Chapter 45 - 44 — Twenty Enter II
I attracted attention as soon as I got out of the car.
Some of it was the ordinary kind. A few of them had seen the ceremony broadcast, and a lot more had seen the compound footage.
By that morning, everybody in the region had watched a boy with fire on both hands standing in front of a barricade outside a bank.
That part I have got used to.
The rest of it was different, and I understood exactly what it was.
The other eight outsiders had spent a week being screened by Meridian. Applications, records, probably an interview, certainly a demonstration of some kind. They had been measured against a list and had come out the correct side of it.
I had not done any of that.
My father made a telephone call and my name was on the roster the same afternoon, and in a professional community this size, that does not stay quiet for seven days.
Two of them were talking when I came past the equipment vehicles, and one of them said something with the word Nolan in it, and the conversation stopped.
Not awkwardly. Cleanly. They simply stopped talking and went back to what they were holding.
Another one looked at me, then past me at the Myrmidon vehicle with the clan mark on the door, and then at nothing in particular.
A woman with a heavy blade across her back looked at how old I was and her mouth went thin, and she turned away before I could decide whether to nod at her.
And a veteran with a Meridian tablet went down the roster with his thumb, found a name, read it, and then looked up at me for slightly too long, checking that the boy in front of him really was the entry on the list.
Nobody said anything to my face.
The looks were considerably worse than saying something, which they will have known.
---
I did not resent any of it.
They were right. That is the awkward part.
I am eighteen. I have been awakened for four weeks. I have two clears, one of which I survived rather than earned, and every other outsider in that yard had to prove something to a guild before they were allowed to stand here.
I got in because of my surname.
I am not going to stand in a freight yard pretending otherwise, and I am not going to apologise for it either.
The advantage is real, I used it deliberately, and I would use it again this afternoon, because there is something in that Gate that kills fifteen people and I intend to be inside when it tries.
You can hold both of those at once. Most people would rather you did not.
---
Then somebody noticed Gideon.
He had come around the back of the vehicle behind me, and he is not a man you miss.
Early thirties, built heavy through the shoulders and chest in a way that does not look inflated, because none of it is decorative. An old scar came up through his left eyebrow and stopped where the hair started again in the wrong direction.
His hands had the look that hands get after fifteen years of weapons and Gate work, thickened across the knuckles, one finger set very slightly off true.
His gear was expensive and completely plain. Nothing on it announced anything.
An older Meridian fighter looked at him, looked away, and then looked back a second time, which is what people do when a face arrives before the name does.
Then he gave Gideon a small nod, and Gideon returned it, and neither of them said a word.
Further along, somebody leaned toward the Player next to him and said something quietly with his eyes on Gideon’s back.
The temperature in that yard changed by a few degrees.
It did not change toward me. Nobody suddenly decided I belonged there.
What changed was that they now understood Christopher Nolan had not simply parked his son in a raid and gone back to work.
He had put one of the six people he takes into Red Gates in beside him, which meant Christopher Nolan considered Eastwick serious.
That is a different piece of information, and every professional in that yard filed it.
Gideon did not hover.
He went through his own equipment, which took him a while and which he did properly. He exchanged four or five sentences with two Meridian veterans who clearly knew him. He looked at the Gate for about ten seconds with his arms folded.
He did not once check on me, and I appreciated that more than I expected to.
---
I looked at the twenty of us standing in that yard, and it came back.
Not cleanly. It never comes cleanly.
The ambulances did it first.
Six of them in a row with the doors open, and something in the back of my head put up a different image of the same road, at night, with far more than six, and people standing behind a line of tape in the rain.
Then the group itself. Twenty living people checking straps in the morning light, and underneath that, a strip of photographs in a row under a banner, head-and-shoulders shots taken at different times in different places so the lighting never matched.
The numbers were the clearest thing I had, and they have been the clearest thing since the police station.
Twenty entered.
Five came out.
And two years later, one of those five was under investigation, and the reporting connected that Player to the deaths of several people who went in through this Gate.
I went along the faces again.
There were three or four that produced something. Not recognition. The lesser thing, the itch you get in a corridor when you have passed somebody before and cannot place where.
I stopped on one. A man in his forties fitting a strap. Something about the shape of his jaw.
I looked at him until he felt it and glanced up, and I looked away first, and nothing arrived at all.
That is what six years of not caring buys you.
I was powerless when Eastwick happened. I heard about it the way you hear about a factory fire in another region.
Two years later I heard the second story and paid slightly more attention, because it was lurid.
At no point did I learn a single name. None of it had anything to do with a boy who was never going to be allowed inside a Gate.
Ouroboros gave me back everything I knew.
It cannot give me what I never bothered to know.
---
And then a worse thought arrived, and it did not leave for the rest of the morning.
Gideon was not in the original raid.
He could not have been. He is one of my father’s Red Gate regulars, and my father had no reason to send him anywhere near Eastwick in a timeline where I was an unawakened twenty-four-year-old sitting in a house.
Neither was I.
Which meant the twenty people standing in that yard were not the twenty people who went in last time.
Two of the outsiders who should have been on that roster were not there, because Meridian only ever had ten places to give and my father took two of them with a phone call.
There were two Players somewhere in the region that morning who had applied, and had not been selected, and will never know why they are alive.
I had already changed it.
It felt like an advantage.
What it actually meant was that the only reliable information I had about that Gate had stopped being reliable the moment my father made the call.
Whatever happened in there before was going to happen to a different twenty, in a different order, with two of the people it happened to last time standing safely outside the district.
The numbers I had were twenty and five.
They were true about a raid that no longer existed.