Impossible Numbers

She's gone before the paramedics reach you.

One second her hand is in yours, cold and shaking. The next, a man in a Nordlys coat is murmuring in her ear, and she pulls free, and her glove is back on, and she's walking away through the floodlights with her silver hair blowing loose.

She doesn't look back. Not once.

"Sir? Sir, can you hear me? How many fingers?"

"Three," you say, still staring at the place she disappeared. "How did she know my name?"

The paramedic shines a light in your eyes and writes possible concussion.

Frode Kozlowski fires you at nine the next morning.

He does it in the Ironjaw hall in Lowmarket, under the dead neon sign and the trophy wall of cores nobody has dusted since 2019, with Tibor Vasko leaning on the bar behind him, smirking.

"Gross negligence," Frode says. He's fifty-two and has a gold chain thicker than his patience. "You froze in the boss room. You slowed the team down. You almost got my best hunter killed."

"Tibor split the core," you say. "I told him it was collapsing. They took the light and ran."

"Hey." Tibor puts a hand on his chest. "I came back for you, Ethan."

"You were standing by an ambulance."

"Looking for you. Emotionally."

A couple of the hunters at the tables laugh. Frode doesn't. He slides an envelope across the bar. "Final pay. Minus the gate fee for D-142, since we didn't clear it."

You open it. Eighty-one dollars.

"I carried every pack out," you say. "Two hundred and ten pounds. Every core you're going to sell this week, I carried."

"And Ironjaw thanks you for your service." Frode turns back to his phone. "Leave your badge."

You unpin the F-rank badge from your jacket and set it on the bar. It makes a very small sound.

On the way out, Tibor leans in, close enough that you smell his cologne. "Real talk. How'd you get the Untouchable to grab your hand? Did you cry? I bet you cried."

You don't answer. Because you don't know. And because the blue window has just opened again, right in the middle of the Ironjaw hall, glowing over Tibor's stupid handsome face.

[DAILY QUEST: LOCATE THE KEY-BEARER]

[Reward: ???]

[Failure penalty: none. The System is not a monster.]

You blink. It stays.

"You good?" Tibor says. "You look like you're seeing ghosts."

"Something like that," you say, and walk out into the rain.

"Okay. Okay okay okay. Say it again."

Briony Halverson has her beanie pushed back on her red curls and both hands flat on the table of the Dixie Star Diner, where you've been sitting since ten-thirty and where she has made you repeat the story four times.

"It says Key-bearer," you tell her. "It said seal integrity, ninety-seven percent. It said S-rank awakening."

"And Ottoline Nordahl touched you. With her actual hand."

"That's the part you're stuck on?"

"Ethan, that's the part the internet is stuck on." She turns her phone around. Somebody filmed it from the platform. The video is shaky, but there you are, on your knees, and there she is, bare-handed, holding on. Four million views. The headline says WHO IS THE UNTOUCHABLE'S MYSTERY MAN?

You look terrible in it. You also look like you're about to cry. Tibor was a little bit right.

Briony is twenty-seven, E-rank, a healer who can knit a cut closed and not much else, so she carries packs like you do. You grew up together at Belmoral Street Home. She's the closest thing you have to family, and she is currently vibrating.

"Ranks don't change," she says. "That's the first thing they teach you. You awaken, they read your number, that's you forever. Nobody goes up. Nobody's ever gone up."

"I know."

"So either you hit your head..."

"I did hit my head."

"...or something happened to you in that tunnel that has never happened to anybody, ever, in the history of gates." She grabs her coat. "Get up."

"Where are we going?"

"Association. You're getting reassessed. Right now. Before you decide you imagined it."

The Hunter Association headquarters on Kessington Plaza is forty floors of gray stone and security scanners. The assessment chamber is on the third floor, a white room with a chair in the middle and a machine that looks like a dentist's x-ray arm.

Senior assessor Ferdinand Belgard is forty-seven, rumpled, coffee-stained, with a prosthetic leg he got from an A-rank gate back when he was an A-rank himself. He's the one who read your number four years ago. He remembers you, which is somehow worse.

"The porter," he says. "F-six. You were very polite about it."

"Can you measure me again?"

"Son, it's going to say six."

"Please."

He sighs the sigh of a man who has done this for a lot of desperate people and swings the arm down over your head. "Hands on the plates. Breathe normal. Don't hope too hard. It doesn't help."

You put your hands on the cold metal plates. The machine hums. A blue light passes over you, slow, top to bottom.

Belgard looks at his screen.

He looks at it for a long time.

Then he takes off his glasses, cleans them on his shirt, puts them back on, and looks at it again.

"Hm," he says.

Briony, from the doorway: "Hm what?"

Belgard turns the screen around.

Mana Output: 31.

Classification: E.

Nobody says anything. The machine hums.

"That's not possible," Belgard says, very quietly. "I've done eleven thousand of these. Nobody goes up. Not one point. Not ever." He looks at you, and for the first time he isn't looking at a polite porter. He's looking at a problem. "What did you do?"

"Nothing. Somebody grabbed my hand."

"Who?"

You don't have to answer. Briony is already holding up her phone with the video on it.

Belgard watches it. All of it. When Ottoline Nordahl tears off her glove with her teeth, he goes very still.

"Okay," he says. "Okay. I need to log this, and when I log this, a lot of people are going to want to talk to you. Some of them will be nice about it." He reaches for his keyboard. "Most of them won't."

His phone rings.

He glances at the number and frowns. He answers. "Belgard."

You can't hear what the other person says. You can only watch his face change. The color goes out of it in stages, like a building losing power floor by floor.

"Yes," he says. "Yes, he's here. Right now. No, I haven't logged it yet."

A pause.

"Understood."

He hangs up. He sets the phone down very carefully, like it might go off.

"Don't log it," Briony says. "Whoever that was. They told you not to log it, didn't they?"

Belgard ignores her. He looks at you.

"That was the Nordlys Guild," he says. "There's a car downstairs. The director wants to see you." He swallows. "Now."