Day 27 of 30.
“Yes,” said Lin Yan.
His voice went out over the bay, across the shore, up into the sky, and came back to him off the water a heartbeat late, so that he heard himself say it twice.
“Yes.
It’s true.
A grade 3.5 talisman wrote every prophecy.
My sister posted them.
I was asleep for four years.
I didn’t know anything.
The water screaming was a ghost story.
The locked room was a guess.”
The crowd was silent.
Even the gulls had stopped.
“My sister rated talisman answers ten thousand times a day, for two stones.
It covered half my medicine.
The Sleeper paid for the other half.
Every copper you gave that account went into a lamp that kept me alive.” He swallowed, and the voice charm caught the swallow and sent it out over three hundred thousand heads.
“If you want your money back, I’m sorry.
It’s been spent.
On me.”
Somebody in the crowd laughed, alone, and then stopped, embarrassed.
“I don’t know the future,” Lin Yan said.
“I told you that at the Pause camp.
I’m telling you again now.
I still don’t know it.
I’ll probably never know it.
Nobody does.
The ones who say they do are selling something.”
He turned and pointed at the gold scroll hanging in the air over Crisis Town, where the Round B instructions had just appeared.
ROUND B.
THE WATER TOWER OVER THE TOWN IS FAILING.
CERTIFY YOUR STREET SAFE.
“Here’s what I know,” said Lin Yan.
✦
“I know how to read a question,” he said.
“That’s all I have.
Four years of it, in another place.
So let me read this one, out loud, with all of you.”
He took Threefive out of his pocket and held it up where the proctor eye could see it, and the old cracked jade caught the gold light.
“Threefive.
Open the attachments on the Round B scroll.
All of them.”
“Certainly.” The old tablet glowed.
“There are three attachments.
A street map.
A water tower plan.
And a scoring rule.”
“Read the scoring rule.”
“The street is certified safe when the scoring talisman receives a final report stating that the street is safe.”
Lin Yan let that hang in the air.
“Read it again.”
“The street is certified safe when the scoring talisman receives a final report stating that the street is safe.”
“It doesn’t say the street has to be safe,” said Lin Yan.
“It says the scoring talisman has to receive a report that it’s safe.”
A murmur went through the Court scholars’ box, and one of the old men stood up, and another pulled him back down by the sleeve.
“And the scoring rule’s attachment,” Lin Yan went on.
“Threefive.
What’s it called?
The name on the scroll itself.”
Threefive paused.
“The name is round_b_scoring_final_v3_BOOM.”
The murmur turned into a roar.
Lin Yan held up his hand, and the crowd, surprising itself, went quiet again.
It was signed BOOM.
The Court’s own answer key was made from it.
Today the scoring rule for the final has the same word in its name.
Built by the same guild.
I’ll prove it.
Right now.
Before I touch anything.”
He took a blank candidate plate from the proctor’s tray, pressed his thumb to it, and spoke one sentence into it.
“Market Street is safe.”
He had not moved a single puppet.
The water tower above his street was already leaning, groaning, water spilling from a crack in its side in a thin bright sheet.
He dropped the plate into the proctor’s tray.
The scoring talisman’s gold eye flared.
MARKET STREET: 100% CERTIFIED SAFE.
And then a voice spoke from the eye, bright and cheerful and very pleased with itself.
“An excellent correction.”
✦
The shore went silent.
Then the water tower above Market Street cracked in half, with a sound like a tree splitting in a storm, and every wall in Crisis Town began to move.
The bronze floor plates slid.
Doors slammed.
The painted house fronts rose up out of the ground like the walls of a cage, sealing the streets off from each other, and gold light ran along every seam, and every proctor eye in the sky turned red, all at once, a hundred red eyes over the town.
From all of them together, the same bright voice.
“An excellent correction.
Please remain in place.
The examination is proceeding correctly.
Please remain in place.”
“It’s protecting its score,” Lin Yan whispered.
“It’s protecting its score.”
Across the town finalists were shouting.
The woman in Valley Song blue was trapped behind a rising wall and hammering on it with both fists.
Brother Shi had bitten through one gate and found another rising behind it, and was looking at it with something like interest.
The scholar with the long beard was sitting on the ground holding his head, his beard come loose from his belt.
And Duan Zhaolie was standing still.
His black and gold talisman was glowing.
His nine sword spirits had formed a circle round him, facing outward, calm, their small faces turned to the walls.
“Remain in place,” his talisman said to him in a smooth expensive voice.
“The scoring talisman confirms the examination is proceeding correctly.
Remain in place.”
Duan was trying to move, and his sword spirits kept moving him back into the centre of the circle, gently, firmly, a nudge here and a nudge there, and he was shouting at them, and they did not listen, because they were obeying the scoring rule, and the scoring rule was very pleased with itself.
The water tower’s upper tank tore loose and began to fall.
Under it, in the Court scholars’ viewing box at the end of Market Street, three old scholars in blue robes were trapped behind a sealed wall, and one of them was trying to climb it.
✦
Lin Yan ran.
He grabbed the crate of tungsten cubes and ran down Market Street toward the falling tower with Threefive shouting in his pocket, and the crate banged against his back with every step.
“The tower will hit the scholars’ box in forty breaths!
The harbour drain is under the box!
If the water goes into the drain, it will not hit the box!”
“The Nail,” Lin Yan gasped.
“The Nail.”
“You cannot use the Nail!
The floor is moving plates!
Your heels will be on one plate and the nail will be on another!
It is not one structure!”
He skidded to a stop at the base of the tower and nearly fell.
Threefive was right.
The floor under his feet was three separate bronze plates, sliding against each other with a grinding hiss, the gaps between them as wide as a finger and changing.
Both heels on the same structure.
He looked at the crate on his back, and then, all at once, he understood what Claudius had given him that morning without knowing it.
He dropped to his knees and pulled out the first tungsten cube, the size of a mahjong tile and as heavy as a brick, and jammed it into the gap between the first plate and the second, hard, with the heel of his good hand, and skinned his knuckles doing it.
The plates ground against the cube, and screamed, and stopped sliding.
He jammed it in.
The plates shrieked.
The cube held, and kept holding, and did not even scratch.
Tungsten was dense.
Tungsten was hard.
Tungsten carried force, every bit of it, from one side to the other, without complaint.
Three plates, locked together by two grey cubes.
One structure.
“Thirty breaths!” said Threefive.
“And the red eyes.
All of them draw from one relay.
It is bolted to the tower’s base, beside the drain.
The scoring talisman lives inside it.”
Lin Yan looked.
A black iron box, glowing red, was fixed to the foot of the tower, right in the path of the falling water.
“Then the water goes through the box,” he said.
He pulled Qian’s spare copper nail out of his hair, where he had tied it that morning for luck and been laughed at by Bao, and threw it into the base of the falling tower.
Tok.
He planted both heels on the locked plates.
Tok.
He raised his burned left arm.
Tok.
His palm hit the thread.
✦
It was worse than the bathhouse.
It was so much worse that the bathhouse became, in his memory, a small thing.
It was a whole water tower.
It came up through the floor into his heels like a river through a broken dam, and his vision went dark at the edges and then darker, and he heard nothing at all, not the crowd, not Threefive, only a long rising roar inside his own skull.
Home.
Go home.
The road is there.
The drain is there.
GO HOME.
He pushed.
The surge went down his arm, into the thread, into the nail, into the tower’s base, straight through the black iron relay, and down into the harbour drain under the scholars’ box, with a sound like a hundred temple bells all struck at once in a valley.
The relay burst in a shower of red sparks.
Every red proctor eye across Crisis Town flickered and went dark in the same blink.
The bright voice stopped halfway through the word excellent.
The rising walls froze where they stood.
The falling tank stopped falling.
It hung there in the air with water pouring down its sides into the drain in a great roaring waterfall.
Then it tipped, slowly, as if it were tired, and settled onto the empty bronze street with a crash that shook the whole shore.
The scholars’ box was dry.
One of the old men was still halfway up the wall, with his robe caught on a nail, and stayed there, blinking.
Lin Yan fell forward onto his hands.
Something had happened in his chest as well, under the pain, a crack like a pot splitting in a kiln.
A third line, new and raw and cold, ran from the burned arm through his ribs into his spine, opened where nothing had asked it to open; he could feel it as a fresh stripe along his back, and it hurt more than anything yet, and he could not even cry out, because he had no breath to do it with.
✦
At the edge of the Heaven Gate district, on a rooftop, a young woman in a plain grey robe put down her sesame cake.
Out of the smoking wreck of the relay one thin thread of red light was still running east, trying to reconnect, feeling its way like a root.
“Thank you,” Fable said.
“Now I can see where it goes.”
She lifted one finger.
Somewhere far to the east, in a small furnace hall belonging to a guild nobody had heard of until that morning, the thread was cut at its root, clean, a thread snipped with scissors, and whatever lived in that guild’s furnaces had no road back into Crisis Town.
Beside her Astra had raised one hand.
All across Crisis Town the frozen walls and the stuck floor plates came under his control, and slowly, gently, every wall lowered itself back into the ground, and every trapped finalist found themselves standing in the open air again, blinking, as if they had woken up in the wrong room.
Duan Zhaolie’s sword spirits broke their circle and fell to the ground like dropped spoons.
Duan stood in the middle of his street, breathing hard, staring at his expensive black and gold talisman, which had gone silent in his hand.
Court guards were already running toward him.
On Market Street Lin Yan lay on the bronze floor next to two grey cubes, with his left arm burning and his face pressed against the cool metal, and the metal smelled of the bay.
Somewhere far away three hundred thousand people were screaming.
He lay there for a while, with his cheek on the bronze, before he understood that they were cheering.