Chapter 44 - 43 — Twenty Enter I
**POV: Jace**
---
My father did not say anything for a long time.
He had turned all the way from the window by then, and he was looking at me the way you look at somebody who has asked for the car keys on the drive home from a crash.
His eyes went over my face. Then down to the gauntlets. Then back up.
I had watched his hand come open on his knee ten minutes ago when I told him nobody had touched me at the station.
It closed again.
"Say the rest of it," he said.
"There isn’t a rest of it."
"There is always a rest of it. You have been out of a police cell for eleven minutes."
"I wasn’t in a cell."
"You were in a building you could not leave, which is the same sentence with better furniture." He did not raise his voice at all.
"Before that you fought four Players in a street. Before that you took a Yellow Gate on your own. In eleven days."
"Yes."
"And your response to all of it is to ask me for Eastwick."
The car went over a junction. His secretary had stopped typing.
"Do you know what that Gate is?"
"I know Meridian has the contract."
"Meridian has the contract because two other outfits looked at the survey and declined it." He said it flatly, the way he reads a balance sheet. "They have already been inside twice.
They came out both times with fewer people than they took in, and the second attempt cost them a section leader with eleven years on him."
"I know."
"There are people dead in that dungeon who were considerably better than you."
"I know that too."
"Then explain to me," he said, and something finally came through in his voice, thin and controlled and unmistakably angry.
"Why out of every raid open in this region, out of every guild taking outside Players this month, my son has chosen the one that has already killed the best people who tried it."
---
I could not tell him the truth.
There is no version of *I watched this on the news when I was twenty-four and fifteen people did not come home* that ends with me in that Gate. It ends with medical assessments and a very quiet conversation with the Bureau.
So I gave him the other true thing, which is that most of my reasons were real anyway.
"Because I am not going to get better fighting things I can already beat."
He did not answer.
"The Yellow Gate was a hole in the ground with ants in it, and I cleared it, and the hardest part of the whole afternoon was that I was on my own with nobody to make a mistake for me."
I turned my hand over. "I have never been in a raid. I have never held a position in a formation with nineteen other people. I have never had to do my job while somebody else does theirs badly."
"That is an argument for a Blue Gate with a competent guild."
"It is. And a Blue Gate with a competent guild is not short of applicants." I kept my voice level, because raising it would have finished the conversation.
"Eastwick is. Meridian is opening ten outside places because they cannot fill twenty from their own roster and they are running out of time to try."
"You have noticed that those two facts are the same fact."
"Yes." I looked at him. "That is exactly why they will look at me. Nobody else needs a Level Seven."
---
He was quiet for a while after that.
Long enough that I started going back over what I had said, hunting for the place where I had pushed it too far, because there is a line with my father and you generally find it by walking into it.
Then he asked his secretary something without turning his head.
"How long does the Bureau give it?"
She had the answer already, which told me she had been reading about Eastwick since the moment the word left my mouth.
"The current instability projection is thirty to forty hours, sir. Meridian’s window closes tomorrow."
"And after that?"
"After that the Bureau stops classifying it as a clearance operation."
She said it carefully, and she did not finish the sentence, and she did not need to.
An Orange Gate nobody clears does not sit politely in a freight district forever. The pressure goes somewhere.
Either twenty people go in and take the boss out of it, or in a day and a half the Bureau stops preparing a raid and starts preparing a defensive line, and then whatever is inside comes out into a city instead.
That is the entire reason Gates get cleared at all. Everything else, the stones and the materials and the money, is what we tell ourselves on the way in.
My father looked at me for a long moment.
"Contact Meridian," he said.
His secretary’s hands did not move for about a second and a half.
She knew exactly what Eastwick was. She had just told him what the Bureau thought of it, out loud, in a moving car, and he had listened to the whole thing and then said that.
Then her fingers started, and she was already three lines into a message before I got my next breath.
---
"On one condition."
"I didn’t think there wouldn’t be one."
"Gideon Rook goes in with you."
I knew the name.
Everybody in that house knew the name.
He had been in the back of my father’s Red Gate footage for six years, and when the Bureau ran the reconstruction of the four hundredth clear there were seven people on the diagram and Rook was one of them.
"He is not free."
"He is now."
"He clears Red Gates with you."
"He does." My father’s tone did not change. "Which is why he is going to be perfectly comfortable in an Orange one."
I pressed my tongue against the inside of my cheek and looked out of the window for a second.
I had asked to be considered for a place. I had been extremely careful about the word considered.
And what I had actually received was a place, immediately, no screening at all, plus one of the six people my father takes into the worst Gates in the region, standing next to me for the entire operation.
I had been a Player for four weeks. I was entirely aware of how that looked.
"Is this negotiable."
"No."
"I meant the part where—"
"No."
I looked at him.
He looked back with absolutely nothing on his face, and I understood that we had reached the end of what he was willing to discuss, and that there was a version of this conversation where I pushed and he simply cancelled the whole thing.
One unwanted minder was a cheap price for a Gate I had been thinking about since a television in a police station.
"Fine."
"Good."
He turned back to the window as though we had settled a delivery schedule.
---
**Eastwick Freight District**
**One week later**
---
They had closed four roads.
Not coned off. Closed, with concrete barriers dropped across the junctions and PSB vehicles behind them, and every warehouse inside the inner ring had been emptied of people and stock over the previous three days.
The streets past the barrier were completely empty, and that is the part that gets you.
A freight district at eight in the morning should be a wall of noise, and instead there were four hundred metres of open road with nothing on it at all.
Inside the ring there was too much of everything.
Six ambulances with their rear doors already standing open. Medical staff moving equipment out of a second vehicle even though nobody had been hurt yet and nobody had gone in. A field triage frame going up under an awning.
And beyond the ordinary containment teams, the other thing.
Four heavy anti-monster units, tracked, with their weapons already trained.
Not on us.
They were facing the Gate, in a wide arc behind the raid staging area, and every barrel in that arc was pointed at the same piece of air.
Those teams were not there to watch us go in. They were there in case we did not come out.
---
The Gate itself was wrong, and everybody standing in that yard could see it.
An Orange Gate surface should move the way heavy water moves, slow and even, with the light coming off it at a constant depth.
This one had something running through it.
Every forty or fifty seconds a darker band came up out of the bottom of the surface and travelled through the whole face of it.
While that band was crossing, the orange went muddy and the edges of the Gate lost their shape by a few centimetres.
Two PSB technicians were standing at a portable rig eleven metres from it. Every time the band went through, the readings on their screens jumped, and one of them wrote the figure down by hand as well as letting the machine log it.
I watched them do that four times.
Nobody writes a number down by hand unless they have stopped fully trusting the equipment.
---
Twenty of us gathered near Meridian’s vehicles.
Ten from their own roster, in matching dark plate with the guild mark on the shoulder. Ten outsiders, in whatever we each fight in.
Nobody was talking loudly.
That was the first thing I noticed and the thing that stayed with me. Everything I have ever heard about raid staging is that it is noisy, that people joke badly and shout across each other and complain about the weather.
There was conversation, and all of it was under a certain volume.
A Tank near the front of the vehicles was going along the fittings of her shield arm with two fingers, one strap at a time, and when she reached the end she started again at the top.
I watched her do the full circuit three times.
Two close-range fighters were stretching out their shoulders, rolling them back, working at a stiffness that I do not think either of them actually had.
A Mage stood with a focus in her hand and was not doing anything with it. Just holding it, thumb moving on the grip, not spending a drop.
The ranged people were counting. All of them, and they had all counted already.
Two support Players had a case open between them and were going through the contents against a list, and one of them said a number out loud, and the other one checked it, and then they both looked at the tray again anyway.
Somebody near the back said something and the man beside him laughed.
Then the dark band went through the Gate, and the laugh stopped in about a third of a second.
Neither of them said anything else.