Chapter 42 - 41 — The Weight of a Name II
There was a second officer in the corridor with my gauntlets.
He could have handed them over. They were mine, the confiscation was routine, and I would not have thought about it twice.
Instead he checked both pieces first, turning them over, running a thumb along the inside of the left cuff where the plating had scuffed, and then he presented them across both forearms the way you hand somebody a sword in a film.
"There’s a mark on this one, sir. I want to note that it was already there when they came in."
It had been there since a Matriarch put my arm in her mouth.
"I know. Thank you."
He apologised anyway. For taking them. Which was procedure, and which was also the only sensible thing to do with a man in the middle of a burning street.
I strapped them on while I walked, because I was not going to carry them.
---
I saw my father before he saw me.
He was standing near the reception desk with his coat still buttoned, hands at his sides, listening to Chief Brennan say something at length. His face had nothing on it at all.
If you had walked in off the street you would have said he was collecting paperwork.
I know him better than that.
His shoulders were sitting too high and too square, the way they do when he has been holding a position so long he has stopped noticing it.
And while I watched, the hand nearest his hip opened and closed once, all the way, and then settled flat against his thigh.
I found out later what had happened to the lights at the estate.
The chief saw me and his whole face reorganised itself.
"Ah! Mr Nolan. Young Mr Nolan." He came away from my father and crossed the floor toward me with his hand already out. "I am very glad to see you. Very glad."
He shook my hand and kept shaking it about a second past the natural end.
"I want to say personally that what you did on that street was extraordinary. Extraordinary.
I have three officers in this building who were on that line, and every one of them has said the same thing, which is that the crowd would have gone under that barricade."
"Thank you."
"There is no accusation here. I want that clearly understood, no accusation of any kind against you personally." His eyes went past my shoulder, to my father, and came back.
"The detention was procedural. Emergency protocol. Those men were following a standing order that frankly was written for a completely different situation, and I have already asked for it to be reviewed."
"That’s fine."
I meant it. It was fine. I had said so to myself in the room.
The chief heard two words with no warmth in them, and I watched him decide he had not yet done enough.
"Because I would hate for you to leave here thinking the department regards you as—"
"I don’t."
"Only, being taken off the street in front of that many people, in front of the press, I understand entirely how that must have looked, and how it must have *felt*—"
"It was fine."
"—and if there is anything at all we can do, any statement, any clarification to the outlets, I am more than happy to make that call myself this afternoon."
His eyes went to my father again.
That was the third time. He was not talking to me. He had been talking past me since the handshake, and every reassurance was being checked against a man standing eight metres away with no expression on his face at all.
And my father was letting him do it.
He had not said one word since I came out. He could have ended this in four syllables. He was standing there with his coat buttoned, watching a chief of police talk himself in a circle, and offering him absolutely nothing to land on.
I could not tell whether that was self-control or whether it was the punishment.
I decided it was probably both, and that I would rather not be Chief Brennan this afternoon.
"Can I have officers escort you both out? There are a number of press at the front, and I would be more than—"
"No," my father said.
That was all of it. One word, and the chief nodded four times.
---
The television was mounted high in the corner above the reception desk.
It had been on the whole time, muted, with the captions running, and I had been half aware of it the way you are half aware of a fan.
Then the story changed, and I stopped hearing the chief entirely.
A wide shot of an industrial site. Containment barriers in a ring, PSB personnel on the line, and behind them a Gate surface hanging in the air with that heavy orange light coming off it.
Three armoured transports parked in a row along the fence, all with the same mark on the door.
The caption at the bottom said **MERIDIAN GUILD SECURES EASTWICK CLEARANCE CONTRACT.**
Eastwick Freight District.
The rest went across the bottom of the screen in a strip while a woman in a hard hat talked silently over it.
Meridian had the contract. Ten of their own core raid unit were already assigned. They were opening ten temporary positions to outside licensed Players, subject to guild screening and PSB approval.
Ten and ten.
Twenty going in.
---
The name reached me before anything else did.
Meridian.
I stood in the reception area of a police station with my father eight metres away and a chief of police still apologising into the side of my head.
And something in the back of my skull started coming up out of the dark, the way a word does when you have almost got it.
Not clean. Nothing about this is ever clean.
I was twenty-four and there was a television on in a room I was not really in.
A row of photographs under a banner. Head-and-shoulders shots, the kind they use, all taken at different times in different places so the lighting never matches.
People standing outside a compound fence in the rain. Ambulances behind them with the doors open and nobody hurrying.
And numbers.
Twenty. Then five.
Twenty went into the Eastwick Orange Gate.
Five came out.
That is why it was on the news for a week. An Orange Gate is dangerous and everybody knows it is dangerous, and an organised twenty-person raid out of a real guild is not supposed to lose three quarters of itself inside one.
I do not know what killed them.
I have tried, standing in that reception area, and I am trying now. I cannot remember the monsters. I cannot remember the boss. I could not tell you the name of a single one of the five who walked out.
I was powerless when this happened. That is the whole reason.
Gate disasters were something that occurred to other people, in a profession I had been formally excluded from, and I heard about Eastwick the way you hear about a train crash in another region.
I was sitting in a house feeling sorry for myself, and fifteen people died, and I did not retain one useful fact about it.
I keep waiting for the regression to make that not true.
It does not work like that. Ouroboros gave me back everything I knew. It did not give me anything I never bothered to learn.