Chapter 121 - 119 — The Next Floor I
**POV: Jace**
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I stood in that doorway longer than I needed to.
Yesterday morning. He had been gone a full day and most of a night while I was inside a fortress arguing with a man about a shield made of air, and the house had been getting on with itself the entire time.
I did not have a reaction to it for about a minute. Then I did, and it did not arrive where I expected it to.
It arrived in my ribs, which were strapped, and in my right forearm, which was swollen from the wrist to the elbow, and in the fact that I had spent nine hours today on the floor everybody has already done.
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I went and found the man at the operations desk instead of going upstairs.
He had four folders open and a fifth in his hand and he put the fifth one down when he saw who it was.
"Is there any way to know anything," I said.
He knew exactly what I was asking and he did not pretend otherwise.
"No, sir."
"Nothing at all."
"Nothing goes in and nothing comes out. There is no signal into the Tower and there never has been."
He turned a folder round on the desk so I could see what was in it, which was a Gate roster and had nothing to do with anything.
"We know when they went in. We will know when they come out. There is no third thing."
"How long are they expecting to be."
"The plan was eight days inside. That was written down before they pulled it forward."
He did not offer me anything else and I was glad about that.
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I went up and sat on the end of my bed and did not put the light on.
Here is the thing I did in the dark, because it is the first thing anybody in my position would do, and because I have been leaning on it for a month.
I went looking for it.
Myrmidon attempting Floor Three. Twelve people. My father at the front of it.
That is not a small item and it is not the sort of thing a man forgets, and it should have been sitting there with the Eastwick Gate and Cormac Keane and the raid that came out five.
I could not produce it.
Not a date. Not a headline. Not a number coming out the other side.
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I sat with that for a while and made myself be accurate about why, because there are two answers and only one of them is comfortable.
The comfortable one is that I was a man with a surname and an office and no Ability, and that a very great deal of what crossed my desk went across it and no further.
The other one is that I have been changing things for a month, and they pulled this expedition forward by two days.
Two days is a small number until it is the difference between a thing I might have remembered and a thing that has not happened yet in any version of the world.
Either way the answer is the same. I do not know what happens.
For the first time since I woke up in that bed at eighteen, I am looking at something enormous involving my own family and I am exactly as blind as everybody else in this house.
So I did the arithmetic on going after him, because not doing it would have been dishonest.
I have cleared Floor One. There is a floor between me and the one he is standing on and I have not seen a single line of it.
Say I clear Floor Two tomorrow, which is not going to happen, and walk into Floor Three behind him at Level Thirteen with two cracked ribs and a pair of gauntlets that did not survive a day.
He took twelve people. He did not take twelve people because twelve is a nice number. He took the twelve he wanted, over months, with three hundred kilos of equipment chosen against two conflicting reports, onto ground nobody has come back from with a clear.
A thirteenth person arriving on his own with no gear and no floor knowledge is not help. He is a man somebody has to watch.
The version of me that is useful on that floor is not the version that gets there fastest. It is the version that gets there able to stand in the line.
That is not patience. I want to be clear about that with myself. It is that there is genuinely nothing else available.
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I went down to the forge in the morning.
The smithy is under the eastern range at the back, dug into the slope so that half of it is below the yard, and you come down six steps into it and the temperature changes on the third one.
It is one long room with a mana furnace at the far end behind a shield wall, and two coal hearths that are still there because some work wants coal.
Four benches down the middle, with the tools racked above them in the order they get used.
The floor is scale. Decades of it, hammered flat and black and slightly soft underfoot.
It smells of hot iron and quench oil and the sharp clean thing that comes off a mana furnace when the shield wall is up.
Two of the benches had work on them. A Gate team’s harness fittings on one, all laid out, and something long on the other under a cloth.
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The man who runs it has been doing it since before I was born and his hands say so.
He took one look at me coming down the steps and went back to what he was doing, which was correct, and let me get all the way to the bench before he stopped.
"You have been somewhere."
"The Tower."
"I heard." He wiped his hands. "What do you want?"
I put the gauntlets on the bench first.
Then I took the ingot out and put it beside them, and it went down onto the wood with a sound that was much shorter than the sound that size of object ought to make.
—
He did not pick it up straight away.
He looked at it, and then he put two fingers on it and left them there for about three seconds, and then he picked it up and nearly did not, because he had judged the weight before he touched it and judged it wrong.
"Where."
"Floor One. First place."
"Right." He turned it over. Then he took it to the light over the second bench and turned it over again there. "Adamantine. I have handled it twice in thirty-one years and both times it belonged to somebody else."
He put it back down on the wood.
"What else have you got."
"Nothing."
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He waited to see whether that was a joke.
"You have been through an Orange Gate and a raid and a Tower floor."
"And I sold the lot. The burrow and the Manticore went to the Bureau at ninety percent the same afternoon, and everything out of Eastwick is sitting in a Meridian appraisal queue and is not mine yet and will come back as money anyway."
"So it will." He did not appear to think any less of me for it. "Most people do. Most people are right to. Material sitting in a case is money you are not using."
He put his hand flat on the ingot.
"Except this. This is not a material you should have sold, and you did not, so that is the end of that conversation."