Chapter 162 - 160 — The Pattern I

*POV: Jace*

Mara was the last one through the door.

Not because she was late.

Because the brace around her lower leg made the final step into the reading room slower than the others, and she refused the hand Krüger put out before he had even finished offering it.

"I can sit down by myself."

"I was moving the chair."

"You were not."

Krüger moved the chair anyway.

Mara looked at him, decided that continuing the argument would take longer than sitting, and lowered herself into it with both hands on the armrests. She kept the injured leg slightly forward instead of bending it underneath the table.

Anton had already taken the seat opposite her.

His hand was still wrapped, although the dressing was lighter than the one he had worn after Floor Two, and he had been using the other hand to move through the files I sent them before they arrived.

Hana noticed me looking at both injuries.

"You’re doing it again."

I looked at her. "Doing what?"

"Checking whether they’re functional before you’ve even started talking."

Anton glanced down at his hand.

"That seems reasonable."

"It is reasonable. That doesn’t mean I have to like the way he does it."

"I’m sitting right here."

"I know."

Theo had ignored all of us.

He was at the far end of the table with two terminals open and enough of the Ashford report spread across both screens that I doubted he had noticed Mara enter at all.

Krüger shut the door behind her.

The sounds from operations dropped to a murmur.

Not silence. Somebody was moving equipment cases through the corridor outside, and every few minutes a printer started somewhere beyond the wall, but the room was small enough that the six of us filled most of it.

So did the material.

Halloran’s route diagrams covered the middle of the table. Ashford’s timestamps sat beside them. I had three still frames of the mechanisms open on the wall display, each taken from a different ring and each showing the same concentric channels around the same dark centre.

Krüger looked at the display first.

Then at me.

"What did you find?"

Not are we going in.

Not when.

That helped.

I turned the nearest terminal toward him.

"Three things we know, and one thing I think."

Mara settled farther back in the chair.

"Good start."

I pointed to the first route diagram.

"Floor Three isn’t one structure. It’s made of independently moving sections. Halloran pushed inward before they understood the rotation and lost the route they used to enter."

Anton nodded once. He had read that much already.

"Ashford found the circular junctions between those sections and realized some of them reconnect outward when the rings return to the right position."

"Alignment Chambers," Hana said.

"That’s their name for them. Not the Tower’s."

Krüger looked at me.

"Important distinction."

"I know."

"Do you?"

"I said their name for them."

Something moved at the corner of Mara’s mouth.

I ignored it.

I brought up the first Lockstone image.

"Ashford also proved this can temporarily arrest movement around one section."

The second image appeared beside it.

Then the third.

"The problem is there are multiple copies on different rings, always at boundaries between moving sections. Halloran walked past at least one. Ashford used one to preserve a retreat route, so their report treats that as the important function."

"And you don’t," Krüger said.

"I don’t think retreat is what they were made for."

Nobody answered immediately.

Good.

If five people had agreed with me before asking a question, I would have assumed I had explained it badly.

Krüger leaned toward the images.

"What do you have that proves that?"

"Nothing."

He looked at me.

"I have repeated placement," I said. "Enough to make it suspicious. Not enough to make it a rule."

His eyes stayed on me for another second before going back to the screen.

"Better."

Hana folded her arms.

"Better than what?"

"He was about to tell us a theory as though the mountain had personally confirmed it."

"I was not."

Krüger did not look away from the display.

"You were close."

I let that go.

Theo had still not spoken.

I looked over.

He was moving through the Ashford timestamps now, one hand on each terminal, dragging entries into a separate document and renumbering them.

"What are you doing?"

"Trying to make the times stop lying."

Anton turned toward him.

"That sounds promising."

"They aren’t lying. They’re just useless."

Theo finally looked up.

"Halloran started their records from entry. Ashford started theirs from first confirmed rotation because apparently consistency was considered optional six weeks ago."

"That seems unfair to people who were being rotated inside a mountain," Hana said.

"It is still annoying."

Then his eyes went back to the screens and the rest of us ceased to exist again.

Krüger pulled one of the route maps closer.

"Let’s stay with the mechanisms."

Anton leaned over the table.

"If they hold one section while the others continue moving, then using one doesn’t make the mountain simpler."

I looked at him.

"Explain."

He tapped the Ashford still.

"People are thinking of this like a brake. Stop this ring, keep this route."

His wrapped hand came up instinctively, stopped halfway, and he switched to the other one.

"But every route depends on where two sections are relative to each other. Hold one in place and anything connected to it changes relative to everything that keeps moving."

Mara frowned at the map.

"So you save one bridge and lose another."

"Possibly."

"Possibly?"

Anton looked at her.

"I have footage of one mechanism being used once. If you want certainty, find me the person who built the mountain."

Mara accepted that.

I looked at the images again.

He was right.

I had been thinking of the Lockstone as a way to preserve a route because that was what Ashford had done with it, then extending from there toward the idea that several of them might control the mountain.

Anton had gone one step earlier.

Using one was not just holding something still.

It changed everything around it.

Which meant a Lockstone could be useful and still make the floor worse if you used it at the wrong time.

"Fine," I said. "Then we add that to unknown."

Krüger nodded.

"Verified: one mechanism can arrest part of a rotation temporarily."

"Likely," Anton said, "that doing so changes subsequent alignments."

"Unknown whether that helps us."

"And unknown what happens if two are active," Mara added.

Krüger marked all three on the shared document.

Hana had not looked at the mechanisms for almost a minute.

She was looking at Mara’s leg.

Then Anton’s hand.

Then the route map.

"What happens to the healer?"

Everyone turned toward her.

She tapped the outer Lockstone.

"If somebody has to remain here to hold this while the rest move inward, and one of you gets injured on the next ring, what exactly am I supposed to do?"

Nobody answered.

She looked at me.

"Your extraction exercise was one injured person on a route you could cross whenever you wanted."

"Yes."

"This is not that."

"I’m aware."

"Are you?"

I almost told her everybody had been asking me that lately and decided it would not improve anything.

Hana continued.

"If I stay behind, the forward group loses its healer. If I go forward, the people holding this position have no healer. If the route between the two disappears, neither group can change that afterward because somebody made a bad decision before we separated."

Mara shifted her injured leg another few centimetres.

"You’re assuming whoever stays behind needs the healer more."

"No. I’m saying somebody will."

"That isn’t the same thing."

Hana looked at her.

Mara pointed at the Lockstone.

"We keep calling it the rear position like that makes it safer."

I followed her finger.

"Because it’s closer to the exit."

"Until the mountain moves."

Anton nodded slowly.

Mara continued.

"If someone has to stand beside that mechanism while the rest of us leave, they can’t chase anything. They can’t abandon it because something ugly appears thirty metres away. They’re fixed."

"Which means?" I asked.

"Which means you don’t put whoever you think is least useful at the back."

Her voice remained even.

"You put someone there who can hold the position without you."

That stayed in the room.

I had not realized I was doing it until she said it.

Somewhere in my head, I had already divided Floor Three into forward and rear, dangerous and less dangerous, as though distance from the Heart measured risk.

That was convenient.

It was also based on nothing.

An isolated Lockstone group might have the harder fight precisely because they could not move.

Hana looked at Mara for a while.

Then gave one nod.

"Fine."

Mara raised an eyebrow.

"That sounded painful."

"It was."

Krüger put his finger on the map before either of them could continue.

"So now we have another problem. Every mechanism we use may require somebody capable of operating independently."

"Several people," I said.

He looked at me.

"I was hoping you would say that."

"I’m learning."

"Slowly."

That one I deserved.

I took the stylus and drew a line from the outer Lockstone toward the next known position.

"If the first one preserves access to the second, somebody remains here. If the second then needs to stay active for a route farther in, somebody remains there too."

Anton leaned closer.

"And eventually your six-person party becomes three parties of two."

"Assuming three mechanisms."

"Which we do not know."

"I said assuming."

Krüger pointed at the word unknown on the shared document.

I wrote the number beside it.

The exercise from yesterday came back to me then, not because I wanted it to.

I had known the route.

I had known where the exit was.

I had been able to cross most of the training ground in a single acceleration when somebody needed me, and the biggest mistake I made was leaving one man alone for too long while I chased another opponent.

Floor Three did not promise me any of that.

If Hana was two rings away and Mara took another injury, I could not assume Talaria would put me beside her.

If Anton was holding one mechanism and something attacked from a direction nobody had mapped, I could not assume I could leave my own position to help him.

The problem with getting stronger was that it made some solutions feel universal.

They were not.

I could be the strongest person in the party and still be standing on the wrong ring.

Krüger watched me finish drawing the third line.

"Why now?"

I looked up.

"Because we have enough information to—"

"That is not what I asked."

The room had already been quiet.

It got quieter anyway.

Mara looked from him to me.

Theo kept working.

I put the stylus down.

"We have more information than Halloran did. We know the mountain rotates. We know how Ashford got out. We have multiple Lockstone positions and a reason to believe—"

"Jace."

Krüger did not raise his voice.

He did not need to.

"Why are you trying to solve Floor Three now?"

I stopped.

There were several answers available.

All of them were true.

That did not make all of them the answer.

"I unlocked it."

"So did the other nineteen people who cleared Floor Two."

"The information is there now."

"It will still be there next week."

"Maybe more."

"Probably more."

He left that between us.

Nobody else helped.

I could have kept going.

I could have told him about progression, about needing strength, about how every floor mattered if I was ever going to become strong enough to change the future I remembered.

All of that would have been true too.

None of it explained why waiting a week felt impossible.

"My father is inside."

Krüger nodded once.

There.

That was what he wanted.

Mara had stopped adjusting her leg.

Hana’s attention stayed on me.

I looked back at the route map rather than at any of them.

"I want Floor Three because it’s next. I need to understand the Tower, and I need to keep moving."

I paused.

"And I want to reach him."

Nobody said anything.

That helped more than sympathy would have.

Krüger rested both forearms on the table.

"Those are two different reasons."

"I know."

"Do you?"

There it was again.

I looked at him.

"Yes."

He held my gaze.

"Then which one is setting the timetable?"

I could have lied.

Not well.

Probably not well enough for him, anyway.

"Both."

Krüger sat back.

Mara looked down at her leg.

Hana exhaled slowly through her nose.

I went on before anybody could turn what I had said into something it was not.

"That’s my reason to be impatient. It doesn’t have to become yours."

Anton looked over.

"You’re not asking us to come?"

"I asked you here to look at the information."

"That wasn’t the question."

"No."

He waited.

I looked around the table.

Five people.

Floor Two had given me enough time with them that I knew exactly how easy it would be to turn this into an argument about trust or loyalty or whether we had already survived something together.

That would have been convenient too.

"I’m not asking anyone to decide until we know what the plan is."

Mara’s eyes narrowed slightly.

"And if there is no plan?"

"Then I don’t know yet."

She leaned back.

"You’d still go."

A week ago I would have answered before she finished asking.

Probably yes.

Definitely yes, if my father was inside.

I thought about the training court instead.

One injured man.

Known route.

Two opponents.

And how much of the exercise had depended on things I could control personally.

"I don’t know," I said.