Chapter 124 - 122 — Not Going In Blind II

I went back up out of the heat with nothing in my hands.

That is an odd thing to walk across a yard with. My gauntlets have been on a shelf somewhere twice in four weeks and both times it was for two hours.

Nine days, possibly twelve, in which I own no combat equipment of any kind.

I have chosen that. I want to be clear with myself about it, because I could have had them back in four and worse, and my father is inside a floor nobody has cleared with an eight-day plan.

Four days of a worse pair does not get me to him. Nothing gets me to him. There is no version of the next fortnight in which I am on Floor Three.

What there is is a version where I arrive at the bottom of that Tower in nine days with hands that will not fail me, and a floor I have actually read about.

---

I got up to my room and opened the terminal and went to the Player Blog.

It has been running about forty years. It is not a Bureau product, the Bureau has tried three times to absorb it and failed three times, and the front page still looks like something a man built in a week and never tidied.

There was a moderator notice pinned at the top in a colour nobody has used deliberately in my lifetime.

> **DO NOT POST LIVE GATE COORDINATES. Fourth time. Posts come down and accounts go with them.**

Underneath that, everything else.

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Two active Gate warnings at the top of the regional board. One of them had a red flag on it and eleven replies underneath, and four of those replies were people saying they had been past it that morning and it looked fine.

A thread about a class of gauntlet being overpriced, with numbers, and somebody underneath it with different numbers, and a third man telling both of them they were quoting last year’s figures.

Two recruitment posts from guilds. One of them written properly, with the terms in it. One of them written by somebody who thought "serious applicants only" was a description of terms.

An argument about whether a particular clan had padded a clear report, which had been going for six days and had a moderator warning halfway down it.

A man asking whether his Ability was worth registering as B, and four people telling him no, and one person telling him yes at length and being wrong in a way I could see from here.

---

And then further down, a different colour on the thread titles.

Memorials.

Nine of them in the last month. Name, registration number, where, and then however many replies from people who had run with them.

One had four hundred replies. One had none at all and had been up for eleven days.

I read three of those and then stopped, and I did not make a thing of it, because the site does not make a thing of it.

They sit in the same list as the argument about gauntlet pricing, in the same font, four threads down.

That is what that place is. It is the whole trade in one column.

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The verified accounts have a small mark next to the name. Registered Players who have put their Bureau number against the account, which most people do not, because most people would rather be able to say what they like.

The ones with the mark are worth reading first and everybody knows it and nobody says it.

---

Yesterday’s Floor One batch was on the board already.

Not at the top. Four threads down, under the Gate warning and the gauntlet argument, with about ninety replies.

Somebody had posted the twenty who cleared, because the placements go public, and the thread was mostly people going down the list and finding names they recognised.

Krüger was in it about fifteen replies down. Two people had run with him in Gates and said so, and there was a short disagreement about which guild he had turned down and when.

Kavanagh was in it more often than Krüger and he had not cleared.

Somebody had posted that he went out at twenty-one, and three separate people replied that it was his fourth attempt, and one added that he had gone out at twenty-two the time before.

My own name came up eleven or twelve times in ninety replies.

Somebody asked whether it was the same Nolan from the stadium and got told it was. Somebody said first place on a second attempt was not that unusual, and got shown a figure that suggested it was.

Somebody said the name explained it, and two people underneath that said the name does not go into the Tower with you.

Then the thread went back to arguing about Kavanagh, who is apparently the more interesting man, and I could not entirely disagree.

---

The sections run down the left. Gates. Abilities. Equipment. Market. Regional. Memorial.

And at the bottom, Tower.

Three floors and that is the whole of it.

Floor One has eleven thousand threads in it and the oldest one is from before my father awakened.

Floor Two has four hundred and six.

---

I sat and looked at those two numbers next to each other for a moment, because they are the entire problem stated in one line.

Floor One has sixty years of people writing down how the last group died, and two hundred and eleven pages of Bureau document on top of it.

That is what I walked in with, and it was still not enough, and I had to go in twice.

Floor Two broke recently. That is the polite word people use and it means humanity spent a very long time not clearing it and then somebody did, and everything useful about that floor has been written in the time since.

Four hundred and six threads, and I would put money on most of them being from before the clear and therefore being about failing.

I cannot prepare for this the way I prepared for the last one. There is not enough of it to prepare that way with.

---

I put the cursor in the search bar.

*Tower Floor Two.*

> **Searching...**

> **406 results in Tower. 1,847 across all sections.**

They came up from the top.

Old ones first by weight of replies, and the old ones are all the same shape. Expedition threads. Dates going back years. Titles with the word *attempt* in them and, underneath, counts of how many went in against how many came out.

Then, much nearer the top of the page than their dates should have put them, a run of recent posts with the verified mark beside the names.

And above all of it, at the head of the list, sitting on its own with a view count I had to read twice, one thread written after the first clears.

I opened it.