**POV: Jace**
---
> **[Attempt Floor One.]**
I did not press it.
Not for the reason I did not press the Tutorial.
That night I sat on the end of this bed for four minutes because I was about to walk into something nobody on this planet could describe to me, and there was no preparation available except deciding to go.
This is the opposite problem.
There is more information about Floor One than about anything else the Tower has ever offered anybody, and I would be an idiot to walk into it without reading a single page.
So I closed the panel and went and got the documents instead.
---
Two of them arrived, about forty minutes apart.
The first was the public one. The Bureau’s *Tower Floor One: Consolidated Guidance*, which anybody registered can pull from a terminal for nothing, and which every Player in this region has read.
Two hundred and eleven pages.
The second came up on a tray with my supper, because my father does not send things by hand unless he means them to be noticed. Thinner.
No cover, no letterhead, a printed header on every page saying **MYRMIDON INTERNAL — NOT FOR CIRCULATION**, and somebody’s handwriting in the margins that was not my father’s.
Sixty-eight pages.
I ate at the desk and read the public one first.
---
It is not a book. It is a document that has been added to for decades and has stopped pretending to be anything else.
The version number on the front says **Rev. 41**.
There are contributor lists at the back running to nine pages, and about a third of the names have a small mark beside them.
There is a key at the bottom of the first page explaining that the mark means the contribution was submitted posthumously, or reconstructed from a returning party.
The oldest observation in it is dated sixty-three years ago.
Sections on the ground itself and how to move across it. Sections on what lives there and how the successful parties handled it.
Sections on the clear. A long Chapter that is entirely other people’s accounts, arranged by year, some of them four pages and some of them two sentences.
And at the back, before the contributor list, an appendix I did not expect.
---
It is a table.
Recorded entries against recorded non-returns, by year, for this region only, going back as far as the Bureau kept it properly.
Last full year: one thousand nine hundred and forty registered attempts on Floor One. One hundred and forty-eight Players did not come out.
I did the division at the desk with my thumb on the page.
That is about one in thirteen.
---
I sat back and looked at that for a while, because it is not the number I was expecting and it is not the number anybody talks about.
Floor One is the thing people are casual about. It is the floor with published routes and paid guides and a market in secondhand equipment. It is the one that gets described as documented, which is a word that does a great deal of work.
Documented means sixty-three years of people writing down how the last group died.
It does not mean the floor changed.
One in thirteen. If Myrmidon put thirteen people into Floor One tomorrow with no preparation at all, on the average of that table, one of them would not come back, and it would not be remarkable enough for anybody outside that family to notice.
---
And then I did the other arithmetic, because it was sitting right there.
Ashford took nineteen into Floor Three six weeks ago and came out with fourteen. Halloran took twenty-two four months before and got eleven back.
That is roughly one in four and one in two.
So the frontier is between three and six times more likely to kill you than the floor everybody has been walking on for sixty years.
Which means Floor One is not safe. It means Floor One is *survivable*, and there is an enormous difference, and the entire difference is two hundred and eleven pages of other people’s corpses.
Four floors below me my father has twelve people and three hundred kilos of equipment and eight days, and he is going somewhere with two conflicting reports and no appendix at all.
I am going somewhere with an appendix.
That is the whole of the advantage, and I am not going to be casual about it.
---
I read the public guide once, properly, front to back, and it took most of the evening.
Then I read the Myrmidon annex, which is a different sort of document entirely. It assumes you have read the public one. It disagrees with the public one in eleven places and says why in about two lines each.
It also has a section the public guide does not have, on what to do when the route you planned is occupied by somebody else’s party, which tells you something about how busy that floor actually is.
Then I sat back and let it settle.
And that is when I noticed the thing that made me close both documents and stop reading.
---
There is a gap in it.
Not an error. Nothing in either of those documents is wrong, as far as I can tell, and that is exactly the problem, because I have read a later version of this.
Not this version. A version six years from now, in a life nobody else remembers, on a screen in an office, and I was not reading it because I intended to climb anything.
I was reading it because it had come across my desk attached to something else and I skim everything that comes across my desk.
I could not reproduce a page of it. I want to be honest about that.
What I can do is notice, in Rev. 41, the place where a thing I know about is simply not mentioned.
It is not hidden and it is not contradicted. It is absent, in the way a road is absent from a map drawn before anybody walked it.
---
I went back to that section three times.
The first time to check I had not misread it. The second time to check the annex, in case Myrmidon had it and the Bureau did not, which would have meant it was merely restricted rather than unknown.
Myrmidon does not have it either.
The third time I read every line around it, looking for somebody skirting the edge of it without understanding what they had.
There is one account from about nine years ago where a returning Player describes something in passing, in a single clause, as an oddity, and then never mentions it again.
Nobody followed it up. Why would they. He cleared, he came out, he wrote four paragraphs.
I know what that clause is a symptom of.
He did not.
---
I am not going to write down here what it is.
I have got into the habit of that this month and I am aware of it and I am keeping it, because the number of people I can safely say anything to is currently zero, and a habit is easier to keep than a decision.
What I will write down is the shape of it, because the shape is the part that changed how I am going to do this.
Humanity finds it eventually. Not soon.
Somewhere in the six years between this desk and that office, somebody on Floor One notices what the man nine years ago noticed and does not put it in a paragraph and forget it.
After that it stops being a secret and starts being a paragraph in Rev. 50-something.
It exists right now. Tonight. On that floor, in whatever condition it is in, with nobody looking for it.
And it is not a shortcut. That is the important part. It does not get me to the clear condition faster and it would not shave an hour off anybody’s route.
It is worth more than clearing the floor.
---
Which is where I had to stop and think about what I have actually got.
Because up to tonight, the six years in my head have been used for a fairly small set of things.
Knowing that a Green Gate in Eastwick was going to fail. Knowing who Cormac Keane was. Knowing that a raid of twenty would come out as five and that the Bureau would never work out why.
All of that is threat information. It tells me what is about to hurt somebody. It has kept me and a number of other people alive and it has been worth more than anything else I own.
But it is small.
It is one Gate, or one man, or one afternoon. And the world produces those at a rate that outstrips me.
There are Gates opening tonight that I have never heard of and never will, because in the version I remember they were cleared by somebody competent and never made the news.
The Tower was not like that.
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