Chapter 130 - 128 — The Other Five III (Bonus)

The paired rooms were built after the first clears, because six people who can all fight turned out not to be the same thing as a party that can be split.

Two chambers, mirrored. Reinforced, because people bring Abilities into them. A bell on the wall in each.

One side gets information. The other side gets mechanisms.

The bell rings for forty seconds every three minutes and that is the only time either room can hear the other, and the moment it stops you are alone again with whatever you have been told.

---

It put me with Mara and Theo.

Krüger, Hana and Sokolov went through the other door.

Our room had four sections and a wall between each one, and above the first wall there was a board with three lines of timing on it that the other room could not see.

None of the four walls had a handle on our side.

---

The first bell went and Theo talked for thirty-one of the forty seconds.

"Right, we have four sections, walls between all of them, no handles on our side so you must have them, we have a board up here with three timings on it which I think is a cycle,

"there is a floor plate in section two that looks like it does something, the room is about eleven metres wide, there is a gap along the left of section three that might be a route or might be nothing,

"also the light above the second wall is a different colour and I do not know what that means."

Nine seconds left.

Krüger’s voice came back. Flat and short.

"Which wall first."

Then the bell stopped.

---

"I did not tell them which wall," Theo said.

"No," Mara said.

"I told them everything about the room."

"You told them everything about the room."

Theo stood there with his hands moving and worked it all the way through on his own, which I gave him credit for.

"Three minutes," I said.

---

We got the first wall on the second bell, because Theo said four words and Krüger repeated them back.

Second section was open floor and a plate and nothing else. We crossed it.

Third section had the wall at the far end and the gap along the left that Theo had mentioned. The gap was real. About a metre and a half wide, with a lip on it.

I looked at the gap and I looked at the wall and I did the arithmetic.

Two minutes until the bell. Wait, tell them, they open the wall, we walk through. Or do not wait.

---

I could get across that gap.

So I did.

Talaria across the lip and up onto the ledge on the far side, and it was nothing, and I was through into the fourth section before I had properly decided to be.

Theo came after me along the lip on his hands and feet, which was ugly and worked.

Mara did not.

---

She stood at the mouth of the gap with the spear held short and looked at it for about four seconds and then stepped back.

"Come round," I said.

"No."

"It is a metre and a half."

"It is a metre and a half with a lip that takes one person at a time and no room to turn round at the far end."

She was already moving back down the room. "I am not getting stuck on a ledge in a corridor. Open the wall."

Then the bell went, and Krüger’s voice came through, and it said the thing I had forgotten it was going to say.

"Third wall is opening now. It will not open again."

---

It opened into an empty section, because two of us were already past it.

Then it shut.

And Mara was on the wrong side of a wall that had just spent its only opening, with the room between her and us, and two minutes and forty seconds of silence before anybody could tell anybody anything about it.

---

She did not shout through the wall. She did not do anything at all.

When the bell came round she said eight words to the other room, and the other room fixed it in about fifty seconds.

Sokolov apparently put an anchor on something that was not designed to be anchored. We finished four minutes over the reference time.

The doors opened and we all came out into the corridor and nobody said anything for a moment.

Then Mara put the spear butt down on the floor.

"You solved your problem," she said. "You made two."

"I know."

"You got yourself and Marchand through a section, which we would have got through anyway on the bell, and you spent their only opening doing it and put me somewhere neither of you could get to."

Flat. Not angry. Worse than angry. "That was not a risk. A risk is when there is something to win."

---

"He did not know the wall opened once," Theo said.

"He did not know anything about that wall," Mara said, "which is the entire point, because the people who did know were in the other room and there were ninety seconds left on the clock."

Krüger had come out and was standing against the opposite wall with his arms folded and had said nothing.

"Go on then," I said to him.

"You do not need me as well."

---

We did the debrief properly and it was the most useful twenty minutes of the day, because I had to be told what had happened in a room I was never in.

Hana had had the second wall control go stiff halfway through and had said so immediately instead of trying it twice first, which is apparently the difference between a twenty second problem and a three minute one.

Krüger had spent his entire first bell asking one question and getting one answer.

And Sokolov, at the end, when our third wall had shut and the room started closing a section down on schedule, had put two anchors across a moving barrier and held it for twenty-six seconds.

That was not what the drill was for. The facility staff came to look at it afterward.

"Why did you not tell us you could do that," Theo said.

"He did tell us," Mara said. "Twenty-six seconds. He said thirty. He was honest and slightly pessimistic, which is the correct way round."

---

We reset and went again.

Krüger set two rules before we went in and both of them were about Theo, and he put them to him rather than about him.

"Four things and nothing else. Threat, direction, distance, and anything that changes the route. If it is not one of those four, it goes in the debrief."

"What if it might matter."

"Then it goes in the debrief and we are four minutes slower. If you bury the one that matters under six that do not, somebody is dead and we are not slower at all."

Theo took about a second with that and then said, "Four things," and meant it.

---

The second rule was mine and he gave it to me the same way.

"Nothing happens before the bell unless something is trying to kill you."

"That is a wide rule."

"It is a wide rule because you are going to want to narrow it and I am not letting you."

He was already opening the door. "You are fast and you are right a lot of the time. On this floor being right and early is the same as being wrong."

---

It went considerably better and it was Mara who made it go better, and she did it without being asked.

About ninety seconds in she started saying where the three of us were, out loud, every time one of us moved more than a few metres.

After the second time I realised she had been doing it on the first run as well and I had not been listening.

"Marchand right wall, me centre, Nolan forward left."

"Forward left," Theo repeated, and then went back to watching the section ahead.

I waited at the gap. It cost us about fifty seconds and the wall opened on the bell and all three of us went through it together.

---

We finished eleven minutes inside the reference and we made four mistakes doing it, and two of them were mine.

Nobody was on the wrong side of anything.

---

In the corridor afterward Krüger checked the time and then looked round the five of us.

"I am satisfied," he said. "All six."

Nobody cheered. Hana put her pack strap over her shoulder. Sokolov nodded. Theo said "Right" twice.

Mara said, "Supplies," and that was the end of the decision.

---

We spent an hour on the unglamorous half of it and it was better than the drill.

Who carries what, so that no one person is holding two things the party cannot lose. Draughts split three and three so that a side is never without.

Water. Light, because half of us are going somewhere with an orange sky and none of us know which half.

Words. Krüger made us agree on six of them and then made us say them until nobody hesitated. *Hold* means stop where you are.

*Clear* means the ground in front of me has nothing on it and I am certain. *Unknown* means I cannot see and I am not guessing.

Withdrawal conditions, in advance, written down. Two of them were about the canal.

And no permanent leader, which he put plainly.

"I will probably be in one room and three of you will be in the other. If I am the leader, the other room has nobody. Everybody carries the whole plan. Everybody is allowed to change it."

---

Then Hana put one more on the table.

"One rule from my last attempt and I want it agreed now rather than in there."

"Go on," Krüger said.

"If somebody cannot be reached, and getting to them costs the rest of us the floor or worse, we do not go."

Nobody said anything for a moment.

"That is a hard thing to agree to in a corridor," Theo said.

"It is considerably harder to decide at a pillar with ninety seconds on it." She did not look away from him.

"We lost two and we withdrew with four, and we very nearly lost all six, and the reason is that nobody would say it out loud beforehand and so we spent forty minutes not saying it afterward either."

Krüger said, "Agreed."

Mara said, "Agreed."

Sokolov nodded. Theo said it properly. And I said it, and I meant it, and it is not the same sentence in my mouth that it is in theirs.

---

Because if I am the one who cannot be reached, that rule costs them nothing and costs me a day.

And if one of them is the one who cannot be reached, I am going to be standing there knowing I am the only person at this table for whom that rule is cheap.

They are going to be watching me agree to it as an equal.

I have been in that building three hours and nobody in it is playing the same game I am.

---

My panel came up while we were still in the corridor.

> **Myrmidon Forge. O. Mercer.**

>

> **Ready tomorrow morning. Come early, they will need fitting twice.**

Krüger read my face rather than the panel.

"Equipment?"

"Tomorrow morning."

He looked at the other four. "Anybody who needs a day?"

Hana said no. Sokolov shook his head. Theo said he had been ready for a fortnight, which was the first thing he had said all afternoon that I did not believe.

Mara said, "I want the morning."

"Then the day after tomorrow," Krüger said. "Tower plaza, six. We go in at seven."

---

They went out in twos and I was doing my coat up when Hana stopped beside me.

"You cleared One first of a hundred," she said.

"I did."

"I have read about that. Congratulations, and I am not being sarcastic, and here is the thing I came back to say."

She waited until I was actually looking at her.

"On One, when a man went out, did you see the light?"

"Every time."

"Right." She put her pack up onto her other shoulder. "I watched two people die at the canal. One of them about four metres from me, which is close enough to have got a hand on him if I had been two seconds earlier.

"And nothing came. No light. No column. Nobody was taken anywhere."

---

"He was just on the ground," she said. "And then he was still on the ground. And we had to decide what to do about that with everything else still happening, and we got it wrong twice.

"That is the only thing about Floor Two that I would tell somebody who has read everything else."

She did not wait for me to answer and I did not have one.

I went out through the hall past the map tables, where somebody was still saying a sentence and somebody else was still repeating it back, and out into the street.

Two days.

Five people who have told me exactly what they cannot do, and one of me.