He said that flatly and moved straight past it, and I have thought about that sentence since.
"Ashford took a team in six weeks ago," he said. "Nineteen went. Fourteen came out and two of those did not come out standing."
"They cleared it?"
"They withdrew. Whatever the condition is on that floor, they reached a point where they could stop, and they took it." He shifted his weight. "The Halloran clan did not have that option four months before. Twenty-two in, eleven out."
"And nobody has finished it."
"Nobody has finished it. There are two reports circulating and neither of them agrees with the other about what the floor is actually asking for."
He looked at the medical crates going past.
"Which is the real problem. A Gate is a survey and a classification and a briefing. A new Tower floor is twelve people finding out the rules while the rules are killing them."
---
"That is why the first team matters."
"That is exactly why the first team matters." Something came into his voice that was almost warmth and went again. "Not the credit.
Ashford came back with fourteen people and about nine pages, and those nine pages are the reason I am taking twelve instead of nineteen."
"You are using their information."
"I am using their dead." He said it without any weight on it. "And whatever we bring back, somebody else will use ours. That is how the Tower has moved every single time it has moved."
Behind him the catches went over on another case. Four at a time.
---
Then he stopped and actually looked at me.
"You have been standing in that doorway for six minutes and you have not asked me for anything."
"I have not."
"Which is new." His head tilted about two degrees. "What have you been doing since Eastwick?"
"Sleeping."
"Before that."
I could have kept it. I do not entirely know why I did not.
"I reached Level Ten."
---
He stopped moving.
It was not a big reaction. His hands came apart behind his back and one of them came round to his side, and his eyes went off me for about a second and a half and came back.
The two people behind him had already worked out that they should be somewhere else and had gone.
"When."
"Inside Eastwick. During the boss."
"So the Tower has opened."
"This morning."
---
He did not tell me not to.
That is the thing I keep coming back to, and I do not think I properly expected it. I had a whole argument ready and I did not need one line of it.
"Have you attempted it?"
"No."
"Are you going to?"
"Yes."
He nodded once, and it was not approval and it was not permission. It was a man receiving a piece of information about a situation he no longer controls.
"Then listen to me, because I am only going to say this once."
---
"It is called a Tutorial."
"I know what it is called."
"You do not know what that word does to people." He came a step closer and his voice did not rise at all. "Every year the Bureau publishes a number of Players who unlock the Tower.
And every year they publish a smaller number who clear the Tutorial. And the gap between those two numbers is not people who changed their minds."
"How big is the gap?"
"Big enough that Myrmidon runs a preparation programme for it and I have signed off on the budget for eleven years."
He let that sit.
"The Tutorial is not an introduction, Jace. It is not a lesson and it is not a courtesy. It exists to find out whether the System was correct about you, and it is entirely willing to conclude that it was not."
"I understand."
"You do not, and you will not until you are standing in it." He straightened up. "But you will remember that I said it, which is the only thing I can actually achieve here."
---
There was one more thing and he nearly did not say it.
"Nine days," he said. "If you go in and you come out before I leave, come and find me."
"And if I do not come out before you leave?"
"Then we will both have been somewhere difficult and we can compare notes afterward."
He said it evenly and then he turned round and went back into his hall, and a man with a tablet went to him before he had taken four steps.
---
I stood there a moment longer.
Twelve of the strongest Players in this region, nine days of preparation, three hundred kilos of equipment, two spare sets of everything, and a folder full of somebody else’s casualties.
That is what it costs to attempt Floor Three.
I am going to need a chair.
---
The house had gone quiet by the time I got back upstairs.
Late afternoon light coming in low across the rug. The east hall four floors away and inaudible. Somebody moving a trolley somewhere, once, and then nothing.
I sat on the end of the bed again in the same place, in clean clothes, with my feet on the floor.
> **[TOWER]**
>
> **[Minimum Level: 10.]**
>
> **[Requirement fulfilled.]**
>
> **[Tutorial: Not Attempted.]**
>
> **[Highest Floor Cleared: —]**
>
> **[Attempt Tower]**
> **[Attempt Tower.]**
> **[First-time challenger detected.]**
>
> **[The Tower Tutorial must be completed before Floor One can be accessed.]**
>
> **[Would you like to attempt the Tutorial?]**
>
> **[YES] [NO]**
---
I did not answer it straight away.
My hand had come up and stopped about ten centimetres short of it, and I let it stay there, and I looked at the two words rather than at the room.
Eastwick was a hole in a freight district with a survey and a classification and a colour. People had been inside it twice before me.
The Bureau knew how long it had. There were four heavy anti-monster units in an arc outside it and six ambulances with their doors already open.
It killed forty people and it was still something we understood.
Four floors below me there are twelve of the best Players in this region packing spares because nobody has ever come out of the third floor of that building and written down what is in it.
And I am going to knock on the front door of the same building this evening, with nothing, from a bedroom, because a tab appeared in my interface.
I have died six times. I know exactly what it costs and exactly what it feels like and exactly how little the knowing helps.
None of that made my hand move any faster.
---
> **[YES.]**
---
The window did not close.
It got brighter, and it kept getting brighter, and then the light stopped being inside the frame.
It came out past the edges and went across the rug and up the wall behind it, flat and white and without any warmth in it at all, and the corners of the room went first.
My ears changed. The pressure came down the way it does in a lift, and everything I could hear went distant and then went out.
The warm air went. The whole twenty-one degrees of that room lifted off my skin in about a second and what replaced it was nothing. Not cold. Nothing at all, on every part of me at once.
The bed stopped being under me.
I did not fall. There was simply no longer anything holding my weight and no longer any weight to hold, and my feet lost the rug and did not find anything else.
The white came up over the last of it.
> **[Welcome, Challenger.]**
>
> **[Tower Tutorial commencing.]**
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