A Necromancer's Guide to Clearing a Game Like Tower

Chapter 192: Chapter 192 — Nine Returned I

"Welcome back."

The last of the transport light drained out of the platform, and the return chamber stood there in full, ordinary fluorescent detail. Twenty stretchers along the wall, made up and waiting. Medics in green with trauma kits open at their feet. A line of TRB officials behind the security cordon, lanyards and clipboards and faces that had been ready for anything except the specific thing in front of them.

Nine Challengers standing.

Eleven bodies laid out behind them in two neat rows.

Nobody answered O’Shea. There wasn’t a shape for the answer yet.

Then two figures broke from the officials’ line at the same time.

Ronan came first, moving the way he moved into a breach, fast and low-shouldered, and his eyes were already working before he reached the platform. He counted. James watched him do it, watched his lips move slightly, one to nine, and watched him hit the end of the count and start again, as if a second pass might find more.

It didn’t. Ronan’s jaw set, and he came the rest of the way up the platform steps and looked James over head to boots, then Finn, then Maeve, cataloguing each of them the way a Guardian checks his line after a hit.

Cillian was two steps behind him, and Cillian arrived grinning.

"There he is." His hand was already coming up toward James’s shoulder. "You absolute lunatic, you actually went and cleared the—"

He saw the rows.

His hand stopped in the air. The grin didn’t fall off his face all at once; it went out in stages, the eyes first, then the mouth, and what was left was a young man staring past his friend’s shoulder at eleven shapes on the floor, some of them under cloaks, one of them with a shield laid on its chest.

Cillian knew that shield. He’d drunk with the man who carried it.

He lowered his hand and looked away, at the floor, and said nothing at all.

The medics moved in around them. Recovery teams crossed the platform with scanners and fluids and warming blankets, and one by one they arrived at each survivor and found nothing to fix. The floor-clear restoration had left nine bodies without so much as a bruise. What it hadn’t touched was everything else — Maeve’s armor scorched black across the chest plate, Saoirse down to one dagger with dried blood to her elbows that wasn’t hers, Finn’s shirt stiff and brown down one whole side around a hole with no wound under it, James’s gear split down the back where something had exited that was no longer there.

A medic ran her scanner over Finn twice, frowned at the reading, and looked up at him.

"Sir, you’re — there’s nothing. You’re fine."

"Yeah," Finn said, looking at the rows. "Grand."

Marcus stepped down off the platform.

He crossed to O’Shea, stopped at the regulation distance, and gave the report the way he’d been giving reports for twenty years, straight, level, before anyone had to ask.

"Floor 20 has been cleared. Eleven casualties."

O’Shea took the number without a flicker. He looked past Marcus at the rows, at the shield, along both lines, and James watched the man’s whole posture change in the space of one breath, the welcome going out of it and something older and colder coming in.

He turned to the officials behind him.

"Seal the chamber," he said. "Nobody in or out without my authorization. All non-essential personnel are dismissed as of now." He pointed at a comms officer by the door. "Nothing leaves this room. Not a name, not a number, not a text to your wife. If the casualty list reaches a camera before it reaches the families, I will find where it leaked."

The room emptied by half in under a minute.

They put the nine survivors in a private recovery room down the corridor. Couches, water, a medical station, no windows.

Marcus didn’t go with them.

He stayed in the chamber with the recovery officials and the eleven, and when a lieutenant offered to handle the identifications so he could rest, Marcus took the tablet out of the man’s hands without a word and started at the top of the list.

He walked the rows himself. At each body he crouched, confirmed the face or the guild tag or the equipment registry, and marked the name. Declan O’Rourke. Orla Keane. Nine more from the outer lines, one at a time, no faster for the ones he’d known twenty years than for the ones he’d met at the gate briefing. It took him forty minutes. He didn’t sit down once, and he didn’t hand the tablet back until the eleventh name was marked and countersigned.

The lieutenant took it back carefully, the way you take something heavier than it looks.

In the recovery room, Ronan planted himself in front of James and would not be moved.

"Arms up."

"Ronan, the System restored—"

"Arms up."

James put his arms up. Ronan went over him like a field medic, ribs, collarbone, the back of his skull, pressing, watching James’s face for a wince that never came. He got to the ruined back panel of James’s gear, put two fingers through the split in the material, and went still for a second. The tear went clean through armor plate and underlay, outward, both sides of the spine.

He came back around to the front and looked at James.

"You’re fine."

"I’m fine."

"Nothing under any of that."

"Nothing."

Ronan held his eyes a moment longer. Whatever he was reading there, he filed it away where he filed everything. "Right," he said, and moved on to check Saoirse, who threatened him with the dagger and let him do it anyway.

Across the room Cillian sat down next to Finn, quiet, and handed him a water without being asked. He looked at Maeve, at her hands, which had been scrubbed pink at the medical station and still weren’t clean by any measure that mattered.

"Declan," Cillian said. It wasn’t a question.

"Protecting me," Maeve said.

Cillian nodded slowly and didn’t say any of the six jokes he would normally have reached for, because he’d played cards with Declan on four different floors, and because Orla had once thrown him across a training hall and bought him chips after.

"He would’ve filled out the incident report about it, too," he said finally. "Three pages. Diagrams."

Maeve laughed. It came out wrong and wet, half a sob with edges, and Cillian sat there and let it be both things.

Nobody in the room talked about the rest of it.

Nobody said the word Azrael. Nobody mentioned that James had been dead on the marble for four minutes, or what had floated up off the floor wearing his body, or what he’d done to Alice with her own wings, or the coin, or the fact that the thing that killed eleven of them was currently a name in his interface. Finn caught James’s eye once across the room and tipped his head a half-inch toward the TRB officer stationed by the door, and James returned the smallest shake of his head, and Maeve saw the exchange and looked back down at her water, and Marcus, when he finally came in from the chamber, read the whole room in one pass and said only:

"Debrief’s tomorrow. Sleep first."

That was the entire conversation. Everyone in it understood the terms.

O’Shea came in twenty minutes later.

"The casualty announcement is delayed," he said, without preamble. "Nothing goes public until all eleven families have been contacted in person. That’s underway now. It’ll take a few hours. Until then, you’re ghosts. I’m sorry — you’ve earned better rooms than this one, and you’ll get them, but not tonight."

He paused at the door on the way out.

"What you did is the biggest thing this country has done since the Towers came." He said it flatly, like a measurement. "Eleven families are about to find out what it cost. I intend to get the order of those two facts right."

The door closed behind him.

Eleven cars left the TRB underground exit over the next half hour, unmarked, two officers in each, a sealed folder on every passenger seat.

On the big status board in the operations room, eleven rows sat under a single heading, each name followed by the same amber flag:

NEXT OF KIN — PENDING

In a house in Drumcondra, the television was still on the celebration coverage, a crowd outside Dublin Tower waving flags, when the doorbell went. A woman answered it with the sound of the crowd still coming down the hall behind her, and the two officers on the step introduced themselves quietly, and the first thing they asked, before anything else, was whether she would mind turning the television off.

She looked at their faces. Then she went and turned it off, and came back to the door very slowly, and let them in.

In Athlone, a second team sat parked outside a bungalow for forty minutes, doing nothing, waiting. The woman inside lived alone. Her son was on his way from Galway; the officers had called ahead to arrange it without saying why. When his car pulled in behind theirs, they let him get to the front door first, and only then got out.

Back in the operations room, a comms officer sat watching the board with a headset on, and every so often she touched her console and one amber flag turned grey.

NEXT OF KIN — NOTIFIED

NEXT OF KIN — NOTIFIED

She didn’t announce them out loud. She just changed them, one at a time, across the evening, and the room got quieter with each one instead of louder.

At 9:41 p.m., the eleventh flag turned grey.

She took off the headset and said, "That’s all of them, sir."

O’Shea, standing behind her, nodded once. "Call the press room."

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