Chapter 120 - 118 — Gone Ahead II
The district had got louder rather than quieter.
There were four young men round a table near the food counter who had cleared it, somewhere in the middle of the twenty, and had been drinking something for an hour.
One of them had put his Floor Two line up on the table for the others to look at, and they had all seen it four times already.
At the next table two people were comparing placement rewards item by item, and one of them had finished eleventh and the other seventh and it was very obvious which was which.
A man on the floor against the wall had his back to all of it and his gear in a pile beside him and had not moved since I came in.
The consumables queue was eleven people long again.
And in front of the public board, where the final placements had gone up, there were more people than had been in front of the map that morning.
---
The healing station is in the fourth bay along the eastern side and I should have gone there first.
It is quieter in there than the passage by a long way. Six reinforced beds behind low screens, four of them occupied. Trays on stands beside each one with the instruments laid out in order and covered.
The smell is entirely different from the district. Antiseptic first, sharp, and then the flat sweetish thing that mana-treated dressing has before it is opened.
Voices in there stay low without anybody telling them to.
The woman who took me had been on since the first cohort of the day and it showed and she did not let it slow anything down.
---
She got the shoulder guard off and the bracer off and then she went at the strap I had made out of the pouch.
"That is not a fastening."
"It held."
"It held the plate against the injury for four hours." She cut it rather than untying it. "That is a different sentence."
Then the shirt, which had to come off in two pieces because the whole left side of it had dried onto me and taking it off in one would have taken the rest with it.
I sat on the edge of a reinforced bed and looked at the far screen while she worked it loose.
---
She went over it without saying anything for a while.
The whole of my left side from the armpit to the top of the hip had gone through purple into something darker in the middle, in a band about the width of a bracer.
It did not look like an injury. It looked like a mark somebody had made deliberately.
The claw lines from the fortress had opened again in two places and closed again on their own and there was a third one that had not.
There was a graze across the back and shoulder from the wall, full of grit, and she spent longer on that than on anything.
Everything down the outside of the right forearm was swollen from the wrist to the elbow.
"Ribs," she said. "Two of them, possibly three. Not through."
"How long."
"For the bone, three weeks. For being able to breathe without thinking about it, four days." She put something cold along the band and it went in immediately and kept going.
"Your Health is full. Your Health being full is a number about whether you are going to die. It is not a report on your ribs."
"I had noticed."
"Everybody notices on the same afternoon."
---
The dressing went on warm and stayed warm and it was the first thing in nine hours that had not been either an impact or a countdown.
She strapped the ribs properly, which is not what I had done, and the difference between the two was immediate and slightly humiliating.
Then she left me sitting there for ten minutes while it took.
I ate something afterward at the counter with the four pots, sitting down, with my elbows on the table, and I got through the whole bowl before I registered that I had been eating.
My hands had a problem I did not have a word for. They kept coming up. Every time somebody went past behind me at any speed the forearms came off the table about four centimetres before I had decided anything, and then went back down.
Everything in both legs had gone stiff while I was sitting still.
My jaw ached, which made no sense at all until I worked out how long I had been holding it shut.
---
I did the panel properly at the end of the table, with a cup of water in front of me and nobody within six metres.
> **[Strength: 33 → 35.]**
>
> **[Endurance: 43 → 45.]**
>
> **[Agility: 42 → 44.]**
>
> **[Perception: 28 → 30.]**
> **[Maximum Health: 430 → 450.]**
>
> **[Health: 430/450 → 450/450.]**
> **[Unassigned Attribute Points: 9 → 14.]**
Two on every line, permanently, for finishing first instead of twentieth.
Endurance forty-five is four hundred and fifty, which is where the Health came from, and the extra twenty is in there because the ceiling moved and not because anything healed.
Fourteen points sitting unspent. Nine of my own and five off the placement.
I did not touch them. I have not been in whatever comes next and I am not going to guess at it from a bench.
> **[Adamantine Ingot: stored.]**
> **[Unique Relic: KAIROS.]**
> **[TOWER]**
>
> **[Floor One — Cleared.]**
>
> **[Placement — 1st / 100.]**
>
> **[Floor Two — Available.]**
I looked at the last line for a while.
Then I closed the panel and went home.
---
The east hall was the first thing I noticed and I noticed it from the wrong end of the corridor.
I had come in the back way out of habit and I got about fifteen metres before I worked out what was wrong, which was that I could hear my own boots.
Two nights ago I stood at the bottom of that stair and listened to twelve people arguing about load distribution at eleven at night.
The doors were open. There was nothing in there.
---
The cases had gone.
They had been stacked four deep along the eastern wall of that hall for a week and there were four rectangles on the floor where they had been, in the dust, with clean edges.
The long table had been pushed back against the wall and somebody had put the chairs up on it.
There was a coil of strapping in the corner that had not gone with them and a wooden crate lid leaning against the leg of the table with nothing under it.
The board they had been working off was still up and it had nothing on it. Somebody had taken the pins out and left them in a line along the bottom of the frame.
I stood in the doorway of that hall for a moment with my ribs strapped and a block of metal inside my shirt.
---
The rest of the house was working.
Two women came past me in the lower corridor with an equipment case between them going the other way entirely, toward the armoury, and both of them said good evening and neither of them stopped.
There was a man at the desk outside the operations room with three report folders open in front of him and a fourth in his hand, and he was reading the fourth one and reaching for a pen without looking at it.
Somebody had a Green Gate team in the yard. I could hear the tail end of it through the window, a man counting people off and somebody else saying a number back.
Two of the younger ones were in the training hall and had been for a while, from the sound of it.
The clan does not stop because one man is not in it.
---
I found somebody by the stair. One of the equipment staff, going up with a box of something under one arm.
"Where is my father?"
"Gone, sir." He shifted the box. "Yesterday morning."
"Gone where?"
I assumed the field station. That is where they go first.
There is a week of moving people and equipment before anything starts, and I had come home expecting to walk into the middle of it and go round the cases in the corridor.
He looked at me for a second and then understood that I did not know.
"No, sir. Gone in."
---
"They went into the Tower yesterday morning," he said. "The whole team. They pulled it forward two days."
He said the next part slightly differently and I do not think he chose to.
"Floor Three."
He did not explain it to me. He did not say anything about the frontier or about the reports or about Ashford coming out with fourteen out of nineteen.
What he did was glance sideways at the doors of the east hall, at four clean rectangles on a dusty floor, and then bring his eyes back, and shift the box to the other arm, and stand there.
"Right," I said. "Thank you."
He went up.
---
I opened the panel in the corridor with one hand.
> **[TOWER]**
>
> **[Floor One — Cleared.]**
>
> **[Placement — 1st / 100.]**
>
> **[Floor Two — Available.]**
Floor Two.
I looked at it for about four seconds and I did not press it, and I closed it.
---
Then I went back and stood in the doorway of the east hall.
Four rectangles in the dust with clean edges. Chairs upside down on a table. A coil of strapping in the corner that somebody had decided was not worth three hundred kilos.
A board with the pins taken out and laid in a line.
At eleven o’clock two nights ago there had been twelve of the best Players in this region in that room, and a man reading aloud, and a case being closed and opened and closed.
I stood there a while.
I had come home from Floor One expecting to find my father getting ready to leave.
He had gone the previous morning.
And the floor I unlocked this afternoon is the one underneath the one he is standing on.