Chapter 125: The Glass Room

I did sleep.

A bit.

The note was under my pillow, which was a stupid place to put it, because every time I turned over I could hear the paper crinkle, and every time it crinkled I woke up and read it again in my head.

Keep the last one.

Not for them.

By three in the morning I’d decided I hated whoever wrote it.

By five I’d decided I didn’t.

By half past five Sanctuary was so loud it didn’t matter what I’d decided, because nobody was sleeping through that.

Thirty-six people getting ready for something at once sounds like a stable on fire.

Cedric was shouting about boots.

Somebody had lost a water skin and was accusing three other people of having it, and all three had it.

Lena was going through her medical satchel for what must have been the fourth time, lips moving, counting bandages.

Roland was eating standing up, which I have never seen him do.

Mira was sitting on the bottom stair with her eyes shut, very still, the way she sits when the noise is too much and she’s decided to let it go through her instead of fighting it.

And I was in the middle of it, in my black jacket, with nothing to carry.

That was the strange part.

Everyone else had something.

A satchel, a sword, a list, a job.

I had my hands in my pockets and a pillow under my arm and nowhere to be until somebody came to collect me.

It felt like being the only person at a funeral who didn’t know the deceased.

***

Penelope came down last.

She’s never last.

She had her hair tied back tighter than usual and the folded lists sticking out of her jacket, and she stopped at the bottom of the stairs and looked at the room the way my father looks at a map.

Then she looked at me.

"You look terrible."

"I slept."

"You slept badly."

"I slept creatively."

She almost smiled.

Then she didn’t.

I’d been trying to think of something to say to her since about two in the morning.

Something she could take in there with her.

Something useful, or kind, or at least not stupid.

I’d come up with nothing. I’ve never been good at that kind of sentence. I can tell you exactly how deep a cut is from across a tent, but ask me to say something that matters to somebody’s face and I go blank like a wiped slate.

"Don’t let Cedric carry anything heavy," I said. "He’ll try."

She looked at me for a second, like she was waiting for the rest of it.

There wasn’t any rest of it.

"All right," she said.

Then she turned around and said, "Sanctuary," not loudly, and thirty-five people stopped talking at once. I’d never heard that room go quiet for anyone. Not for me, certainly.

She walked out into the grey, and they followed her, and the door swung shut, and I stood in an empty common room in the wrong clothes listening to their footsteps go.

The escort came for me twenty minutes later.

I kept my hand in my jacket the whole way there. On the paper.

I don’t know why.

It wasn’t going anywhere.

***

Whoever had designed the gallery, Elizabeth concluded within the first minute, had understood precisely what it would feel like to stand in it.

It ran along the northern rim of the basin: a long, narrow room whose entire front wall was glass. It had been divided into five alcoves by partitions of the same glass, clear from floor to ceiling, so that each leader stood in a transparent box with an unobstructed view of the other four, and of the whole Crucible spread out below.

Each alcove held a narrow writing desk.

On each desk lay a pen and three cards of heavy cream stock.

Set into the wall beside each desk was a brass slot, and she did not need to be told what it was for.

Above the glass ran a long board bearing five numerals.

All of them zero.

She laid two knuckles against the partition on her left and knocked, lightly.

Nothing. Not a ring, not a tap, not so much as a vibration against her skin. Sound did not pass through that glass. It simply stopped.

To her left, Sophie Trohan had already noticed, and was wearing the expression of a person who has said something out loud and received no reply.

To her right, beyond Sophie, James stood with his left hand pressed flat on his desk.

Past him, at the far end, Daphne Spinster had not moved since she was shown in, and Alash Vortex, in the last alcove, had sat down.

Of course he had sat down.

Elizabeth turned to the basin.

It was larger than she had imagined.

A sunken bowl, the better part of a mile across, walled on every side by steep rock. Woodland covered the northern slope below the gallery. A river ran east to west across the lower third, wide and slow.

The south rose into broken high ground, all ridges and loose stone. And at the centre, where the land was flattest, stood the remains of a town: collapsed walls, a tower with its top gone, a square that had once had a market in it.

Scattered across all of it, the Wellsprings glowed.

Most were small and a pale, cold blue. She counted twenty-four of those before she stopped counting.

Five were white, and larger, and brighter, and every one of the five had been placed somewhere difficult.

Two in the ruin.

One on an island in the river.

One high on the southern ridge.

One in the densest part of the wood, directly below where she stood.

Five gates had been cut into the rim of the basin, spaced evenly around it.

As she watched, all five opened at once.

Concord came in through the north gate, below her.

She found Petra Halvern almost at once, at the head of the column. Not in front of it, which was where Elizabeth would have walked.

A few paces inside it, turning back every so often to say something to the people behind her.

Elizabeth watched her do that three times and felt something uncomfortable settle under her ribs.

She had spent three hours on Sunday with that girl, going over everything Elizabeth knew about how Concord moved and thought and failed. Petra had listened to all of it, asked sharp questions about roughly half, and at the end had said, quite politely, that she would probably not do most of it.

Elizabeth had not argued.

That had been the hardest part of the entire weekend. More difficult than the drill. She had sat across a table from someone telling her that her own plan would be set aside, and she had nodded, and thanked her.

Now she stood in a glass box above a mile of ruins and watched Petra lead Concord down the northern slope, into the trees, toward the white Wellspring in the wood, at a pace Elizabeth would have called too slow and a heading she would not have chosen.

She looked at the three cards on her desk.

She had made a decision about them already, and she intended to keep it.

She would not spend a single one.

Not because it would be wise.

She was not certain it would be wise.

Because if she sent even one card down to Petra, she would be telling thirty-seven people that she did not trust the person she had given them to, and she was not prepared to do that on the first morning.

She folded her hands behind her back, so that they could not reach the pen without her noticing.

***

Sophie waved at Alash through the glass before she’d worked out that nobody could hear anything, and he looked up from his chair and gave her this tiny, sleepy half-wave back, like a man lifting a teacup off a saucer, and that made her feel about a hundred times better for about four seconds.

Then she said "good morning" out loud to the glass on her left, just to check, and Elizabeth didn’t even turn her head.

Oh.

Okay.

So they’d really meant it.

You couldn’t hear anything in here.

Not even from two feet away.

Not even if you wanted to.

That was fine. That was a completely normal thing to be a little bit upset about, and she was going to be a little bit upset about it for maybe one more minute and then she was going to be fine, because she was always fine, that was sort of her whole thing.

She pressed both hands flat against the front glass instead and looked down.

Brightvale was coming in through the east gate.

She knew it was Brightvale before she could make out a single face, because they were the only class that came through the gate in a clump instead of a line, all bunched together and talking, she could practically see them talking from up here, and somewhere in the middle of the clump somebody was probably already arguing about whether they should have brought more rope.

And then the clump sort of... sorted itself out. Pulled into a shape.

Marta. That was Marta, at the front, with one arm straight out pointing south toward the ruins, not waving it about, just pointing, and everybody turned the way she was pointing, and went.

Sophie laughed, out loud, alone, in a glass box nobody could hear.

She’d done it. Marta had done it in about ten seconds. Sophie had spent a whole Saturday evening and five rounds of voting failing to get thirty-six people to agree on anything, and Marta had just pointed.

Good.

Good, that was good.

That was exactly why she’d picked her.

She could see Roth near the back, carrying far too much.

She could see little Wynne, who always walked on the left of whoever she was walking with, doing it now.

She could see Hollis, who got nervous in crowds and hummed, and she was absolutely certain he was humming.

She could see every single one of them.

And she couldn’t say a single name.

That was the part she hadn’t thought about properly. Not on Friday, not all weekend. She’d thought about not being there, and she’d thought about not giving orders, and she’d been fine with both of those, or nearly.

She hadn’t thought about being able to see all of them, all day, the entire time, and not being able to say one name.

Sophie kept her hands on the glass and her smile on her face, and she did not sit down.

***

James kept his left hand flat on the desk.

It helped. The shake came up from somewhere in the wrist and the wood took some of it. Not all. Enough that nobody would notice unless they were staring, and the only person who ever stared at his hands was Elizabeth, and she was two boxes down with her back to him.

Vanguard came through the west gate at a run.

Of course they did. He’d spent all of Saturday telling them to move fast and hit first. What else were they going to do.

But Tristan was at the front with one arm up, and he was slowing them.

Good.

Slow was good. He’d never once in his life thought slow was good, and now he did, and he didn’t like what that said about the last week.

He wanted to be down there so badly his jaw hurt.

Not to lead.

He knew he’d have been worse at it than Tristan today, with his hand like this and his channels like that.

He just wanted to be in it.

Running.

Breathing hard.

Feeling the ground come up through his boots.

Anything except standing in a glass box with a pen, like a clerk.

He watched Vanguard reach the edge of the southern ridge, and stop, and fan out.

Then he watched them turn.

Not toward the white Wellspring up on the ridge, the one he’d have gone for.

Back north.

Along the bottom of the ridge.

Keeping low, keeping behind the line of the rocks, where nobody in the basin could see them.

James frowned.

Where the hell was Tristan going.

He looked further ahead along that line, toward the ruined town, and then he saw it.

Three classes were converging on the white Wellspring in the square.

Concord from the north, out of the trees.

Brightvale from the east, across the river.

Sanctuary from the south-west, with Declair at the front of it.

Three classes. The exact number needed to open it.

And Vanguard was coming up behind the collapsed wall on the far side of that square, low and quiet, where none of the three could see.

James understood about a second before he wanted to.

Tristan wasn’t going to help open it.

Tristan was going to let the other three open it, and then step out from behind that wall, and seal it.

In full.

It was exactly what the rules said you could do.

It was probably the smartest move anyone would make all day.

It would put Vanguard so far ahead that the others might never catch up.

And it was the ugliest thing he had ever watched his own class decide to do.

He looked down at the three cards.

One card.

Ten words.

Don’t do it.

Four, even.

That would stop it.

And it would cost Vanguard points.

And it would cost Vanguard the Wellspring.

And it would be him, standing up here, telling Tristan he didn’t trust him, on the first morning, in front of all thirty-seven of them.

His hand was shaking again.

He hadn’t noticed it started.

***

Greywall was not in it.

They had gone south-east at the start.

To the river.

To two small Wellsprings on the near bank, which Nadia had marked on page three.

They would be fine there for an hour at least.

So Daphne watched the others.

In the square, three classes were arriving at the white Wellspring from three directions.

They were slowing.

Looking at each other.

Working out, from the ground, what she had worked out from up here ten minutes ago.

Behind the broken wall, Vanguard waited.

None of the three could see them.

Daphne looked along the glass.

Aurelius had her hands behind her back. Her knuckles had gone pale.

Trohan had both palms flat on the front glass, smiling, and her eyes were wet.

Vellaroux was looking down at his desk. At his cards. His left hand was not steady.

And Vortex.

Vortex had not moved.

He was still sitting.

He was leaning forward with his elbows on his knees, watching the square, and his right hand was inside his jacket.

It had been there since he was shown in.

He was not reaching for the pen.

He was holding on to something.

***

Below, the three classes stepped up to the white Wellspring together.

The light began to change.

It rose, slowly, out of the ground, the colour of a sky just before sunrise.

It was opening.

Behind the broken wall, Tristan lifted one hand.

Daphne put her own palm against the glass partition beside her.

It was warm.

It had not been warm when she came in.

In the four boxes along the glass, four people looked up from what they were holding, at the same moment, and looked at each other.

None of them could say anything.