The gauntlets finished changing shape at some point after midnight, then closed around both his wrists and would not open again.
Bastien told him once that a man who cannot get his own kit off is a man who dies inside it.
Ossian worked at the left one for twenty minutes with a screwdriver and his own teeth before he accepted the situation.
'They have gone past the wrist bone... and there is no seam anywhere on the inside now,' he turned both forearms over under the lamp, 'shit, these are not gloves anymore.'
Dreadweight had folded in along the back of each hand into two edges that took the light the way the Mantis forelimbs had.
The Glass Mantis was lying on the table three feet away and had not been on his face since the stairwell.
It did not need to be on his face, as it turned out.
Nothing in the room had changed, and every edge in it had started telling him things he had not asked to know.
The trial opened inside his own sensory field at half past one in the morning, with no panel, no audience, plus no door out of it.
Everything in the flat went sharp at once, the way it does under the mask, except he was not wearing anything at all.
'It is running the trial through me without the face on... so it does not need my permission for this part,' Ossian put both hands flat on the table, 'stay still, let it show me.'
[You wear this face badly and you know it]
[Here is the version of you that wears it properly]
The trial showed him himself, standing in the training hall on Verrick Street, doing every single thing he has ever failed at.
That version took the spear off Calista without her channels locking, since he read her four exchanges earlier than he had.
He answered Ruan in that forecourt with the manifest filed and three clerks briefed before the memorial started.
On the descent he read the addendum properly, refused to sign it, then walked back up the slope with the crate.
'It is showing me a man who does not lose... and every one of these is a room I actually stood in,' he watched himself work, 'that is the offer, then.'
None of it was a lie, making the offer harder to dismiss than any fantasy would have been.
The offer underneath all of it was one line long and did not raise its voice.
[Accept permanent stillness and you keep this]
[Nothing that happens to anybody will ever slow you down again]
Then the trial went back to Halvers Cross and ran the whole afternoon again from the foot of the eastern stair.
The version of him on that platform cut all four cables in eleven seconds rather than fifteen, and nobody up there would have had to spend the difference.
Twelve people came down the western stair in that version too, and he did not look at one of them while they passed him.
He never once looked down at Calista in the junction, at the crowd behind her, at his own opened shoulder.
'Four seconds faster and better at every part of it... and the man doing it does not care who is up there,' Ossian watched himself save forty-three people without minding, 'that is the sales pitch.'
The trial let that run twice, since the second showing is where a person usually says yes.
Ossian understood the offer completely, which is not the same as being tempted by it, though it was close enough to frighten him.
Nobody in that flat was going to see the difference between the two versions from the outside.
Calista would have seen it inside one training session, and Bastien would have read it off him from a doorway in a second.
'She read it off me in one training session... and she stopped the drill rather than let me finish,' he thought about her hand going to the spear left-handed, 'no.'
"No," Ossian said it out loud in an empty room at two in the morning, to a thing that was inside his own head.
'Say it fast, before the second showing gets a third... shit, it is going to run this all night,' Ossian put both hands on the table edge, 'no.'
The refusal took payment on the spot, without any negotiation at all about the timing of it.
Nobody had warned him that saying no to a mastery trial carries an invoice, and the system did not ask whether he could cover it.
[Half of everything this face earned is going back to it]
Something went out of his hands, out of his sight, out of the way he reads a room, all in the same second.
The flat came back to being an ordinary room, and the edges of the table stopped telling him where its load was going.
'That was a third of what I could do this afternoon... and I gave it away in one syllable,' Ossian sat down hard on the floor, 'damn it, say it again anyway.'
[The other half is yours permanently]
[You will read a wound, a fault, or a load without wearing anything at all]
Half of it stayed with him, so he can still find the crack in a plate or the fault in a wall with his own face on.
The trial closed itself without any ceremony at all, in the way a shop puts its shutters down.
Then both gauntlets came open at the wrist, and the plate that had locked around him folded back into two clean edges.
[One imprint socket has opened in the left]
[One imprint socket has opened in the right]
Both edges sat flatter than the old plate had, with a line down the back of each hand where the fold closes.
Stage One had given him a single socket shared across both hands, which is why the Jackal could only ever live on one of them.
'Two sockets... so one mask on each hand at last,' Ossian turned both fists over, 'and there is a face in my bag that has never been out of it.'
He put the Halvers Cross flyer into the left socket before dawn, on a kitchen floor, with nobody watching him do it.
[The flyer is holding in your left]
[Your right hunts along the ground and your left comes down from above]
'Jackal on the right, flyer on the left... and I have mastered neither of them,' the left gauntlet went cold rather than hot, 'that is a different fighter entirely.'
A porter carries with both hands, and for two weeks he has been fighting like a man with one.
Then a function appeared on the panel that had never been there before, sitting under the sockets in plain wording.
[True Mask creation is available to you]
[A face you convert becomes a person's, once, for life]
Converting a mask is the mechanism that turns a monster's face into a treatment for damaged channels.
'Three weeks ago I wanted a badge, then a licence, and now I am pricing my own face against her arm,' Ossian sat with that a while, 'the wanting keeps getting more expensive.'
Everything Calista needs sits inside one line of a system panel, priced in a currency he had not thought of as spendable.
'That is the thing she needs... and the system has put it in a list like a menu option,' Ossian read the line four times sitting on the floor, 'what does it cost.'
[Converting Glass Mantis will take Glass Mantis from you]
He took that in, worked out what it meant for both of them, then went down to the line underneath it.
[You will not wear this face again]
Ossian had read four system panels a day since the Gate, and none of them had ever bothered to say a thing twice.
The system does not repeat itself often, and it had just said the same thing twice inside four seconds.
'It is not copying the mask for her... it is handing it over,' Ossian looked at the pale thing on the table, 'so it is her arm or my second face.'
Twenty-two minutes was the longest he had ever worn that face, and he spent every second of it failing what the thing wanted.
Half his attributes had gone back to that mask an hour ago, and what remained of it was the only precision he owned.
That mask is the reason forty-three people came off a platform, plus the only thing standing between Calista and a working arm.
'Some choice to hand somebody at seven in the morning... damn it, her arm or the only precision I own,' he put the pale thing in his coat, 'her call, not mine.'
Ossian sat on the floor of his room until the light came up through the window, working out how to put a choice like that in front of somebody without leaning on it.
Then he put the pale mask into his coat and went out to find her.