Chapter 68 — Five Shares I
**POV: Jace**
The sound of it coming out was worse than the sound of it going in.
Wet cloth, and then a suck, and then the swordsman’s body settled about four centimetres lower against the stone slab because there was nothing holding it up any more.
His blood went out across the floor in a sheet.
It found the low line in the stone and ran along it toward the healer’s knees, and she did not move her knees, because she had not finished understanding what she was looking at.
Nobody in that chamber had.
Sixteen of us had come out of that boss fight, and every single one had already put it down. Weapons on the floor. Straps opened.
The exit standing forty metres away throwing pale light over all of us and the smell of burned undead already thinning out of the air.
Fifteen now.
A man behind me was halfway through sitting down and stayed halfway through sitting down.
Then Rhodri Griffiths killed Idris.
---
I did not see the beginning of it, because I was still looking at the man on the slab.
I heard it. A short heavy impact off to my right and then somebody’s breath going out all at once, and by the time my head came round Idris was already going down with a Welshman’s hand still on the back of his collar.
Rhodri had been standing beside him for the last two minutes. He had handed him a water skin.
Idris had been the second-healthiest fighter left standing in the room and he was three metres from Renard, and he never got a hand up.
Then Søren Juel went for the healer with the shaved head.
She was on her knees with both hands inside somebody’s ribs and her whole back to him, and she was the reason four of us were still breathing, and he came at her from behind with something out.
Barre got there.
Not cleanly. He put his shoulder into Søren’s line and took the blade high through the meat over his collarbone instead of letting it go where it was going, and both of them went down over the top of her.
She screamed. Not from being hurt. From a man landing on her patient.
And then the whole chamber came up off the floor at once.
---
Fifteen seconds. That is what it took.
I have thought about those fifteen seconds a great deal since, and the thing that gets me is not the killing. It is the arithmetic of the timing.
Cormac did not shout anything and did not signal anything and did not look at either of them.
He walked twelve metres, he killed a man who could not stand, and two other people three separate parts of the chamber away started moving inside the same second.
They had agreed all of this before any of us walked through that Gate.
---
Gideon was in front of me before I had my hands up.
He did not say my name. He put himself between me and Søren’s side of the chamber and stayed there, and his weight was already down and forward.
"Nolan."
"I see it."
"Behind me. Not beside."
Erik Lind arrived on my left about two seconds later with his axe already up, and Clara came in on the other side and put her back to the broken stone, and neither of them asked anybody anything.
They have done this before. Two nights ago, in a forest, when a man they had eaten dinner with turned out to be something else.
Erik got it in one look.
"Three of them?"
"Three."
"Right," he said, and that was the whole conversation.
---
"UP. EVERYBODY UP."
Renard was on his feet with a hand pressed flat against his own side, and he had not been on his feet ninety seconds ago.
His breathing was audible from where I was standing.
"Anyone who cannot fight goes to the exit. Not later. NOW. Voss, Ide, take the wounded, you do not stop for anything, you do not come back."
He got another breath in.
"Everybody else, on me, between them and that door. Nobody chases. NOBODY CHASES. They win if we spread out."
---
He was right about the spreading out, and I could see why he had to say it, because half the room wanted to go straight at Cormac Keane.
And the room could not do it.
I counted while Renard was still shouting, because I have not stopped counting since the freight yard.
Fourteen people alive in that chamber. Three of them were theirs.
Eleven of us, and all eleven had been standing for nine hours, and eleven minutes ago we had killed a Level Thirty-Five boss and two of our own.
A man near the wall got up on the second try, with his weapon reversed into the stone like a walking stick, and stayed up.
The Mage who had been putting light through the undead all fight put his hands out and something came up between them that was about a third of what he had been throwing forty minutes ago, and he looked at it, and threw it anyway.
The healer with the shaved head came up off her knees with both sleeves dark to the elbow and drying stiff.
And she had to decide, right there, whether to keep her hands on the man in front of her or pick up something to defend herself with.
She kept her hands on him.
Somebody stood over her instead.
Gideon had cuts on both forearms from the Dullahan and one across the jaw and Adamant on top of all of it, and he was still one of the two most dangerous people in that chamber.
And I was standing there on two hundred and eighteen Health out of three hundred and forty, with a hundred and twenty-eight Mana left.
The Mana was fine. Sixty-four punches, if my arms had been willing to throw sixty-four punches, which they were not.
> **[Eastwick Orange Gate cleared.]**
>
> **[Exit active.]**
>
> **[Gate collapse in progress: 26:41.]**
---
"Why."
It came out of Renard flat and hard, across about eleven metres of floor, while everybody was still getting into position.
Cormac looked up from wiping his weapon.
He did it on the dead man’s own sleeve. Twice down one side, once down the other, then a look along the edge.
"Twenty million."
"What?"
"The completion pool." He straightened up. "PSB put twelve into it and your people put eight, because two teams had already gone in and the break window was inside forty hours and somebody had to do it this week."
There was nothing under any of it. He gave us the funding split the way he had given me advice about a filter seal.
"It pays out among registered participants who exit after the clear. Not among the roster. Among the ones who come out."
"You murdered—"
"Death compensation is a separate schedule." He was already looking past Renard at the exit. "His family will be paid. That is not the same fund."
---
Twenty million.
I did the division standing there and I did not want to and it happened anyway.
Twenty names went onto that roster in the freight yard. Twenty shares is a million each.
A million is three hundred and thirty years of what my mother’s driver is paid, and there were people on that roster who came out of the screening queue with repaired gear on.
Five shares is four million.
Four million each, plus the ordinary Orange clearance payment, plus five ways on whatever the Bureau appraises out of a dungeon nobody has ever brought materials out of.
And the dungeon has already done six of it for them.
Ewan and Declan in the forest were not part of that arithmetic and never would have been, but the two Meridian men the Dullahan took were, and so were the four who went into that grotto and the boss chamber before them.
There are eleven of us left to get through the door. When they walked in there were nineteen.
And then my eyes did the thing I could not stop them doing.
Cormac, standing over the man he had just killed.
Rhodri, eleven metres left, with Idris on the floor.
Søren, getting off Barre.
Three.
And then, without deciding to, I looked at the two places in that chamber where nobody was standing, and I have no idea what my face was doing while I did it.
Ewan Calder is in the forest with his throat opened.
Declan O’Rourke is somewhere north-east of him under the trees.
Five.
It was always five. It was five before the first briefing. Two of them are dead in a wood and these three have come to collect anyway.
---
Gideon went at Cormac and Cormac did not fight him.
That is the correct decision and I hated watching it work.
> **[Adamant — S activated.]**
He closed eleven metres in about a second and a half, and the strike he opened with would have gone through the chest plate and everything behind it.
> **[Talaria activated.]**
Cormac was four metres left of where the fist arrived.
And I saw what I have been doing wrong for two days.
His stop was silent.
There was no skid and no scrape and no arm out for balance. He arrived, his weight came down through a bent knee, and he was already facing the direction he intended to move next.
He did it four times in the first thirty seconds and every one of them ended with him somewhere useful.
Mine end with me against a tree.
Then he went in, once, at Gideon’s hip, when Gideon had to turn to keep himself between the Mage and Rhodri.
Gideon caught it on his forearm and pushed, and Cormac went backward six metres with his boots off the floor and had to spend a burst arresting himself.
So he cannot beat him. He knows he cannot beat him.
He is not trying to.
Every time Gideon committed to a strike, Cormac was somewhere else and Gideon had to come back round, and coming back round takes time, and while Gideon is coming back round he is not standing between anybody and anything.
That is what Cormac was actually doing. He was making the strongest man in the room expensive.
---
Rhodri went for the exit route and Søren went for the middle.
Neither of them tried to fight the whole raid, which is what I would have expected from people this outnumbered, and it took me about a minute to understand what they were actually doing.
Rhodri put himself across the open floor between the wounded and the door, at an angle, so that anybody carrying somebody had to come through him.
Søren stayed on Renard.
Not to kill him. To keep him talking and turning and unable to organise, so that the eleven of us who wanted to converge on Cormac could not do it in one piece.
They did not call anything to each other.
Once, Søren shifted about three metres left for no reason I could see, and four seconds later Rhodri went through the space he had opened.