Chapter 43 - 42 — The Weight of a Name III (Bonus)
Then a second piece arrived, and this one came in sharper, because I had actually paid attention to it at the time.
Roughly two years after Eastwick, the name came back.
Not as a Gate story. As a criminal investigation.
One of the five survivors was under investigation, and the reporting connected that Player to the deaths of several members of the Eastwick raid.
Inside the Gate.
That is why I remembered the second story and not the first. Fifteen people dying to monsters is a tragedy and a headline.
Fifteen people dying and then somebody working out two years later that not all of them died to monsters is a different kind of story entirely, and it ran everywhere.
The public had assumed the Gate did it.
Two years later, that assumption stopped being clean.
I cannot remember the name. I cannot remember how many they were accused of. I cannot remember whether the case ever proved anything or whether it only reopened the file and left it hanging.
I know somebody who walked out of that Gate helped fill it.
---
I looked down at the gauntlets on my hands.
Level 7. Two registered clears, one Orange and one Yellow, and a Bureau that told me to my face that surviving an Orange Gate Failure does not hand me Orange access.
I cannot put my name on that list. Meridian will not take a walk-in with two clears, and the Bureau will not approve one.
Ten temporary positions, guild screening, PSB approval.
I turned my head.
My father was still standing near the desk with his coat buttoned, waiting for a chief of police to run out of apology.
I did not say anything in that building.
---
The press were three deep at the front doors, which is what happens when Christopher Nolan walks into a police station where his son is being held.
Clan security put a corridor through it. Nobody answered anything. Somebody shouted a question about whether charges had been filed and somebody else shouted my name twice, and then the car door shut and all of it stopped existing.
That is a strange thing about those cars. The noise does not fade. It ends.
We sat in it for a moment.
My father’s secretary was in the seat opposite with her tablet already up. The driver pulled us out into traffic.
Then my father looked at me properly for the first time since I came out of that corridor.
His eyes went over my face. Then down to my wrists, where the straps were, and stayed there for a second. Then to the gauntlets themselves.
He did not touch me. We do not do that.
He did not ask whether I had been frightened, which I appreciated, because the honest answer would have been complicated.
"Did anyone in that building put hands on you?"
"No."
"At the scene. When they took the gauntlets."
"They were careful."
"Did anybody threaten you."
"Nine rifles were pointed at me. Nobody threatened me." I turned my hand over. "There’s a difference. The commander told me to keep my hands visible and I kept them visible, and after that it was paperwork."
"And the room."
"Cold. Boring. The light flickers."
His hand had been resting closed against his knee for the whole exchange.
It opened.
That was all. It came open and lay flat on his thigh, and about a second later his shoulders came back against the seat by perhaps two centimetres, and I do not think he was aware of either.
Then his face went back to exactly what it had been.
"Good," he said, and turned toward the window as though we had finished discussing a scheduling matter.
I looked past him.
His secretary was very carefully reading her tablet. She had been reading the same part of it since we got in the car.
The corner of her mouth had gone up.
She caught me seeing it, and her face was flat again inside half a second, and she scrolled down a page she had not read.
I looked from her to my father.
He was watching the traffic. If he had noticed any of it, he was not going to give either of us the satisfaction.
"Thank you for coming."
"It was the efficient thing to do." He did not turn from the window. "The department was going to reach the correct outcome eventually. I removed several hours from the process."
"How long did it take you to reach here? Forty minutes?"
"Nineteen actually. The traffic was light."
---
The car turned north.
I watched the city go past and thought about a wide shot of a fence in the rain, and twenty going in, and five coming out.
And a survivor under investigation two years later.
I have already made a decision about how I do this. I made it sitting in front of a Bureau terminal reading the Tower requirements, and it has not changed.
I do not use the name to skip the work.
I could have had my surname put in front of a Floor One application a month ago. I did not, because walking into the Tower at Level Five to prove a point is how you become a photograph in somebody else’s briefing.
But there is a difference between skipping the work and being allowed to compete for it.
Meridian is going to screen ten outsiders. There will be a hundred applications for those positions, and probably four hundred, and every one of them from a Player with a longer record than mine.
Meridian will never open my file at all, because nobody opens the file of a Level 7 with two clears.
I do not need them to give me a place.
I need them to look.
"I need to ask you for something."
"You have had a long day. Ask me tomorrow."
"It has to be today."
He turned from the window.
"You were detained four hours ago."
"Yes."
"Before that you fought four Players in a street."
"Yes."
"And ten days before that you took a Yellow Gate on your own with a permit you should not have been given."
He was looking at me properly now. "Whatever this is, my answer is going to be affected by the order in which those things happened."
"I want you to get me considered for a raid."
Something went out of his face. Not anger. The other thing, the one where he stops managing the conversation and starts actually listening, and it is considerably worse.
"Considered."
"I am not asking you to put me in one. I am asking you to make a guild open my file and screen me properly, and if I pass their screening, to sponsor the Bureau application."
I kept my voice level. "That is all. If they look at me and say no, that is the end of it."
His secretary had stopped pretending to read.
"Which raid?"
"You already know you’re not going to like the answer."
"Which raid, Jace?"
I looked at my father.
"Meridian Guild. The Eastwick Orange Gate."