Chapter 31: Re-Measuring [pt 2]
The room was smaller than the one downtown, and cheaper about it. The paint on the walls had gone the color of old teeth, and the whole place had the worn, second-string feel of a branch nobody important ever visited. But the machine was the same design as the big branch’s.
A waist-high pillar of dull metal stood on a round raised platform, and thick cables ran from its base into a bank of humming equipment along the wall, the kind of hum you stopped hearing after a minute and felt in your teeth after ten.
A bored operator sat at the console with a tablet propped against one knee, thumbing through something that had nothing to do with the job. A handful of people waited on a bench along the far wall for their own turns, half-watching, expecting nothing, the way you wait at a clinic for a number to be called.
"Hand on the reactor." The operator didn’t bother looking up. "Stand still. It forces mana into your system, your mana heart answers, we read how much you put out. Three minutes. You’ve done this before, apparently."
Theo stepped up onto the platform, the plate giving a little under his weight, and laid his palm flat on the cold metal.
For the first second, nothing.
Then the reactor woke up, and the room stopped being bored.
It started as a rising whine, low and climbing, the sound a kettle makes just before it screams, except it did not stop where a kettle would. It kept going up. The lights in the bank of equipment along the wall flickered from green to amber to a hard alarmed red, one after another, faster than the operator could track them, faster than he could pretend they were normal. He looked up from his tablet. He looked at the tablet again. The boredom fell off his face.
"That’s — hold on, that’s a fault, that’s got to be a fault —"
It was not a fault.
The pillar under Theo’s hand had begun to hum up through the bones of his wrist and into his arm, a deep even vibration with no top to it, and the numbers on the operator’s screen climbed and climbed and did not stop climbing. They went past the marks the man was used to seeing. They went past the marks he had ever seen. They kept going. The operator tapped the screen, then swiped it, then tapped it harder, the way a man argues with a number he does not want to be true.
Somewhere in the wall bank a breaker snapped with a flat industrial crack, and a second one snapped after it. A cable jerked against its clamp. The fluorescents overhead stuttered, dimmed, and the whole room’s light seemed to bend toward the platform, as if the machine were pulling the current out of the building to feed whatever it was trying and failing to measure. The air near the plate went hot and sharp, the smell of metal pushed past what it was built for. Under the smell, the plate itself had started to tick, the small sound metal makes when it is getting hot faster than it can spread it.
"Shut it down," the operator was saying, on his feet now, "shut it down, it’s past the ceiling, it’s reading past the ceiling —"
The people on the bench had stopped pretending not to watch. One of them stood, slow, the way you stand when your body decides before you do. Another already had a phone out and held up, red dot on, catching all of it.
"Past what ceiling?" someone asked.
"The scale!"
The operator shouted it, and his voice cracked on the word.
"S is the top of the scale. It’s reading past S. The needle’s got nowhere left to go, it can’t..."
The dread reached his face as he said it, and the last of it came out slower than he meant.
"...The reactor can’t measure him."
The word went around the little room like a dropped match in dry grass. Past S. Somebody in the doorway repeated it to somebody in the hall, and that somebody repeated it further, and Theo, still standing on the platform with his palm on a screaming machine and his Jupiter Lady sneakers planted on the plate, could only watch the uproar bloom outward from him in every direction.
He frowned slightly.
’What is going on? Did I break their machine?’
He looked at the pillar the way you look at something in a shop you are fairly sure you just broke.
He lifted his hand off the reactor.
The whine died all at once. The lights steadied. The red faded back to amber, then green, and the room dropped into a ringing silence with every single face in it turned toward the young man in the hoodie. Nobody on the bench sat back down.
The clerk from the front counter stood in the doorway now, glasses in his hand, the color gone out of his face. He was looking at Theo and already doing the arithmetic of it, and none of the numbers came out in his favor. His mouth opened and shut once, and no useful sound came out of it.
And there, in the sudden quiet, the farce fell out from under Theo and left the cold underneath.
Because he had come here to do one small, careful, invisible thing. Collect a card. Stay legal, stay low, keep his name and his money and his three sensitive wives out of anyone’s mouth, exactly as the bank had warned him.
Instead he had walked into a district office in a hoodie and lit himself up in front of a room full of witnesses and at least one phone camera, an unmeasurable awakening, a name now getting typed into somewhere it could not be untyped, a file with his face in it and a number no scale in the building could hold.
The operator was already reaching for a different phone, the one wired to the wall. His hand wasn’t quite steady on it.
"Get the branch director," he said into it, low and fast. "And flag the research division. Tell them we may be dealing with a potential higher than S rank."
Theo stood on the platform and didn’t move, and he kept looking around the room, wondering, a little late, whether he maybe shouldn’t have come down to the branch office to collect the card after all.