Chapter 314 - 305 — Forty Left II

Chapter 314: Chapter 305 — Forty Left II

Somewhere around the fourth group James worked out what he was actually watching, and it was not what he had expected.

These people were good. Some of them were better than he had been eighteen months ago and one or two of them had more floors than Finn.

But they had to *look*.

That was the whole of it. He kept seeing the same half-second everywhere: a candidate turning to check whether their teammate was moving before committing to a movement of their own. Two people reaching for the same opening because neither of them knew whose it was. Somebody hesitating over whether covering the man on their left was their job, deciding it was, and arriving a beat after it would have mattered.

Nothing was wrong with any of them.

They had just never done it before with each other.

Downstairs, when Ronan closed a lane, Finn would have been in the replacement lane before Ronan finished the movement, because Finn had watched him do it four hundred times in five years. None of these forty had watched anybody do anything four hundred times.

James thought about a padded hall six weeks ago and a woman with black wings who had not known where any of them stood.

---

Group seven did not have a single one of the top ten individual records in it.

They came off the line without any particular confidence and got a hundred feet before anything happened.

Then Ronan closed the centre with the shield and Cillian went to work on the right — controlled, low, steady, walking them left the way he had walked six groups left already.

The caller, a woman in bib thirty-one, started them moving left.

And then stopped.

She stopped so abruptly that the man behind her walked into her shoulder.

James leaned forward.

*She saw the foot.*

Ronan’s rear foot had gone back about eight inches, exactly the way it had for nineteen four hours earlier, and thirty-one had either read it or had seen the earlier group from the holding area, and either one of those was worth marks.

They held. They lost eleven seconds standing still in the middle of a hall being shot at, and they did not go left.

Cillian punished them for the eleven seconds. He caught the man on the far side of the group square in the ribs — a controlled hit, the sort of thing designed to make you lose your feet and nothing else — and the man went down and slid.

Nobody came back for him except the person nearest.

That was the bit James liked. One person, the closest, went and got him up by the harness. The other three did not turn round at all. They held the route, facing the way they had been facing, and the two of them came back into the shape from behind.

Ronan increased it.

He stopped blocking and started separating — pushing between the front pair and the rear three, trying to make two groups out of one, which was the thing that had ended four attempts already.

And number eight, in the rear position, got a clean opening on Cillian.

James saw it and Cillian saw it and every person in the observation level saw it. Cillian had come too far forward chasing the split and his back quarter was open for about a second and a half, and number eight was a caster with something heavy enough to end a training run.

He did not take it.

He would have had to step two metres out of the rear position to land it, and the rear position was the only thing covering the man who had just been picked up off the floor.

He stayed where he was and did nothing.

Cillian’s head turned about ten degrees, and he looked at eight for a moment, and then went back to work.

James saw Cillian do it.

Nobody said anything upstairs.

---

They did not dominate the rest of the run. They barely did anything at all — they lost more ground, they took four more hits, and the last twenty feet was three people practically dragging the other two.

All five crossed.

`PASSED — 5/5 EXTRACTED — 09:41`

Maeve wrote the time down.

Finn had already rewound to the moment number eight did not take the shot, and was watching it for the second time with his chin on his fist.

"There," he said. "That. That’s the one."

---

Between groups seven and eight, Finn and Ronan had it out about nineteen.

It was not a row. Nobody raised their voice. It went on for about six minutes at the observation table while forty people ate sandwiches downstairs, and James let all of it happen.

"He’s the best individual fighter in the building and it isn’t close," Finn said. "Dara Nolan. Eleven years, two guilds, cleared twenty-two off a party that lost two and still finished. You’ll not find that on the open market and if you cut him he signs somewhere else inside a fortnight."

"I know what he is," said Ronan.

"Formation’s coachable. You’ve coached me out of worse."

"That’s the bit I don’t accept."

Ronan pulled the tablet over.

"It’s not technique. If it was technique I’d have him in the door tomorrow." He scrolled. "Screening, week four — group task, he’s told to hold a position, he leaves it to take a kill. Marked. Week five, same thing, different assessor. Marked. This morning I *hand* him a gap that any of you would have looked at twice, and he’s through it in under a second with four people behind him." He put the tablet down. "That’s three times. That’s not a habit he hasn’t learned out of. That’s the thing he does when he sees something good."

Cillian did not take a side. He took the tablet and read the two screening entries himself and then sat there tapping his thumb against the edge of it.

"They’re consistent," he said, eventually. "Same behaviour, three assessors, six weeks apart. I’d have argued if it was once."

Maeve closed her console.

"Then here’s my question and I don’t much mind who answers it," she said. "Are we looking at a weakness we can train — or a behaviour we’d have to gamble somebody else’s Challenger on while we train it?"

Nobody said anything for a moment.

Finn rubbed his face. "...The second one."

"Then that’s the answer."

They all looked at James.

He had not said a word in six minutes and he did not want to start now, so he asked the only question he thought was his to ask.

"What does your process say?"

Ronan turned the tablet round.

Nineteen’s formation composite was a nine out of a possible fifty-five. The acceptance line, which had been written down and signed in August by two men who had not met a single candidate yet, was twenty-eight.

"It says no," said Ronan.

"Then it’s no."

James did not enjoy it. He had watched the man run and there had been about four seconds in there that were better than anything else on that floor all day.

The line held anyway. That was the entire point of having written it down before they had faces to put against it.

---

By six o’clock Ronan was sitting down.

He had been on his feet since half seven and had taken about two hundred controlled hits, and none of it had hurt him, and he sat down anyway on the edge of the observation table with his forearms on his knees.

Cillian had dropped into a chair an hour earlier and pulled the scoring tablet into his lap and had not got up since.

Finn’s replay markers covered more than half the screen — forty-one of them, coloured, each one a moment somebody had done something worth arguing about.

And Maeve had already merged the day’s practical scores into the six-week screening data, so that when the last group crossed the line the composite was sitting there finished, because she had been doing it group by group all day instead of waiting.

The forty were sent home at half six with no result.

No lineup. No announcement, no cameras, nobody made to stand in a row while somebody read names out. They handed the bibs back at the door and got told they would hear inside three days, and they left.

Guild Zero had promised a process. The process was not finished.

---

It took another two hours.

Most of the forty were not close either way, which surprised James until he thought about it — six weeks of screening had already done that work, and the day had really only been for the twelve or fourteen in the middle.

They took two people out who had looked fine on paper and had shown something on the floor that paper could not show: one who had left a position twice in the same run, and one who had spent the entire nine minutes doing exactly what he was told and had never once said anything when the caller was wrong.

"That’s not obedience," said Ronan. "That’s not being there."

And they put two back in who had barely survived the screening. Number eight, whose combat file was frankly mediocre, and number thirty-one, whose file was worse — and whose composite, when Maeve put the day’s marks against it, came out fourth of forty.

At half past eight it settled at ten.

Ten was not a number anybody had picked for the sound of it. Ten meant two more parties of five. Two more parties meant Guild Zero could put Challengers into the Tower without any of them being called Team Zero, and Team Zero stayed James, Finn, Maeve, Ronan and Cillian, exactly the way five of them had said it into a microphone outside their own front door.

Ronan read the ten one more time and signed his assessment.

Cillian signed his.

Maeve turned the list round on the table to James.

He did not go down it name by name and he did not ask anybody to justify a single one of them, because two people had spent six weeks building the thing that produced this page and had spent eleven hours today using it.

"Send them," he said.

---

The acceptance messages went out at nine minutes past nine.

James stood at the rail afterward with the hall dark below him. The lane tape was still down. Somebody had left a water bottle at the extraction line.

Six weeks ago there had been thirty-one thousand four hundred applications and no way on earth to judge any of them, and a folder on a table that Ronan kept saying he would open on Thursday.

Now there were ten people in Dublin reading an email.

Behind him he could hear Cillian describing, at length and with actions, the exact face number eight had made when he decided not to take the shot.

---

Finn brought it back to work, because Finn always did.

"Thirty-one’s been sitting there since August."

"I know."

"We gave it six weeks. We gave it the analysis team, we gave it two hundred pages, we gave it every frame anybody has." He shrugged. "It hasn’t got us anything. And we’re not going to find out what that thing was by not climbing."

Nobody argued with him. Nobody had wanted to argue with him for about a fortnight.

James opened the interface.

`[FLOOR 31 AVAILABLE]`

He did not open the floor itself. That could wait until morning, with everybody in the room and a screen up.

"Tomorrow," he said. "Nine."

"Ten," said Cillian.

"Nine."

"I’ve done eleven hours—"

"Nine, Cillian."

Maeve was already typing.

"That’s fine either way," she said. "Intake orientation starts Monday and runs a fortnight, and it doesn’t need any of us — Ronan’s documentation is done, we’ve got the two assessors and three of the ops staff on it, and I’ve got the whole schedule signed off." She looked up. "If we’re gone eight days, they’ll be on day six of a fortnight when we get back. Nothing waits on us."

James thought about a message that had ended *nothing requires founder action tonight*, six weeks and two floors ago.

"Right," he said.

Nobody made a speech. Nobody said the word Wrath, or the Seven, or mentioned a red light going out of a dead man in a courtyard, because all of that was in a two-hundred-page document that had told them nothing and there was no version of tonight where saying it again helped.

Finn put his coat on. Ronan picked up the shield he had still not replaced. Cillian was arguing with Maeve about nine o’clock.

"I’ll spend the points before we go in," James said, to no one in particular.

"You said that after twenty-seven," said Maeve.

"I’ll spend them."

---

He was last out.

Maeve’s console was still awake on the observation table, and the summary was still up on it where she had left it, three lines and nothing else.

**31,400 APPLICATIONS**

**40 FINALISTS**

**10 ACCEPTED**

For the first time since a solicitor had incorporated it in a room above a car park, Guild Zero had Challengers in it who were not Team Zero.

James turned the screen off.

In the morning, the original five went back to work.