Chapter 66: Shadow Scout
Chapter 66: Shadow Scout
I had four days to think about this and I still nearly got it wrong.
The honest answer would have been the end of me. EX-grade Dimensional Summoner is not a sentence you say to a registration clerk at a fortified settlement; it’s a sentence that ends with a room, and people asking questions, and eventually somebody working out that the man in front of them can produce a dragon-blooded commander out of thin air on a three-day cycle.
Saying nothing was worse. A man who won’t state his class at a checkpoint is a man with something to hide, and the entire structure in front of me existed to sort exactly that.
So I gave them the truth, minus everything.
"Adrian Vale," I said again. "Shadow Scout. C-grade."
The clerk wrote it without a flicker. "Reason for entry?"
"Work. I’ve been hunting solo out past the reservoir and I’m looking for contracts, supplies, and somewhere with walls."
"Weapon."
"Rifle, one hundred and eleven rounds, two knives."
"Class skills. Combat, utility, or concealment?"
"Concealment. Movement suppression."
That got me a first proper look — half a second, professional rather than suspicious.
"Then you’ll want the yard," she said, and stamped something. "Provisional grades get tested. If you pass you get the badge and full entry. If you fail you get a grey and the outer district, which is not a punishment, it’s just where the cheap beds are." She handed me a card. "Through the gap, second building, ask for Serris."
Shadow Scout had been four days in the making and it was built to fit the shape I already had.
It explained a man who hunts alone, because scouts do. It explained the rifle, because scouts carry one and don’t want to use it. It explained why I’d survived out there at Level 14 without a crew. And it explained the one thing I couldn’t hide, which was the Veil — because I was going to have to use it in front of them, and it had to belong to something.
C-grade, because B invites attention and D gets you the outer district. C is the grade nobody looks twice at.
The yard was sixty metres by forty and it had been built by somebody who enjoyed this.
Loose grey gravel over about a third of it. Two low walls, a stack of pipe, a burnt-out van, three sections of chain-link. Trip lines at ankle height in six places that I could see, each one wired to a hanging cluster of tin. Two floodlights on stands throwing hard light across the middle, which meant the shadows at the edges were blacker than they should have been. At the far end, a painted white square about a metre across.
Serris was a compact grey-haired man with a red badge who explained it in about nine sentences.
"Start behind that line. Reach the square. Three spotters — two on the platforms, one roving, and the roving one doesn’t tell you where he’s going. If they see you they call it and you stop where you are. Two calls, you fail." He looked at me. "You can take as long as you like. Most people who fail, fail from hurrying."
"Do the lines matter?"
"The lines are yours. Trip one and it makes a noise and everyone looks at where the noise was, and if that’s where you are, that’s a call."
I stood behind the line for eleven minutes before I moved, and I could feel the spotters getting bored, and I did not care.
Where am I standing when they look at me.
That was the whole exam, and Liora had already taught it to me in a bramble patch. Not how do I cross sixty metres. Where am I when the roving spotter comes round the van. Where am I when the man on the left platform finishes his sweep and comes back. What do I do when the Veil isn’t enough — because it was going to not be enough, at least twice, and I had better already know where the pipe stack was.
Then I turned it on and started walking.
The gravel was the first problem and it was the one I’d expected. The Veil suppresses what I emit; it does not stop stone grinding on stone. I went across it at the speed of a minute hand, outside edge of the foot down first, rolling in, and twice Feline Grace took my weight off a flake that would have shifted before I’d consciously registered it was loose. Nine metres in four minutes.
The roving spotter came round the van at the six-minute mark and I was behind the second wall, sitting still, and he looked directly at the wall for a moment and moved on.
The floodlight belt was the part I’d planned longest. Fourteen metres of open, lit, gravel-free concrete, with the left platform having a clean view of all of it.
I didn’t cross it in the light. I crossed it under the van.
That took nine minutes on my back with my rifle against my chest and gravel in my collar, and it was the least dignified pass anybody has ever made of that yard, and when I came out the other side I was two metres inside the shadow line with the whole platform sweep behind me.
Trip lines at eleven, fourteen, and fifteen metres. I found all three by lying still and looking along the ground into the light, which is the only way you see a wire, and I went over the first and under the second and round the third.
At forty metres the roving spotter came back early.
He wasn’t following a pattern; he’d just decided. And I was in the middle of the chain-link section with nothing between us but eight metres of air and a stack of pipe I’d noted from behind the start line and had been quietly keeping to my left for the whole crossing.
I went behind the pipe. Slowly, one shoulder at a time.
He stood there for about forty seconds looking straight into the section I was in, and I was not more than four metres from him, and every animal part of me wanted to run.
Move fast and you’re a man in a yard. Stay still and you’re pipe.
He went.
I reached the white square eight minutes later, stood in the middle of it, and turned the Veil off.
The reaction from the left platform was extremely satisfying and I have replayed it many times since.
Serris came down and looked at me for a while with his arms folded.
"Thirty-one minutes," he said.
"Was that slow?"
"That was the slowest pass I’ve had this year." He handed me a badge — a flat blue-grey disc on a clip, with a C stamped into it. "It was also clean. Three calls between three spotters and none of them were about you."
He wrote something on his board.
"Word of advice, Shadow Scout. There’s a hundred people in this city who’d have crossed that yard in eight minutes and been seen twice. Don’t let anyone here talk you out of doing it in thirty-one."
I put the badge on my shoulder where everyone could see it.
Nobody stopped me at the inner gate. The guard glanced at the C, glanced at my face, and waved me through, and that was the entire cost of the largest lie I have ever told.
I came out of the gate tunnel into Greyhaven proper and had to stand still for a moment.
It was a city. Not a settlement with walls — a functioning city, laid out along the valley floor and up both sides of it, with a main street wide enough for two carts abreast and lit at intervals with actual working lamps. There was a market four hundred metres long. There was a building with a red cross painted on it and a queue outside that was moving. There were shops with signs — permanent ones, painted, by somebody who’d expected to still be there in a year.
There was noise. Thousands of people, all of them going somewhere, at eight o’clock in the evening, outdoors, without weapons in their hands.
I stood in the gate tunnel with a rifle on my back and a lie on my shoulder and watched a woman walk past carrying bread.