs a station and a bed and somebody better than me."

---

"What can you not do," I said.

She looked at me properly for the first time.

"I cannot give anything back that has gone. Not a hand, not an eye, not anything that was inside a man and is now on the ground."

She said it without any weight on it at all. "I cannot do the same man twice in an hour and have the second one mean anything. And I cannot do it at all if I cannot reach him."

"How many can you carry in a day."

"Three properly. Four badly. On the fourth I stop being useful for anything else, including walking." She closed the pack.

"Everybody in here should build the next two days as though I am not coming. Then if I get to you it is a bonus instead of a plan."

---

Theo did not wait to be asked.

"I read moving mana through structures. Walls, floors, up through rubble. I get a shape of it rather than a picture, so I get *something coming down the street on your left and it is heavy* rather than a face."

"Range."

"Forty metres in open air. Through one wall, twenty-five. Through a lot of stone or a lot of ash, eight or nine and I would not trust nine."

He was already looking at the door again. "Two things it does badly."

"If a thing is not moving I will probably miss it entirely. And if there are more than about six signatures inside my range it goes to noise and I get nothing at all."

"That is good," Krüger said. "That is the best disclosure at this table so far."

Theo looked pleased for about a second and a half.

"Also the party in nine still have the floodgate in the wrong place."

"Yes. You have said."

---

Sokolov took his hands off the table.

"Anchors," he said.

Then nothing for four seconds.

"Go on," Krüger said.

"Between two surfaces. I set a point here, a point there, and the line between them resists being moved." He put one finger on the table and one on the edge of it. "Four at once. Thirty seconds, about."

"What does it hold."

"A door. A slab that is going to come down. A man’s arm against a wall, for a moment." He looked at the table rather than at anybody.

"Something strong pulls, it costs more. Something very strong pulls, it costs everything and it still goes. I cannot hold a Warden. I can hold a Warden’s weapon for two seconds."

"Two seconds is a great deal," Mara said.

Sokolov nodded and put his hands back on the wood.

---

Then all five of them looked at me.

---

I gave them the useful shape of it and I was careful, and I was careful in a way that five people who have just told me their limits did not deserve.

"Fire on my hands. It sits on the gauntlets and the forearms while I hold it and I hit things with it."

"Two mana a second, so a punch is six. Eight seconds is the longest stretch I have ever held and it hurt me to do it."

"Reach," Mara said.

"My arms. That is the whole of it. I have no ranged option of any kind and if a thing is four metres away I have to go and get it."

"Can you go and get it quickly."

"Yes." I put a hand flat on the table. "I have an acceleration. It is not a teleport. I cross the ground and I am on every metre of it."

"The entire cost is the stopping, and it goes through my landing leg. Eleven metres is comfortable. Twenty is not, and after four or five my ankle starts telling me about it."

---

"Anything that holds ground," Krüger said.

"Two. One fixes a single contact point. A boot, a hand, whatever is touching the floor. Ten mana, eight metres, and only the contact point. The rest of the man keeps coming."

"That is worth more than you are making it sound," Sokolov said.

"The other one needs both of my feet flat on stable ground and it makes me extremely hard to move. It ends the instant either foot leaves, including if somebody picks me up."

"Has somebody picked you up."

"Yes."

Krüger did not smile and I saw the place where a different man would have.

---

"Detection," I said. "Six metres, sixty seconds, living things only."

"Inside it I know where they are and which way they are going without looking. Outside it I know nothing, and it will not reach through a wall to somebody I have not got in range."

"Six is short," Theo said. "Mine is forty."

"Six is what I have."

"But mine is forty."

"Marchand," Krüger said.

---

I did not say the names of any of them.

I gave five effects and five costs and no names at all.

I did it because two of those names belong to dead men, and one of those two used his in front of a great many people in a freight yard four weeks ago.

And I did not mention the other two things I have.

Nobody at that table had a reason to notice. Krüger noticed.

---

He did not say anything about it in the way I expected.

He waited until I had finished, and looked at me for about two seconds longer than the conversation required, and then went on to the next item as though the pause had not happened.

Then, four minutes later, when he was setting out the rules for the drill, he put one in that had not been in the post.

"Last thing before we go in. Private Abilities are fine. Everybody at this table can keep a card and I do not care."

He had a counter in his hand and he was not looking at me.

"What nobody keeps is a limitation. If there is something you cannot do, or something that stops working under a condition, or a cost that lands on you afterward, that belongs to the other five whether you like it or not."

"You can keep your secret. You cannot keep the part of it that decides where I stand."

Then he put the counter down and asked Hana about supply weight.

---

He was right, and there was nothing to argue with, and it went into me further than an accusation would have.

Because he had not said *you*. He had said the rule, and left the rule standing in the middle of the table, and every one of us had to decide privately whether we were on the wrong side of it.

I am on the wrong side of it.

Not for the fire or the acceleration or the anchor. For the two I did not mention, and specifically for the one where I come back and they do not, because that is not an Ability.

That is a condition attached to every decision I will make in there. It changes where I would stand and it changes what I would risk.

And five people are about to build a plan around a man they think is taking the same bet they are.

I have not worked out what to do about that. I am going to have to.

---

"Before the drill," Hana said. "Two corrections. Both from the site, both technically true, both useless."

She put a finger on the map table.

"One. The amber. Everybody reads that and thinks it is a warning."

"It is not?" Theo said.

"It is accurate and it is not a warning. At fifteen metres it is a warning. At four metres, by the time the slit changes, whatever was going to happen has happened."

She said it evenly. "If you are inside about six metres of a Warden and you are waiting for amber, you are not reacting to it. You are watching it."

"So what do you react to."

"The head. It brings the head round and holds it, and the amber comes after that. If it has stopped turning its head, move."

---

"Two," she said. "The pillars are not rest points."

"Nobody says they are," Krüger said.

"Everybody treats them as if they are, because it is the only place on that floor where anything good happens."

She put both hands flat. "You get through to the others, you are getting information, everyone is talking. Nobody wants to be the one who says leave.

"We stayed at one for eleven minutes near the canal because the conversation was going well."

Nobody said anything.

"That is my correction," she said. "Somebody has to be the one who says leave, and it has to be decided before we go in, because it will not get decided in the moment."

"You," Mara said.

"It should not be me. I will be the one holding somebody together."

"Sokolov," Krüger said.

Sokolov nodded.

---

"Right," Krüger said. "Room eleven. We are booked for two hours."

"Doing what," I said.

"Finding out whether any of this survives being in different rooms."