Chapter 14 What Amir Gave him

Amir opened at 40 percent.

Not his 30 percent probe which he used on his assigned opponent. Something in the way Ethan stood at the mark had changed Amir's read. He'd opened higher than standard — too sharp to be naïve, trusting his own instincts over assumption.

The force landed on Ethan's chest and went through the reservoir, and Ethan stood in the same place as before.

Amir's face was expressionless, but there was something dimming in his eyes.

The crowd above had shifted — from idle curiosity to something sharper. They'd registered, at least, that this wasn't what it had looked like. Ethan didn't actually see the attendees, but he felt the shift in the crowd's mood anyway.

Amir achieved his goal of 60%.

The force came in layers, structured, offset, each impact was mastered so as not to be recoverable, the mechanics of a talent used by a person who had been working with it for years, not just powerfully. Ethan got it all. It wasn't as though it grew, as Knox's full discharge did, but as though it was flowing along as one would expect a system that had been worked out to be given what it could use.

He was still at the mark.

Amir ran on full power.

The jump to full power was not a gradual process. One moment Amir was sixty percent and the next he was at everything; a fighter who had decided the quickest way to information was an all out expenditure of what he had got. It came into Ethan's chest like a pressure system: structured, whole, enduring, and the reservoir received it and the first tier threshold that Ethan had been swirling at for weeks finally broke.

Not like breaking. It was similar to a door opening.

The other side of the door was a capacity he had been developing but had no idea how it felt once it had reached it. It felt solid in a way that hadn't existed prior to the threshold.

Still, he was still at the mark.

Amir had produced full output for 30 seconds, and then backed off because he was disciplined enough to know when he had enough to process. He scanned the distance to look at Ethan as if he was someone who knew they had a problem he couldn't solve.

No sound came from the crowd up above them.

Ethan thought about how the reservoir had been restructured, and what he felt he should show. Not everything. Half of half. More than enough to inform them that the gray band classification was wrong, but not so much as to make them aware of how much.

He pushed against the floor in front of where Amor stood.

The crack in the tile was 2 feet long—straight and the noise that crack made was loud enough in the silent challenge space. A sound not quite a word was heard by someone who was watching from the tier above.

Amir studied the crack. He studied the drab band of gray. He studied Ethan's face as if he had just seen something he had to reconsider a part of what he was sure about the world.

He was a man of professionalism. He didn't let it get the better of him for very long.

He came to the boundary of the challenge area. He told the floor staff, Withdrawing. Evenly. The tone of a judgement, not a concession.

The match was over.

There was a group of people who had seen something they couldn't put a name on and were trying to make up a name from the little bits and pieces. Ethan was on the broken tile floor and let them look and he did not look back.

Amir walked across the floor towards him.

He played with the same casualness that he had displayed before they brought him in and it reassured Ethan that his condition hadn't been affected at all; it had simply shifted his focus on to a different challenge – one that he actually found more interesting than troublesome.

Amir said, "The Bureau classified you unregistered.”

"Provisionally."

He glanced at the crevice. “That's what you got back out of my push with you on high Crank, with high Crank force.” He stated it as a fact of his observation, not as an accusation. “That's not a developing talent – that's a developed talent under a misnomer.”

“It's the Bureau's classification,” Ethan said.

"I know whose it is." He looked into Ethan's eyes. “I'm asking-why does it exists?

Amir had pulled out rather than push further — weighing the safety of the floor, the people above it. But instead of walking away, he'd walked toward Ethan, curiosity overriding caution. His question wasn't about Ethan's skill. It was about why the Bureau had classified him this way at all.

“You'd have to go to the Bureau,” Ethan said.

"I intend to." Quietly. The mood of the sentence that was made before the end. “What's your name?”

"Ethan Cole."

Amir kept it just as one would file information that they plan to use. He nodded once and walked away from his assistants to the floor, without looking back.

The Authority officers at the door watched as Ethan walked away and didn't say anything. The flag had already been filed. He had witnessed one before the two minutes of the first half and the report would be received by Harmon before the end of the evening.

Good.

As he walked on, his hands in the coat pockets, he took stock outside the Tower, to his east. The reservoir was at the post-threshold level, its new depth, the new efficiency of the conversion that the first tier had achieved. What he had demonstrated on the floor was half of about half of what the current return capacity is, so the difference between what Harmon's footage would show and what Ethan actually carried was quite large.

That was the plan.

Allow Harmon to work out what C-rank output from a gray band would mean for 2 weeks. Allow the Crest division to update their profile with Tower challenge data. Allow both of them to watch the Tower as the move proceeded somewhere else.

He turned around and walked back to the Warrens.

He had work to do, and the time in which he could do it had been reduced and he was not going to miss a single day of it.