**POV: Jace**
---
The room was too warm and nothing in it smelled of anything.
That is what I could not get past.
For two days I had been breathing wet stone and old blood and burnt hide, and now there was a bedroom at twenty-one degrees with clean air in it and nothing on the back of my tongue at all.
I sat down on the end of the bed and my whole body went down with the movement rather than after it.
Everything I had on was soft. A shirt that did not have a strap under it anywhere. Trousers with no plating and no buckles at the hip and nothing sitting on my collarbone.
My feet were bare on a rug.
I had slept eleven hours and then lain in a bath until the water went cold, and there was still black under three of my fingernails that would not come out.
Somewhere down the west side of the house a door closed. Somebody laughed at something outside, two floors down, and it carried up through the glass.
That is the whole of it.
No boots on stone. Nothing breathing that should not be breathing. Nobody shouting a direction.
---
Eastwick is finished, as far as I am concerned in it.
I gave the Bureau my statement yesterday afternoon in a room with a table and two officers and a recorder, and it took four hours, and I told them exactly what I saw and nothing that I could not have seen.
Søren Juel is in PSB custody. He has not said anything to anybody, according to the second officer, who told me that without being asked.
The investigation into the Rooks belongs to them now. Meridian has the materials and the appraisal has not happened yet and the money is weeks away, and none of it needs me.
So I opened my Status properly for the first time since the freight yard.
---
> **[STATUS]**
>
> **[Name: Jace Nolan]**
>
> **[Age: 18]**
>
> **[Level: 10]**
>
> **[EXP: 75/1,000]**
>
> **[Player Rank: SSS]**
>
> **[Strength: 27]**
>
> **[Endurance: 35]**
>
> **[Agility: 32]**
>
> **[Perception: 25]**
>
> **[Health: 350/350]**
>
> **[Mana: 240/240]**
>
> **[Unassigned Attribute Points: 15]**
Twenty-nine days ago I stood in a stadium with two hundred Health and a hundred and fifty Mana and no idea what any of it was for.
I looked at the numbers for a while and then stopped looking at them, because the numbers are not the interesting part.
---
> **[ABILITIES]**
>
> **[Ouroboros — EX]**
>
> **[Mimesis — SSS]**
>
> **[Aten — SSS]**
>
> **[Androphagos — A]**
>
> **[Talaria — A]**
>
> **[Lycaon — SS]**
>
> **[Snare — S]**
Seven.
Three of them are mine. Four of them belong to dead men, and I know the name and the face attached to every one, and I can tell you where each of them was standing when they put me on the floor.
A Player gets one Core Ability. Some awaken a second. Very few awaken a third, and three is where the record stops, and every one of them comes out of the same resonance.
I have seven out of five separate resonances and there is no rank on that table high enough to describe what that looks like from outside.
Nobody has seen the whole list. Renard saw Talaria and Lycaon in the same eleven minutes and has not had a chance to write it down yet.
I sat there with my hands on my knees and read it three times, and it was not pride.
I do not know what it was. It sat somewhere under my ribs and did not have a name.
---
Then I looked at the fifteen.
I have been carrying attribute points around inside a Gate for four weeks and refusing to touch them.
Allocation is permanent and it takes about four seconds, and there is never a good four seconds in a place where things are trying to reach you.
This is the first time since the Awakening Ceremony that I have been somewhere with nothing in it.
So I actually thought about it, and I thought about it in terms of the specific places I have been killed.
---
Talaria has hurt me every single time I have used it.
Not the acceleration. The stop.
All the arresting force goes through whatever foot I land on, and the Ability does not help with any of it, and my right ankle has been rolling out past where an ankle goes since the first time I tried it in a courtyard.
Cormac Keane did it four times in one fight and arrived silent, and I have been telling myself that was fifteen years of practice.
Some of it was. Some of it was that the man could take it.
A body that can absorb the landing is a body that can use the Ability, and mine currently cannot, and no amount of training fixes a joint that is being asked for more than it has.
Then the other thing.
I knew that Giant’s forearm was coming. I knew the exact arc and I called it out loud and I still went into a tree, because knowing where something is going does not shorten the distance my legs have to cover.
Androphagos has been telling me things I could not act on for a month.
And when I held Aten on that Dullahan’s wrist for nine seconds, the Mana was never the problem. My hands were. They cramped, and by the eleventh punch into that hip I was bracing one wrist under the other forearm to keep a fist closed.
---
> **[Allocate 15 points?]**
> **[Endurance: 35 → 40.]**
>
> **[Agility: 32 → 39.]**
>
> **[Strength: 27 → 30.]**
>
> **[Perception: unchanged.]**
> **[Confirm?]**
I left Perception where it was and I want the reason on record, because it looks like a mistake.
I have an Ability for that. It has failed me exactly once, in a chamber full of things that were not alive, and there is no number on this panel that would have changed a single second of that fight.
> **[Confirmed.]**
> **[Maximum Health: 350 → 400.]**
>
> **[Health: 350/350 → 400/400.]**
>
> **[Unassigned Attribute Points: 15 → 0.]**
Something went through my shoulders and down the backs of my legs, and it was not dramatic and it was not warm. It was the feeling of standing up straight after carrying something.
I flexed my right ankle twice.
I have no idea whether it is different. I will find out the next time I put a foot down and ask the Ability for nine metres.
---
Then the window changed shape while I was still looking at it.
> **[Level requirement fulfilled.]**
>
> **[New System Function unlocked.]**
>
> **[TOWER]**
I stopped moving.
There was a new line down the side of my interface, under the places I have looked every day for four weeks, and it had not been there this morning.
I sat forward on the end of the bed and opened it.
> **[TOWER]**
>
> **[Minimum Level: 10.]**
>
> **[Requirement fulfilled.]**
>
> **[Tutorial: Not Attempted.]**
>
> **[Highest Floor Cleared: —]**
>
> **[Attempt Tower]**
I read the whole thing twice and then a third time.
---
I sat in front of a Bureau terminal a month ago and pulled up the Tower requirements and read every line, and I closed the page without registering for anything.
Minimum level. Clearing record. Guild or clan sponsorship. Medical clearance.
I remember thinking that with my surname I could argue past two of those, and that arguing past them was exactly how a Level Five gets into a briefing photograph.
And I had it wrong.
That page was not the Tower. That page was the Bureau, and the Bureau regulates *expeditions*. Sponsored parties. Registered attempts. Recorded clears that go into the public record and get argued about by guilds.
The Tower itself does not care about any of it.
There is one requirement on this panel and it is a number, and once you reach the number, the System puts a tab in front of you and waits.
No application. No sponsor. No doctor. No Bureau.
Whether I climb it is not a decision anybody outside this room is entitled to make.
---
I did not press it.
Not out of nerves. Because the Tutorial comes first, and once the Tutorial has me, I do not know how long I am gone for, and I have been in this house for two days and I have not once been downstairs.
There has been noise underneath me since I woke up.
---
The east hall had been cleared out.
Somebody had taken the long table out of it entirely, which I have never seen happen, and put down runners along the whole floor, and there were cases open in two rows from the door to the far window.
Not the ordinary black cases. The heavy ones, the ones that lock with four points and have the clan mark stamped into the top rather than printed on it.
A man I did not know was going along the first row with a tablet, and every time he closed one he ran his thumb around the full seal and pressed all four catches and then wrote something down.
The sound of those catches going over is very specific. It went four at a time, all the way down the hall, for the whole time I stood there.
---
Past the cases they had trestles up with weapons on them.
A woman was working a section of shoulder plating with something in both hands, bending it slightly and letting it come back and bending it again.
She did that to the same piece eleven times before she put it down and picked up the next one.
There were two spare sets of everything.
That is the part I noticed. Not the quality. There were two of some things and three of others, laid out beside each other in matched pairs, and nobody carries spares for a Gate.
Down at the far end they were loading medical.
Crates going past me smelled of the inside of a hospital, that sharp clean nothing-smell, and one of the medics had a second case that he opened and checked and closed and then opened again.
Mana restoratives. A lot of them. More than the number of people in that hall could carry.
---
And the people.
I knew four of them by sight from six years of footage in my father’s study.
The woman with the grey coming in at the front of her hair was in the reconstruction diagram of the four hundredth clear.
The heavy one by the window has stood behind my father in three separate press photographs and has never once said anything in any of them.
Not clan staff. Not household. Myrmidon’s actual people, the ones who go into Red Gates, standing in an east hall at ten in the morning checking each other’s straps.
My father’s secretary went past me with a tablet in one hand and a folder in the other and did not stop.
She has never in her life carried a paper folder.
---
Nobody had to tell me.
Floor Three.
I stood at the door of that hall and worked it out from the spare plating and the folder, and then I stood there a bit longer for a reason I did not expect.
Because I know where this goes.
Floor One is a document. It has been walked and mapped and argued over for decades, and there are guides you can buy.
Floor Two held for a very long time and then broke, and it broke recently. Recently enough that the first verified clears are still being contested by people who wanted to be on them.
And every party that cleared Two got Three, and since then the best organisations on this continent have been putting teams into it.
Nobody has come out the other side of Floor Three. Not once. Not verified.
Some teams come back hurt. Some come back short. Some do not come back.
That is where the wall is right now, this year, in this house, with my father’s people checking spare shoulder plates in the east hall.
---
And in six years it is Floor Five.
I sat in an office at twenty-four with a preliminary Floor Five assessment on my desk in a sealed envelope and got two pages into it, and the entire world was arguing about a scouting team.
Three, four, five. Six years.
I looked at a hall full of people about to walk into the current wall and I could not say one word about any of it to anybody in the room.
---
"You are up."
My father had come out of the side corridor with two people still talking at his back, and he stopped when he saw me, and the two people stopped talking.
"You slept."
"Eleven hours."
"Good."
He looked me over once. Not at my face. At the way I was standing, and then at my hands.
"Floor Three," I said.
He did not ask me how I knew. He turned and looked down the hall at his own preparations for a second and then turned back.
"Nine days."
"Who is going?"
"Twelve. Myrmidon only." He put his hands behind his back. "Muir will be one of them, once the Bureau has finished with his statement."
"Twelve is small."
"Twelve is what I can extract if it goes wrong."
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