Chapter 120: Outside the Door

Chapter 120: Outside the Door

At nine in the morning, six hours before the recording ran out, Silas stood in the middle of his room on loose knees and waited for a cat to let go of a bag.

Nim had taken the job seriously. He’d learned to hold the strap for an unbearable length of time, then release it while yawning, and twice he’d dragged it all the way round to the window side and let it go from behind Silas’s shoulder, which Silas privately considered cheating and publicly paid extra for.

The bag swung in from the left.

Silas didn’t lean. That was the whole thing, the part that had taken him three days to find. He stayed light on both feet until the bag had told him where it was going, and then everything happened in order: the left foot lifting, the Grasp beginning while it was still in the air, his weight following the foot instead of leading it, his palm arriving on canvas that was already slowing down.

The bag stopped. It hung there under his hand.

This time he knew why the movement had worked. The pause had kept his weight available until he needed it; he hadn’t spent the rest of the attempt correcting an early guess.

He handed the strap back to Nim and turned partly away. Nim drew the bag behind his shoulder, waited, and released it without warning.

Silas turned on the balls of his feet, waited half a heartbeat, and stopped it.

[Battle Evolution — Assimilation: 100%.]

[Battle Evolution acquired permanently. Temporary slot available.]

He stood there with his hand on the bag.

Then he said a word Mara would have smacked the back of his head for, very quietly, and grinned so widely it hurt.

It had settled into him the way Spirit Communion had, deep and steady, like something that had been there all along. Seven permanent Talents, three short of a second slot. At three o’clock, he would still have it. He wanted to go outside and try it immediately.

"Was that it?" Nim asked from the shelf. "You’ve gone a funny color."

"That was it." Silas pressed both hands over his face and laughed into them. "Nim, that was it."

"Then I want my extra."

He gave Nim the promised extra mana, within their usual limits, and spent the rest of the morning feeling smug.

***

The retrieval frame stood at the far end of the east yard, under a canopy: a waist-high timber box, open at the front, with a narrow slot at the back just wider than a hand. A weighted case, about as long as his forearm and stamped with the yard’s mark, sat inside it. A thick wooden lip ran along the front edge of the opening, so the case couldn’t simply be dragged out flat. It had to be lifted over.

From the case’s handle, a cord ran back through the slot to a pulley, where Rovan stood with the other end in his hands.

Three chalk marks were drawn on the gravel in an arc, ten paces from the frame.

"Clean extraction means over the lip without touching it, and down on that board without a bang," the yard hand on duty said, pointing. "You start on the first mark. You move to the second while it’s coming out, and you’re on the third when it lands. Kest pulls against you. Kest decides how hard."

"I’ll be gentle," Rovan said, with no particular sign of meaning it.

Silas took the first mark. He laid Remote Grasp along the case and lifted.

The first lift cost more mana than he had budgeted. A week of practicing with the room’s doubled output had made him careless with the estimate. The case came up slowly, Rovan leaned on the cord, and Silas started for the second mark with all of his weight already on the front foot.

Rovan’s pull eased. The case jerked forward. Silas felt the Grasp lag, a half-beat behind his feet, and the bottom edge of the case clipped the lip with a loud wooden knock and dropped back inside.

"One," the yard hand said.

Silas went back to the first mark and stood there for a moment.

He didn’t need the Talent to tell him he’d failed. What it did instead was quieter and more useful. It turned over the attempt and showed him the waste: he’d been lifting and moving at once, spending force on height he didn’t need yet. His footing had committed him toward the second mark before the case had cleared anything.

Angle first. Move while the pull’s light. Then lift just enough to clear the lip.

"Again," he said.

This time he only tilted the case at first, rear edge down and front edge up, so that it sat at the angle it would need to clear the lip. It cost almost nothing. Then he moved, while Rovan’s pull was still light, and his feet arrived at the second mark with his weight under him.

Rovan pulled hard.

Silas felt it hit the case and didn’t know it was coming. He didn’t throw more mana at it. He let the case give a finger’s width backward, held the angle, and added just enough to keep it from going further. Rovan eased off. The case came up the last inch, cleared the lip by the thickness of a coin, and Silas walked to the third mark and set it on the board without a sound.

The yard hand made a note.

Rovan let the cord go slack and came round the frame, ears up. "You fixed that while it was happening. The first time, you waited till you’d failed and then thought about it. That time you were correcting during the work."

"That’s the idea," Silas said.

"It’s a good idea." Rovan held out a hand. "Same again next week?"

"Same again," Silas said, taking Rovan’s hand.

Walking back across the yard with his mana scraped and his C-Rank reputation exactly as modest as before, he thought about the bag, and about the glassback running up a pane at Harrowglass, and the slab coming apart in his hands when he’d worked from the wrong side. A month ago he would have wanted to get back indoors before anybody asked him to try again. Today he was already looking forward to next week.

***

Team Nine met at supper, at the end of a refectory table with their trays pushed together.

"I’m in," Dagna said before he’d sat down. "I know the site. The ninety helped. And I’d like to see what the growers do."

"I’m in too," Alden said. "Obviously. I’ve been in since your message."

"Then here’s what I think we’re for." Silas pushed his bread aside. "We’re not trying to strip the place before anyone else gets there. There’ll be people with proper equipment who’ve done this for twenty years. We want to save what’s viable from the outer beds before they drain the conduit, work out what can be moved without wrecking the backing, and carry it home alive. And we do it by the rules of the open area."

"The vent," Dagna said. "Under the hood."

"The vent," Silas said. "And there’s a small spirit near the middle. I could sense it when we took the slabs. It drew away whenever I went near the center."

"You can sense them?" Dagna asked.

"A little. Elyra’s been teaching me," Silas said. "I can notice something and still have no idea what it is." He could admit that much without explaining where the ability came from.

Alden looked up from his tray. "That’s why you left the middle."

"Partly," Silas said. "I can’t just pick it up. It isn’t mine, and I don’t know what it wants. I’ll ask Harth what’s allowed when we get there, and before that I’ll ask Elyra what you do for something like that when its home is about to dry out."

Alden nodded. "And the slabs?"

Silas took a scrap of paper out of his pocket and laid it on the table between their trays. On it, in pencil, was a box. It was shallow, with slatted sides for air, and inside it, a row of small separate cradles, each one shaped to hold a single slab by its edges so that nothing pressed on the weak backing.

"Something like this," he said. "Ventilated. Each piece supported on its own. I don’t know yet what it’ll cost to make, or whether it keeps them damp enough, or whether we can carry three of them across the court without dropping one."

Dagna turned the paper toward her and studied it.

"Two days," she said.

"Two days," Silas confirmed.

She pulled a pencil out of her own pocket and handed it to him. Silas drew the first line of a list at the bottom of the page—timber, cloth, measure the slabs—and kept going.