Chapter 45: Knowing
Wade raised both hands, shifting his weight back.
Sean moved on command.
The strike came in low at Alina’s left side, fast and already committed. Alina read it before Ash did. She stepped inside the arc and let Sean’s forearm graze past her shoulder. She drove her elbow into his ribs at the close range his own momentum had created. The impact cracked through the platform. Sean’s feet slipped on the warped grating, and he went sideways into the railing hard, the metal ringing with the collision, the whole walkway section shuddering.
Wade broke left while Ash was still tracking Sean.
Ash drove a gravity field directly into Wade’s center of mass, and his forward momentum was stopped like he had a wall. He fell down to one knee, both hands slamming the platform to catch himself, his chin nearly meeting the grating. The field held him there.
The third member had been circling right, looking for an angle on Alina’s back. He got four steps in before he started walking wrong as if to compensate for something.
Alexis hadn’t moved from the walkway junction. She had one hand extended, not touching anyone. The result was causing a slight spatial wrongness applied to the perimeter of the platform.
The third member’s right foot came down, and his body told him it had landed somewhere it hadn’t. He grabbed the railing to keep himself upright. His eyes went to his hand on the railing; his expression shifted to something of confusion.
Sean pulled himself off the railing and launched back in at Alina.
Alina caught his wrist on the way in and turned it with the momentum instead of against it. She redirected him onto the platform floor with enough force to rattle the grating under everyone’s feet. Sean lay there for a second with his cheek against the metal, deciding if he should continue to attack or not.
Alina stepped past the pinned Sean to approach Wade, still fighting the gravity field’s weight, hands occupied with keeping his face off the platform. She went through his jacket pocket; her eyes gleamed when they made contact with a round metal object. She searched the other pocket of his jacket, her eyes even more surprised when they felt a second coin.
She held them both up.
"They had two," she said, her voice carrying a hint of excitement to it.
Alexis released a war cry. Several students on an adjacent platform looked over. "Two coins claimed from the field of valor! The third all but awaits our discovery!"
"Lower your voice," Alina said.
"The momentum of victory demands—"
"Lower. Your voice."
Alexis lowered her voice to just above a whisper’s breath. "The momentum of victory," she continued, "demands acknowledgment."
Wade’s team retreated. Sean half-carried the third member, who was still looking at his own feet, unsure if he was walking on solid ground.
"Good work, team," Ash said. "We only need one more."
"Yeah," Alina confirmed. She pocketed both coins and looked at the access shaft. "Time to go up."
Davos looked like he had been waiting for them to appear, squatting down in front of his two teammates. He was on a connecting catwalk between the second and third tiers.
He was propped up six feet from Ash and looked at the three of them with the half-lidded attention from the registration hall.
"Seems like you guys had a productive morning," he said. He glanced at the platform behind them, the warped grating, and the railing still vibrating from Sean’s impact. "You’ve been busy."
Davos’s Shade ran warm and organized, like it had been managing its own presentation long enough that the management had become the Shade’s baseline.
Ash didn’t feel the acute tightening he felt when someone lied quickly and urgently because they needed to. This was different. The deception ran at the Shade’s foundation rather than its surface. Not a door being held shut. A structure built from doors that had never opened. The Shade lied without deciding to, without invitation.
"I have a proposal for you three," Davos said. "My team has total control of the eastern fourth tier. There are two allied teams already holding the access points. Between the three of us, we’ve locked the upper level. Nobody gets up without us knowing. The issue is the lower tier." He nodded toward the space behind Ash. "Someone needs to clear it. Teams down here are going to start consolidating once they figure out the upper access is blocked. We could use a fourth team to run interference, and we’re willing to split the take."
Ash looked at him, then at his teammates.
"What’s our share?" Ash said.
"Whatever you pull from the lower tier while you’re working it. Plus one coin from our count at the exit."
"We want the coin guarantee in writing."
Davos smiled. "I don’t have paper on me. But you have my word."
The Shade lied twice during that exchange. Once during the coin guarantee. Another when he mentioned the allied teams.
"We’ll pass," Ash said.
Davos’s expression didn’t change. "Your loss, Credit Recovery Student. Yours as well, satellite student and..." He didn’t quite know what to call Alexis. "Don’t get in our way." He turned and walked back toward the upper access shaft, his two teammates falling in behind him.
The three of them watched him go.
"Yon man bears the smile of one who profits from another’s grief," Alexis said.
"He was going to set us up?" Alina said.
"Not only once, but probably throughout the duration of the event," Ash said.
Alina looked at him. "How do you know?"
"His Shade lied while he talked. Twice."
She held his gaze for a moment. Then she turned back toward the arena floor below. "We should stay down here then."
"No," Ash said. "We go up. Just not through his access point."
They came up the shaft at the second tier’s northern edge and found it was not empty.
A two-person team had been waiting at the top of the ladder and pounced at the three newcomers climbing single file. Mallow dropped from the platform above the shaft exit the moment Ash cleared the top rung.
The hit landed across Ash’s shoulder and drove him sideways across the platform. He caught himself on the railing. The gravity field came up reactively, and the area around him shifted. Mallow’s next strike slowed mid-arc under the increased weight.
Alina cleared the shaft behind him.
She took in the platform’s status and located where DeMan, the second teammate, was standing near the platform’s edge. She went left, not toward DeMan but toward a bolt pattern she saw, and used the platform’s own edge bracket as a lever point to change her position. She came up on DeMan’s flank from a direction the platform’s layout shouldn’t have allowed.
DeMan swung at the air in front of him.
Alexis came out of the shaft last, cape catching the air, and stood at the shaft exit taking in the fight with her head tilted.
"Sizable odds," she said to the audience she presumed was watching her, and extended one hand toward Mallow.
A sustained two-degree wrongness propagating outward from her palm. Mallows’s next step landed badly, stumbling over himself as he tried to overcorrect the landing. The overcorrection cost him the angle he’d been maintaining on Ash.
Ash’s gravity field found the overbalanced weight and applied immense pressure.
Mallow kneeled down on the platform.
Alina had DeMan’s wrist in both hands and was redirecting the strike’s momentum downward until she heard his arm crack.
DeMan screamed in agony, wincing as he braced his arm with his good one.
"The coin," she demanded.
"We—we don’t have one," DeMan whined in agony.
Alina began to search Mallow, while Alexis looked at DeMan.
"They’re telling the truth," Ash said, already turning around from the fight. "We’re wasting time here."
The two girls stopped their pat-down. Alexis, for good measure, stomped on DeMan’s face. Alina checked to see if the two coins in her possession were still there.
"Where to?" Alina asked.
"Let me think; give me a second," Ash spoke, trying to concentrate on what he was sensing.
He wasn’t actually looking for other students’ Shade signatures. He was thinking about why Alexis still had access to her Dominion after fighting her Shade. His mind went onto Professor Olley and his research partner’s notes. What little he understood about their inheritance theorem. He had thought it meant it was like a river flowing into the ocean. He was starting to suspect the river’s current went the other way.
Ash turned his attention back to the field around him.
The fourth tier above them was raging with combat. Davos’s coalition was moving, the Shade-pressure up there spiking and shifting as participants entered and left the fight.
A third team’s Shade-pressure dropped sharply from the fourth tier’s western section.
Ash kept his eyes on the third tier below.
On the third tier’s maintenance corridor, half-hidden behind the walkway’s lateral wall, one Shade registered differently from the rest. It wasn’t suppressed, and it was only one of the few Shade’s that weren’t spiking under combat.
This Shade was metronomic, cycling through its own pattern with the patient warmth of a process that had been running for a very long time. There was no urgency to it. Reading it from this distance was like trying to hold a sentence that looped back toward its own beginning before it could finish.
"On the third tier," Ash said. "By the maintenance corridor on the north side."
Alina looked at the vertical shaft between their platform and the tier above. "They have a coin?"
"One. And they’re not moving."
Alexis straightened. "A quarry that holds still," she said, "is simply patience rewarded."
"In plain language," Alina said, already moving toward the shaft.
"It’s better than a moving one," Alexis said, and followed her up.
