Chapter 151 - 149 — The Two Sides of Victory III (Bonus)

> **[Ability Activated: Aten.]**

> **[Mana: 116/280 → 110/280.]**

I got it back to the gap at about forty seconds and I did not follow it.

"Anton, is there a sixth."

"On the ramp. Halfway down. It has been there for two minutes."

"Doing what."

"Standing."

---

> **[Window: 00:30.]**

Hana said something from behind the disc and I did not hear it.

I was looking at the pillar, which had one line lit down one face, and had had one line lit down one face for four and a half minutes.

---

> **[Window: 00:15.]**

I have spent eleven days learning that there is nothing I can do from one city about anything happening in the other one.

I have said it out loud to five people. I have written four words about it on a piece of paper on a desk in Myrmidon.

And at fifteen seconds I found out that knowing a thing and standing in it are not the same, and I would have given a very great deal to be able to do something, and there was nothing, and I stood there.

---

> **[Window: 00:09.]**

Then the pillar went.

---

All four faces, all at once, up from the bottom, and it went so much brighter than it had been that the whole chamber changed colour.

> **[Corresponding activation received: Stone.]**

>

> **[Convergence commencing.]**

---

The silver wall round the disc came up out of the floor and kept going.

It went up past my head and up into the vault and did not stop at the vault, and the light in it was the same light as the pillars and it was everywhere at once.

Then the room came apart in the way that a thing does when there are two of it.

---

The vault above me has three cracks in it running out from the north wall.

It also has none.

Both of those were true at the same time and I could see both, one over the other, the crack and the unbroken stone in the same place, and the crack being the fainter of the two.

---

The eight bronze frames round the wall are seized. Two of them are lying on the floor in front of their own mountings and I dragged a section of one across a ramp mouth with my own hands four hours ago.

They are also standing. All eight.

And they are turning.

That is the part I was not ready for. Somewhere in the other version of that room those frames have been turning for sixty years and nobody has ever seen it, and for about four seconds I watched eight bronze assemblies going round inside the wreckage of themselves.

---

The floor has ash on it in a thin layer from the ramp and boot marks through the ash.

It also does not.

And the light in the chamber went from orange to white and stayed somewhere between the two, which is a colour I have no name for and am not going to attempt.

---

And there were three more people in that room.

Standing where they were standing, twenty metres from me, round a disc that was in the same place as mine.

---

Krüger first, because he is a head taller than anybody.

The cuirass has lost the shoulder section and there is a second tear across the front of it that was not there when I last saw him under a white sky eleven days ago on a fortress floor. The arm is dark to the wrist again.

Theo beside him, with his right wrist strapped into a splint made out of something that was not made to be a splint, and both eyes going round that chamber and taking every part of it in, which is the single most Theo Marchand thing I have ever seen.

And Mara on the floor.

---

Sitting, not lying. Back against the base of a bronze frame that was standing in one version and down in the other, with the leg out straight in front of her and both hands flat on the stone either side of her hips.

Her hand was still out toward their disc.

She had been the one to touch it.

---

She got a look at me across twenty metres and two cities and said something I could not hear.

Then the Tower said the only thing it had left to say.

> **[Convergence complete.]**

>

> **[Floor Two cleared.]**

>

> **[All surviving party members: 6/6.]**

---

Then the room let go.

Not the light. The room. The stone under my boots stopped being stone and the vault stopped being a vault and the whole of both of them came apart into the white, and the last thing I saw of either city was eight bronze frames turning in the middle of their own wreckage.

---

There is a hall on the other side of it.

Flat floor, low ceiling, grey stone, light out of fittings at shoulder height. It is the same shape as the Floor One return and it is not the same room.

There were nine people in it when we arrived and six of them were us.

---

I got about four steps and then had to stop, because ninety-seven had become sixty-one and sixty-one had not become anything else.

> **[Health: 61/510 → 510/510.]**

>

> **[Mana: 110/280 → 280/280.]**

The number went back and I did not. I stood with one hand on the wall for about eleven seconds while a body that had been at sixty-one caught up with a panel that said five hundred and ten.

Hana was three metres away doing exactly the same thing and neither of us said anything about it.

---

Then she went past me without stopping and went to Mara.

Krüger and Theo had got her up between them and she was standing on one leg with an arm across each of their shoulders, and Hana got down on the floor in front of her and did not ask anybody’s permission about anything.

She cut the trouser leg off above the knee.

"Sit her down. Now, not in a minute."

---

They sat her down.

It took Hana about four seconds to look at it and I watched her face while she did, because I have learned to read that face over two days and I could not read it at all.

Then she said, "Nine hours."

"Nine hours," Mara said.

"You have had an open wound on a moving leg for nine hours and it has closed twice and opened twice and you have walked four hundred metres of plaza on it." Hana had a hand round the calf. "It is not infected, the foot is warm, and I am going to be extremely rude to you about this in about an hour when I am less pleased."

"That is fair."

"It is not fair. It is what is happening."

---

Sokolov sat down on the floor against the wall and did not get up again for a long time.

Theo was talking. He had been talking since we arrived and I do not think anybody had heard a word of it, and it was all about the frames turning.

"They were *going round*. Both of them. I was looking at the same machine seized and running and nobody has ever put that in a post, because you only get to see it for four seconds and then the floor takes you."

"Write it," Krüger said.

"I am going to write it."

"Write it tonight, before you sleep, because tomorrow you will have decided it was five seconds."

---

Then Krüger came and stood in front of me.

"How long was your window."

"Five minutes."

"Ours as well." He put his hand up and rubbed his own eyes with the heel of it, which I have not seen him do. "We came into that chamber at four minutes and ten."

"Say the rest."

---

"We were late because of the plaza. It took her fifty minutes to cross four hundred metres and there is no version of that where it takes less."

"And the two on the steps."

"One came off. One did not." He looked at me properly. "Ours came off at about sixty metres and Viteri put it on the ground from a doorway in the ring while Marchand and I were still deciding, and if anybody tells that story badly I will correct them."

"I did not know that was how they worked until this evening."

"Neither did we."

---

"When we got down the ramp," he said, "the disc was already showing. There was a line on our pillar and it was already lit and it had been lit for a while, and none of us knew what that meant."

"It meant I had opened mine."

"I worked that out about a second later. Marchand worked it out first." He shrugged with one shoulder, which is the most expressive thing that man has ever done. "We did not have four minutes and ten to talk about it. She put her hand on it from the floor because she could not stand up."

---

"Why did you open it," he said.

"Because I had four minutes and thirty seconds of defence and no idea where you were."

"That is a guess."

"That is a guess. Arai made me look at it properly before I made it, and Sokolov gave me a number instead of an opinion, and I had a wall that had just gone." I put my back against the wall of that hall, which I was going to do anyway. "If I had waited another five minutes I would have opened it with no wall and no anchors and I would have been on the floor."

---

Krüger took about three seconds with that.

"If you had waited five more minutes we would have arrived to a dark disc and a man too tired to open it," he said. "So it was the right decision."

"It was a guess that came out."

"Those are the same thing afterward and they are not the same thing at the time, and I am telling you which one it was because you were the one who had to make it." He turned away. "And I am not going to say this twice, so hear it now. We cleared that because you opened it early and because she got across a plaza on that leg. Both. Not one."

---

Mara said, from the floor, "Somebody tell me what happened at your end."

"You are being treated," Hana said.

"I am being treated and I am also conscious and I have been in a corridor for nine hours with no idea what any of you were doing. Somebody tell me."

---

So Sokolov told her, which surprised everybody including him.

He did it in about ninety seconds and he did it in the order Krüger taught us, threat and location and route and injuries and objective, and he did not put one unnecessary word in it.

When he got to the wall coming down he said, "Then he opened it," and stopped.

"How many were on you when he did," Mara said.

"One in the room. One on the ramp that did not come down."

"And afterward."

"Afterward he stood in front of a light for five minutes and did not follow anything past the disc, which is the only reason the light was still on when you got there."

---

"Right," she said, and put her head back against the wall.

"Sixty-one out of five hundred and ten," Hana said, to nobody, without looking up from the leg.

"That is not for the room," I said.

"It is exactly for the room."

---

Nobody made a speech.

Theo wrote for eleven minutes on the back of his own route sheet, sitting on the floor with the splinted wrist held against his chest and the pencil in the wrong hand.

Krüger went and spoke to somebody at a desk at the far end of that hall about a medical station and came back and said it was two levels up and they would take Mara on a chair.

Sokolov did not move at all.

And Hana worked on that leg for twenty minutes and then sat back on her heels and said, "You keep it," to a woman who had not asked out loud.

---

I opened the panel while they were getting the chair.

> **[TOWER]**

>

> **[Floor One — Cleared.]**

>

> **[Placement — 1st / 100.]**

>

> **[Floor Two — Cleared.]**

>

> **[Floor Three — Available.]**

---

There it is.

Eleven days ago a man at an operations desk with four folders open told me there is no signal into the Tower and there never has been. Nothing goes in and nothing comes out. We know when they went in and we will know when they come out and there is no third thing.

That was the eighth day of eight.

It is now the nineteenth.

---

And the line under my Floor Two says Floor Three is available, which means the door my father walked through eleven days ago is open to me as of this evening.

I could press it.

---

I looked at Anton Sokolov, who has not stood up in a quarter of an hour, and at Theo Marchand writing with his wrong hand, and at a woman on a stone floor who has just been told she keeps her leg.

And at Hana Arai, who has one closing left in that pack and has been carrying it since a drainage passage under a canal because somebody might need it more than I did.

---

Floor Two is one to two days and it nearly finished six of us, and it is the floor that humanity solved.

Floor Three is the one nobody has come back from with a clear, and my father has been in it for eleven days on an eight-day plan, with twelve people and three hundred kilos of equipment and two conflicting reports.

I am Level Fourteen. I have three points I still have not spent.

---

I did not press it.

Not because I have decided anything. Because there are five people in this hall who got me to the line, and two of them cannot walk properly, and the chair has not arrived yet.

I closed the panel and went to help carry her.

---

But it is there now.

For eleven days the answer to *can I go after him* has been no, and it has been no in a way that settled the question before I had to ask it.

It is not no any more.