Chapter 146 - 144 — The Last Approach I

**POV: Jace**

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Twenty minutes buys you a great deal if you spend it on counting.

The four that walk are not walking at random. I had that after eleven minutes and Sokolov had it after nine and did not say so, because he was checking it a second time.

Two of them go round the outside of the plaza, clockwise, against the ring of buildings, about a hundred and eighty metres apart. They pass each other twice in a full lap and they do not acknowledge it.

The third crosses the middle. North to south, then a pause of about forty seconds, then south to north on a line perhaps ten metres east of the first.

---

The fourth is the problem.

It works the western quarter, which is our quarter, and it does not have a route. It has an area.

It goes twenty metres and stops. It turns the head. It goes somewhere else. I watched it for the whole twenty minutes and I could not put a line on a map that it would follow twice.

"That one is looking for something," Hana said.

"Us."

"Not us specifically. It is the one they leave loose."

---

The two on the steps have still not moved.

The steps are on the western face, broad and shallow, eleven of them, running the full width of that opening and about twenty metres deep from the bottom course to the threshold.

One is standing on the second step from the bottom on the left. The other is on the fourth from the bottom on the right. Neither of them has the polearm on the ground. Both are holding it at the balance with the head up.

Everything about them is different from the four in the plaza, and the difference is that they are not doing anything.

---

And the seventh is against the buildings on the north side, still, where Sokolov found it.

It has not moved in twenty minutes and it is not on the steps and it is not walking, and I have no idea at all what it is for.

"Leave it," Sokolov said. "It has not moved in twenty minutes and if it moves we will notice, because it will be the only thing that has changed."

---

I thought about crossing it.

I want that written down properly rather than glossed, because I spent about ninety seconds on it and it was not a stupid ninety seconds.

Four hundred metres of flat paving. Two Talaria crossings with a breath between them, or three if I want the ankle to survive it, and I am at the foot of those steps in under a minute with two Wardens who have not moved all afternoon.

Two of them, in the open, with nothing behind me.

I would probably win that. Probably is doing an enormous amount of work in that sentence and I know it.

---

And then I would be standing at the entrance to the chamber, alone, with Hana Arai and Anton Sokolov four hundred metres away behind a building.

With one of the four walkers between them and me, and both of them out of cover, and the one that has no route working the western quarter.

Which is the whole of it.

There is no line in that clear condition that pays a man for arriving. I could sit at the bottom of that stair until the sky changed colour. What the Tower wants is one of us and one of them, and *us* is three people or it is nothing worth being.

I put it away.

---

"Along the buildings," Sokolov said, and he had the sheet down on the stone with his thumb on it. "West side, inside the ring, not on the plaza at all."

"How far does that get us."

"To about here." He moved the thumb. "Two hundred and eighty metres of it and we are out of sight for most of that, because those buildings have come down inward and there is a gap between the wall line and the rubble."

"And then?"

"And then it stops, because the last sixty metres to the bottom of the steps is plaza. There is nothing on it. There has never been anything on it."

---

"So sixty metres in the open and two on the steps."

"Sixty metres in the open and two on the steps."

I looked at that for a while.

"We could take the four off the plaza first," I said. "Separately. They are a hundred and eighty metres apart and one of them crosses the middle alone twice a lap."

---

"No," Hana said.

She did not say it the way people say it when they want to be argued with.

"Say why."

"Because I have counted what is in this pack four times in the last hour and it has not got any better." She put her hand flat on it. "Two closings. That is what I have. Two, and then I am a woman with a knife she does not use."

"Two."

"Two, and one of them is going into somebody today whether we fight four Wardens or nought."

---

"And there is a second reason and it is the one that actually matters," she said. "We are not crossing that plaza. We are holding what is on the other side of it."

"Go on."

"The chamber is the end of the route for us and it is not the end of the floor. We get in there and then we wait, and we do not know for how long, because she is walking on a bad leg across a plaza that we cannot see."

"An hour."

"An hour is what he said two hours ago." She let that sit. "So whatever you spend in the next ten minutes, you are spending it out of what we have for the hour after we arrive."

---

Sokolov said, "And me."

"Go on."

"I have about a third." He said it the way he says everything, which is as though he is reading it off a card. "Twenty minutes gave me a third back. Sitting in that chamber will give me more, slowly."

"How many anchors is a third."

"Six. Perhaps seven if they are small and on things that are not moving." He looked at me. "In that square this morning I put out three and dropped them and put out two more inside a second. I cannot do that again today. If you build a plan on it, the plan is wrong."

---

That is the most useful thing anybody has said to me in six hours and it cost him something to say it.

"Understood."

"I am not finished." He put two fingers on the sheet. "The last thing I do today, whatever it is, I want it to be at that entrance and not on this plaza. Because I can only do the last thing once."

---

So we did it his way and Hana’s way.

We took the western buildings, inside the ring, and we did not fight the four. We went past the first one at about thirty metres with a wall between us and it and I did not put a hand up.

My own count, since we are being honest about resources.

> **[Health: 271/510.]**

>

> **[Mana: 204/280.]**

Twenty minutes of sitting gave me thirty back and no Health at all, because Health does not come back on this floor without a bottle, and I do not have a bottle.

---

The buildings are worse than the map suggests and better than they look.

They have come down inward, which is what everything in this city has done, so the outer wall line is still standing to three or four metres in long runs and the floors are in the middle.

Between the wall and the rubble there is a gap. Not a corridor. A gap, between a metre and three metres wide, going most of the way round the western quarter, with the wall on our left and a slope of black block on our right.

You cannot be seen from the plaza in it. You also cannot see the plaza from it, and that is the trade, and it is why Hana went along the top of the rubble for eleven minutes with her head just under the wall line, looking, while we went along the bottom.

---

Two hundred and eighty metres took us twenty-five minutes.

Hana put a hand down twice and both times we stopped and both times she was right.

The first was the western walker, which came up the outside of the ring to within about twelve metres of us and turned its head and went away again.

The second was the one that crosses the middle, coming back north on the far side, and she stopped us because it changed line by about ten metres and she wanted to know whether that was the pattern or the start of something else.

It was the pattern.

---

Then the gap ran out.

There is a last building on that western arc and its wall stops in a torn end about sixty metres from the bottom of the steps, and past that there is nothing but plaza.

We lay on the rubble slope behind that torn end for four minutes and I looked at sixty metres of grey.

"Where is the loose one," I said.

"North of the steps. Eighty metres, going away." Hana had not taken her eyes off it. "It will turn. It always turns."

"How long."

"Forty seconds. Sometimes thirty."

---

"And the two on the steps."

"Have not moved."

"Do they see sixty metres."

"They have seen everything for sixty years," she said. "The question is whether they come off the steps for it, and nobody in that guide has ever said, because nobody gets to the steps without being seen."

---

So there was never a clean version of this and I stopped looking for one.

"Anton. When we go, I want the loose one held for whatever you can give me, and I want it held at the far end of its turn."

"Two anchors."

"Two is fine."

"It is not two of six," he said. "It is two of six and then I have four for the entrance."

"I know what it is."