City Riot

Aptitude

PEARICAL — NATIONAL ASSESSMENT CENTRE, DISTRICT NINE — PRESENT DAY — 13:52

The heat had been sitting on Pearical for nine days, and by the ninth it had stopped being weather and become a smell.

Raphael Chen stood in the queue outside the National Assessment Centre with his collar open and did the arithmetic he'd been doing all week. Third floor has the cooling. The queue takes forty minutes in the sun. The certificate costs nothing and is worth four hundred a month if the number on it is the right number.

He was seventeen. He had a room above a laundry in the fourth district, a job hauling fish he did not want, and a brass key in an inner pocket that a dead man had paid up through 2035.

And he was hot. That was the whole reason he was here, and it was embarrassing in its simplicity, and he was thinking about it so hard that he nearly missed the man at the gate.

A hundred and forty people in the queue and it had a shape. Raphael read it the way he read everything — not a decision, a condition. Two were here because the army paid a bonus for a certificate. One boy near the front had been told literacy tests were a way into a shipping job, and would be disappointed in about four hours.

And the man at the gate was not reading anybody. That was the tell. A guard's job is to look at a hundred and forty people and find the one who doesn't fit. This one stood with his hands behind his back, humming, and every ninety seconds glanced at a parked car with district plates.

He's not guarding the door. He's waiting for someone at the door.

"Chen," Raphael said, when he reached the desk.

The clerk didn't look up. "Identity card."

He put it down. He'd made it that Tuesday out of a library card, a booth photograph, and a laminating iron borrowed from the laundry. Not a good document — but the name on it existed in the district records. Three years ago someone had registered a Raphael Chen at an address that had since burned down, and nobody had closed the file.

The clerk looked at it four seconds, typed, and gave him a number.

"Third floor. Seat two-fourteen. No phone, no bag. You leave after the first hour, you don't come back in."

The third floor had the cooling, and the cooling was glorious.

He sat in seat 214 and let it blow on him ten full seconds before he looked at the paper. Two hundred people breathing quietly in a warm room, made cold by a machine somebody else was paying for. He had not been cool since April.

Then he turned the booklet over.

Spatial reasoning. Eleven minutes. He did not enjoy it.

Verbal — forty items, some in a language he knew, some in one he'd taught himself from a borrower's card in a seventh-district library. Fourteen minutes, and he slowed himself twice on purpose, because the fastest thing in any room is the thing everyone else is trying to catch.

The third section was a single item.

It was a grid of rules. Dressed as a scheduling problem — the sort of thing a railway might use to lay out a timetable — with forty-two constraints, thirty-nine of them ordinary. The fortieth and forty-first were not. The forty-second was a sentence at the bottom, in the same grey font as everything else:

Note: item 44 has no valid solution. It is included in this paper as a standard control. Do not attempt to answer item 44.

Raphael read it three times.

It's a control. It's there to catch people who guess.

That was the official story. It was a good one, and it was wrong — wrong the way you know a step isn't there.

Remove any three of these and the rest resolve perfectly. So the question isn't whether it resolves. It's which three were put in to be removed.

Kill the fat, Jun said, dry as a leaf. If a man's got two reasons, the second one is the lie.

He picked up the pencil.

Four minutes later he put the pencil down.

He'd worked in pencil because pencil erases, and a man who writes in pen has already decided he's right — a mistake he'd made once with a boot on his chest.

The solution was a timetable. Eleven trains through a station with three platforms. It was not elegant. It had never been meant to be.

Because three constraints in, item 44 stopped being a puzzle and became a description.

Forty is impossible for a scheduled service. Forty-one is impossible for a scheduled service. Forty-two — the one they put in as a note, to see if you were paying attention — governs an unscheduled vehicle moving through the same three platforms in a two-minute window.

Somebody had built this problem out of a real timetable.

Somebody had built it out of a real night.

The hair came up on the backs of his hands. He did not know what Terminal Four was. But he had spent seven years learning to look at a thing and see who made it and what they wanted, and all seven of those years stood up at once and said: this is the shape of a door being held open.

He raised his hand.

"Excuse me." His voice came out steady. "Item forty-four has a solution. I think the paper's wrong."

The invigilator's name was Nila Prasad and she had done this job nineteen years and heard every sentence a nervous child can produce.

"Thank you. Item forty-four is a control item. It's explained on the paper."

"It isn't a control item. It's three constraints about a train that isn't on the timetable."

He watched her face without looking at it.

She smiled. She was not smiling.

"If you'd like to note a concern, I can give you a form."

"Your terminal has an assessment mode." Flat, and a little too fast. "It'll validate a submission against the item's rule engine. If I'm wrong, it says so and I sit here and take my fail like everyone else. If I'm right, your paper has a problem — which seems like the sort of thing your job actually cares about."

Two rows back, a boy had stopped breathing through his nose.

Prasad looked at him a long moment. Then she took the paper.

The terminal took ninety seconds. Prasad stood over it with her back to the room, and Raphael watched her back and not the screen, because her back would tell him everything.

At twenty seconds her shoulder blades came down. Routine. At forty, they came up again.

At sixty she turned around, and the way she turned had already told him what he needed.

"Come to the front," she said, in a voice pitched entirely wrong.

He didn't move.

"Would you like to see it?" Brightly, to the room. "How clever one of our candidates has been?"

She's stalling. Somebody above her told her to stall, and the man at the gate who wasn't reading anybody was waiting for a car with district plates.

14:38. He had fifty-one seconds of the sentence before the doors.

Two ways out — the swing door and the stairwell — and there's a fire alarm beside the swing door, and the alarm is the only thing in this building that opens outward for everybody at once.

Running was for men who could be caught. What he needed was for the room to stop being a room with him in it.

He stood, and his chair made a sound, and every head turned.

"I think you're about to do something," he said, clearly, into the cold air, "that you'll have to explain to a hundred and forty people."

He walked down the aisle — not fast, not slow, before anyone had decided what to do about him — and eleven steps short of the door, as Prasad's hand came up for the desk phone, he reached left and broke the glass.

The alarm went off like a machine designed by a committee.

By the time the stairwell doors swung outward, two hundred people on the third floor were standing up and beginning, with beautiful human reliability, to argue about whether it was a drill — and in the middle of them, a boy in a cheap coat moved down the stairs with the crowd and not against it.

If they've got a door for you, Jun said, use the crowd's door.

The pavement was all sun and sirens and people looking up. He was through them in forty seconds and down into the warren of the ninth district, and stopped at the corner of a bakery with a broken sign to press his back against warm brick.

He took out his phone. Bought that morning in the fake name, cash, from a kiosk by the north gate. Activated 13:41.

He had owned the number fifty-seven minutes.

There was one message on it.

The air conditioning was a good reason. Sit down, and stay where you are. Someone is coming who can help you — but first, ask yourself how your number got here.

He looked at it a long time with the city going past him. Then he looked up at the corner of the cross street, where the car with district plates had just pulled in and stopped — not a taxi's stop, not a delivery's stop.

He did not turn around to look at the sound behind him. Turning around to look at a sound was how you told the sound where your eyes were.

"All right, Jun," he said. "You said move. Let's see how far."