Chapter 134: I Asked

( James Vellaroux’s POV )

They came into that clearing in no order at all.

Greywall first, because they’d left first. Then Brightvale about four minutes behind them. Then us, last, thirty-seven people coming out of black trees into a piece of open ground lit white from the middle.

Nobody formed up. Nobody counted anybody. They just walked in and stopped, and stood there breathing, in a wood, in the dark, a mile from where they’d started.

Concord was gone. All of them. Out the eastern side and up the slope and standing well clear on the bare ground above the treeline, where everyone could see exactly where they were.

Halvern had left one person at the edge of the clearing to say so out loud, and then that person walked off after the rest of them.

***

Declair was in the middle with her hands at her sides.

She’d been there for twenty minutes on her own with a hundred points and nobody in the world watching her, and she had not touched it, and she could not have touched it, and I think everybody standing in that clearing understood both of those things at once.

Four classes.

Three is what it needs.

***

It opened.

The white one in the wood is the biggest of the five, or it looked it. The light came up through the canopy and turned every leaf over that clearing silver, and for about four seconds four classes of filthy exhausted people stood in a wood and looked up at it like children.

That is what I’ll keep, out of all of today.

Not the ridge. Not the square. That.

***

( Sophie Trohan’s POV )

And then the room went wrong.

I don’t know how else to put it and I’ve had a long time to try.

It started in the partitions. Not the front window, the ones between us, the ones that have been getting hotter all day and that I’d stopped putting my hand near hours ago. There was a light in them.

Not on them. In them. Inside the glass, thin lines of it, coming up from the floor the way frost goes up a window except quick, and gold.

Gold, not white. Nothing in that basin is gold.

I’ve seen it once before, on a training hall floor eight days ago, from about forty feet, and I have not thought about it properly since because thinking about it properly made my hands feel strange.

My hands felt strange.

***

It went down the whole room.

Five boxes. Four partitions. All of them at once, and then the floor, and I could feel it through my boots, and the warmth that’s been sitting in my chest since the practical field went hot in a way that was not friendly at all.

I looked left.

Elizabeth had both hands off the glass and had gone absolutely white.

James was on his feet.

Daphne was already moving.

And Alash was not doing anything at all.

***

That’s what frightened me. He wasn’t moving. He was on his feet against the front window with both hands on it and he had not moved for about four seconds, and his head was back, and he was looking up at the ceiling of that box like there was something there.

There isn’t anything there. I looked.

Then his knees went.

He didn’t fall. It was worse than falling. It was the thing where somebody’s legs stop and the rest of them stays up, and he ended up half against that window with one hand still flat on it and his shoulders going in a way that is not breathing.

I hit the glass.

I hit it with both hands and then with my whole arm and then I was shouting, properly shouting, screaming at a wall in a room where sound stops at the glass, at a boy eight feet away from me.

Eight feet.

I have never once in my life been eight feet from somebody who needed help and been unable to get there.

***

( Daphne Spinster’s POV )

I have Gravity.

I have had Gravity since I was ten and I have used it to hold things down and to hold things up and to stop Nadia talking, and I have never once in my life used it on a wall.

I used it on a wall.

***

The partition between my box and Trohan’s has a pale line in it that I have been watching since this afternoon. It runs from the floor to about my shoulder. It is not a crack. It has never been a crack.

I put everything I have into that line.

Everything. All of it, all at once, at a hand’s width, the way you are told from the first day never to do because it is wasteful and stupid and you will have nothing left.

I had nothing left afterwards.

The line did not move.

***

I hit it with my shoulder.

I want that written down because it is the least dignified thing I have ever done and there were four people who could see me do it.

I hit it with my shoulder, twice, and then with the chair, and the chair broke and the glass did not, and the gold went on climbing up the inside of it about a finger’s width from my face, and it was hot enough that I had to stop.

***

A wall does not have to be clever.

I said that to Nadia in a classroom at the start of term and I was pleased with myself about it, and I have been quietly pleased with myself about it ever since, because it was true and because it was the closest thing to a philosophy I have ever managed.

A wall does not have to be clever. It does not have to be fast.

It has to be standing in the same place when something arrives.

I have spent my whole life admiring that.

Tonight I stood on the wrong side of one.

***

I have no cards. I have had no cards since twenty seconds after midday, and I spent them on my own people and I would spend them again, and that is not the part that is going to keep me awake.

The part that is going to keep me awake is that Vortex was four paces away.

Four paces. Through a thing I could see him through.

And there was not one single action available to me in the world.

***

( Elizabeth Aurelius’s POV )

I did not move for some seconds, and I would like to be honest about why.

It was not shock. I have been shocked twice today and both times I did something about it, and one of those things was a catastrophe and the other was the only sensible act I have managed since dawn.

It was that I was doing arithmetic.

I had two cards. Each of them transmits ten words to Petra Halvern, who is standing on bare ground above a treeline three quarters of a mile away, and who cannot reach this room, and who does not know it exists except as a strip of glass on a rim, and who could not enter it if she did.

There is no card that goes sideways.

There is no card that goes up.

The entire architecture of this room is that five people may speak downward, once, three times, for a price, and may not speak to one another at all under any circumstances.

That is not an oversight. Somebody designed it.

***

Somebody designed it four days ago.

I have had a very long day to consider one sentence that was added to a competition on a Monday morning by a man nobody can find, and I had assumed, as everyone assumed, that it was about leadership.

Five leaders. One room. Sealed from each other. All day.

And every single one of us with exactly one channel of communication, pointing away from the room, costing us something each time.

Standing in that box watching a boy’s knees go, I stopped believing that the sentence was about leadership.

I do not yet know what it was about.

But it was not an examination requirement, and I have spent my whole life in rooms where people arrange things, and I know the shape of an arrangement when I am standing inside one.

***

( Alash Vortex’s POV )

I would like to describe this accurately and I am not going to manage it, so I am going to describe it badly and leave it badly, because a bad true account is worth more than a good invented one.

The gold came up out of the floor.

Five points. I was one of them. That part I knew, because I have had it before, four nights ago, lying on my back in a room in Sanctuary with a pillow under my head.

What was different was that I was awake.

***

In the dream it noticed me for one and a half seconds and then stopped.

It did not stop this time.

I want to say it came closer. It did not come closer. There is no direction in it and nothing moves and nothing arrives. What happens is that the amount of attention on you goes up, the way a room gets brighter, except it is not light and it is not on the outside.

It is like being read.

Not looked at. Read. Slowly, the way you read something you intend to remember, and by something with no particular reason to hurry.

***

’System.’

Nothing.

’System.’

I have had that voice in my head since before I had a body. I have been irritated by it, insulted by it, corrected by it, and saved by it. It has never once been absent when I called, not in fifteen years, not at the border, not under Garron’s shadow, not in an infirmary with three ribs gone.

There was nothing there.

***

My legs stopped.

That is the only way I can put it. I was standing against the window and then I was against the window with my legs not participating, and my chest was doing something unhelpful, and the edges of everything had gone soft and grey and there was a sound that was not a sound.

Somewhere to my left, a long way off, glass was being hit.

I remember thinking that was odd.

***

Here is the thing about being read.

You start agreeing with it.

That is what I cannot get anyone to understand afterward, and it is the only part that actually frightens me now. It was not painful. Nothing hurt. It went through and it took what it wanted and somewhere in the middle of it I found that I was not objecting, because objecting would have required wanting something for myself, and I discovered, at fifteen, in a glass box, that I did not have that.

Not that I had lost it. That there was no mechanism.

I have never once in my life asked anybody for anything.

Valerian wrote that down about me in a report when I was fourteen and filed it as a concern and I laughed when the Headmaster told me.

***

And then I understood the note.

***

You will want to use all three.

I had. Two on other people and the third would have gone the same way if the day had lasted another hour. Cedric’s hands. A Vanguard boy under a stone. Somebody, always somebody.

Keep the last one.

Not for them.

I had spent four days being pleased with myself about that line. I decided on a riverbank that it meant do not steal the last Wellspring from people who trusted you, and I felt something come loose in my chest about it, and I was so certain that I never once looked at the words again.

Not for them.

Not for your class. Not for the thirty-six. Not for the boy under the stone or the one with the red hands or anybody else you can think of in the next four seconds, because you will think of somebody, you always think of somebody.

For you.

He did not know what was coming for me. I do not believe he knew that. I think he knew something would, because he has been reading people for forty years and I am not a difficult book, and I think he worked out that when it came I would be sitting in a sealed room with three ways to speak and would spend every one of them on somebody else and have nothing left when it was my turn.

He was right.

He was nearly wrong.

***

There is one card left on that desk.

I got a hand to it. I do not know how. There is a piece of that which is simply missing and I have stopped trying to find it.

And I sat on the floor of a glass box in a wood-lit dark with a pen I could not hold properly, in front of the one channel of communication in that entire room, which goes one way, downward, to a person half a mile off in a clearing standing beside a hundred points with her hand already out.

Ten words.

I had ten words and I had never used one of them on myself.

***

I thought about writing something useful.

I want that on the page because it is the truth and because it is contemptible. Even then. Even sitting on that floor. Some part of me went looking for a version of the sentence that would also help, that would tell her to seal it first, that would get the thirty-six their hundred points and keep her running at the same time.

There isn’t one. Ten words is not enough to be clever in.

And I sat there with a pen and understood that I was, for the first time in my entire existence across two lives and an unmeasurable amount of time, going to have to pick.

***

I wrote:

Penelope. I need help. Please.

Five words.

The worst handwriting of my life.

I pushed it through the slot, and Sanctuary went from minus sixty to minus ninety, and half a mile away in a clearing full of silver leaves a girl standing beside an open Wellspring with her hand already out looked down at a piece of card that had just appeared in it.

She did not read it twice.

She ran.