Chapter 56 — Same Six I
**POV: Jace**
---
My left arm was still trying to come up.
It had nothing to come up with and nothing to come up in front of, and it kept trying anyway, somewhere in the dark, in the same wrecked half-arc it had been making when the claw went through it.
> **[Mimesis activated.]**
>
> **[Killer identified: Declan O’Rourke.]**
>
> **[Three concealed Ability Cards generated.]**
>
> **[Choose one.]**
Red. Violet. Black.
I did not deliberate for even a fraction of a second.
Black is SS. Black is the one that stood up out of that spine-bowing and pushed Gideon Rook backward through wet soil with both heels ploughing.
I took it before the thought finished.
> **[Selection confirmed.]**
>
> **[Ability copied.]**
>
> **[Lycaon — SS acquired.]**
> **[Lycaon — SS]**
>
> **[Type: Active Transformation Ability.]**
>
> **[The user assumes the complete expression of the Wolf resonance. Mass, strength, speed, sensory acuity and physical recovery are all substantially increased.]**
>
> **[Mana is consumed continuously for the entire duration of the transformation.]**
>
> **[Lycaon confers no other Wolf-resonance Ability.]**
> **[Ability source recorded: Declan O’Rourke.]**
>
> **[Ability source exhausted.]**
> **[Ouroboros activated.]**
>
> **[Regression point established: Twelve hours before death.]**
>
> **[Now regressing.]**
---
There was rubber against my face.
That was the first thing, before my eyes worked and before I understood anything else. A filter seal pressed around my mouth and nose, damp inside from my own breath, and a taste at the back of my throat like sucking a coin.
I was standing up.
I have come back six times and every one of them has been a bed, or a corridor, or a road. Not this.
My boots were on wet stone and there was a green haze lying four centimetres deep on black water twenty metres to my left, and something was screaming in the dark up ahead.
I died at a quarter to midnight in a forest.
Twelve hours puts me here.
> **[Health: 330/330.]**
>
> **[Mana: 220/220.]**
---
My hands went over myself anyway.
Chest first, flat palm, dragging down over the plate where the claw had opened me. Then the left forearm, squeezing along the bone through the vambrace, hunting for the place it had come apart.
Whole.
I stood in the middle of a moving raid with my own hands on my own arm, breathing through a filter, and something in my chest let go so hard that my knees actually softened.
Then I looked up, because somebody was shouting my name.
"NOLAN. Left. *Left.*"
It was Renard.
---
There is a version of this where I spend twenty minutes standing there working out exactly where in the day I am and what has happened and what has not.
I did not have twenty minutes.
I had a wall-crawler coming over a ledge four metres above the healers, and I have watched that exact animal take that exact route twice now, and my body moved before the rest of me had caught up.
I took it off the wall on the way down.
> **[Ability Activated: Aten.]**
After that it stopped being complicated.
---
We cleared the rest of the first layer in a little over two hours and it cost us almost nothing.
I am not going to write it out. I have been through it twice and you have read it once, and the honest summary is that a raid moves very fast when one person in it already knows which fissure the hounds come out of.
The Amphisbaena’s second head came up into a shield wall.
Nobody went into the water.
The Meridian swordsman with the grey at his temples killed two hounds and got a scrape on his vambrace, and I stood forty metres from Cormac Keane for the whole of it and did not once let my eyes rest on him.
Renard started giving me things to do.
Not because he trusted me. Because I kept being turned the right way before I had any business being turned that way, and a captain will use that even when he cannot explain it.
---
Then the round chamber.
Smooth walls. Sixty metres across. Faint lines in the floor that are not cracks.
I had spent the last hour thinking about nothing else.
Because if this is a machine, it has inputs, and if it has inputs then somewhere in this chamber there is a thing I can change. Six people go one way. Fourteen go somewhere else. That is a rule, and rules can be leaned on.
So I picked Renard.
He was standing about nine metres from me near the centre of the room with his back half turned, counting heads out loud the way he always does, and he is the single most useful human being in this dungeon and I wanted him.
I walked over and stood a metre off his shoulder.
"Something?"
"No."
He looked at me for about a second and a half and then went back to counting, and I stood there with my heart going and my eyes on the floor between his boots.
---
> **[First Layer cleared.]**
The lines came up faint and then burning.
Separately. One plate here, one plate eleven metres away, exactly the way they had before, and the room filled with the sound of twenty people looking down at once.
Renard’s section lit.
Mine did not.
I moved.
I did it without thinking about how it would look. Two full strides sideways, boots coming down inside the lit border of his plate.
Close enough that my shoulder went past his arm, and he turned his head toward me with his mouth already opening.
I got both feet inside the light.
> **[Second Layer transition beginning.]**
The floor went out from under me anyway.
---
Wet earth. Knees.
I came down in leaf litter with my palms in cold soil and the smell of rot and bark and resin arriving all at once, and I did not even wait to stand up.
I counted.
One. Two. Three. Four. Five.
Then I counted them again, and I did it slowly this time, going face to face, because the first count had returned something my chest refused to accept.
Gideon Rook, four metres to my right, already scanning the treeline.
Declan O’Rourke, up on one knee, wiping soil off his palm.
Ewan Calder, standing, hand flat against the nearest trunk.
Erik Lind, checking his own kit.
Clara Vogel, turning a full circle with her blades out.
The same five.
The same exact five, in a forest that goes on for kilometres in every direction, out of nineteen other people.
---
I got up and looked past them.
Into the gaps between the trunks, all the way round. Past the mist standing in flat layers and the pale columns of light coming down through the canopy.
Looking for a man in Meridian gear who should have been standing a metre and a half off my left shoulder.
Nothing.
Renard was not here.
I had put both boots inside the lit border of his plate with a second to spare and the dungeon had looked at that and had not cared at all.
My hands had closed at my sides.
The grouping is fixed.
It was decided before any of us walked through that Gate, and nothing I do in that chamber changes one name in it, and I had just spent an entire layer building a plan on top of a floor that does not exist.
Which means I get these five. Every time. However many times it takes.
---
"You are doing something with your face."
Gideon had come across without me hearing him.
"Nothing."
"You looked at all of us twice and then you looked at the trees for six seconds." He was not scanning the treeline any more. "You want to tell me what you were expecting to be standing there?"
I got two fingers into his sleeve and walked him eight metres away from the others before I answered.
That surprised him. I felt it in the arm.
"Something is wrong here."
"Something is wrong with every Orange Gate."
"Not the Gate." I kept my voice down and I did not blink and I did not soften any part of my face. "The people.
I need you to be careful, and I need you to not ask me for the rest of it, because I do not have anything I can give you that would sound sane."
Gideon Rook looked at me for a long moment.
Whatever he had been about to say went somewhere else. His weight came off his back foot. His eyes went past my shoulder toward the four of them, quickly, once, and came back.
"How careful."
"All of it."
"Right," he said.
That is all. He did not laugh at me and he did not ask a single follow-up, and he went back to the group with his hands loose and his shoulders lower than they had been.
---
We shouted for the others for about six minutes.
Erik put the most into it and tore his voice on the third try, the same as before, and the forest ate every one of them the same as before.
Then we walked.
Declan said the sensible thing about wasting throat and finding the ground the others landed on, in a reasonable voice, and five people agreed with him, and one of the five was me.
There is nothing else to do. That is the part that gets under my skin. His suggestion was correct.
---
Seven hours.
The forest floor took our weight in silence, wet leaf compressing under the boots and letting go again with a sound like something being unstuck. Mist sat between the roots in flat sheets that did not move when we walked through them.
The trunks went up past the point where I could follow them and disappeared into their own canopy.
Damp bark. Turned soil. Something resinous and green underneath both.
And the noises.
There were noises the entire day, always at a distance, always ahead or off to one side, and every single time the six of us stopped walking they stopped as well.
Clara noticed it in the third hour and said so.
Nobody had an answer.
Nothing attacked us.
---
We took the same rise between the same four broad trunks, because it was the best ground and every one of us could see it was the best ground.
Clara scraped the leaf litter back to bare soil in a ring.
Erik produced four kilos of meat out of a storage ring and defended himself against the accusation of having done so.
Ewan produced four small bottles of beer and defended himself less successfully.
The fat came off the meat and hit the coals and the smell went up under the canopy.
I stood at the edge of the light with my back to all of it, watching the black between the trunks, because I could not look at Erik Lind’s face while he turned that meat.
I ate. I talked when talked to.
The temperature dropped the way it drops here, all at once, out of the ground.
---
Then Declan started arranging the watch.
"Six of us. Three pairs, three hours each. First—"
"Rook takes first."
It came out of me flat and it stopped the whole circle.
Gideon turned his head.
"No."
"Yes."
"Nolan." He said it the way you say a name to somebody who has walked into a doorframe. "I have exactly one job in this Gate."
"I know what your job is."
"Then you know it involves being on this side of the fire."
"There are four other people on this side of the fire," I said, "and every one of them went through Meridian’s screening, and I am not eight."
"You are eighteen, which is worse, because eight-year-olds do what they are told."
Clara made a noise into her drink.
"Your father did not put me on a plane and cancel my month so that I could go and stand in a bush while you sleep in the open."
"He put you here to keep me alive."
"That is what I have been saying for four minutes."
"Then take the first watch."