A Necromancer's Guide to Clearing a Game Like Tower

Chapter 195: Chapter 195 — The Reason Changed II

Dinner was shepherd’s pie kept warm since ten o’clock, because some part of her had decided at ten o’clock that he was coming home to eat it.

Nyra abandoned her usual chair without discussion and installed herself in the seat beside James. She ate with one hand. The other held his sleeve, and when he reached across the table for the salt, her hand travelled with him, and when he shifted in the chair she shifted too, a small grim escort service operating at elbow height.

The telly murmured on the counter, and the coverage hadn’t moved on.

"—among the nine survivors, confirmed earlier tonight by Bureau sources: eighteen-year-old necromancer James Ganner, one of the youngest Challengers ever to reach the floor, who—"

The presenter’s panel had his climb footage from months ago running behind them. A man in a suit was calling him one of Ireland’s Floor 20 heroes. A second man was speculating, over a frozen frame of the return light, about what role the Ganner lad might have played in the final phase, given that the Bureau was being so unusually quiet about—

His mother crossed the kitchen and turned it off. Not the volume. The set.

She came back and sat down, and picked her fork back up, and the only sound for a while was cutlery, and Nyra chewing, and the radiator ticking as it cooled.

"The whole country’s celebrating you," his mother said eventually, to her plate. "Strangers in pubs, drinking your health. Lovely for them. They didn’t spend the evening doing sums about which list you were on."

James put his fork down.

"Mum—"

"Look around this house, James." She said it quietly, and lifted her eyes to him, and moved her hand just slightly, taking in the kitchen, the good boiler humming somewhere, the coats on the hooks, the girl welded to his sleeve. "Look at it. The mortgage is nothing. There’s money I don’t touch because I can’t find anything left to want. I work three mornings a week because I’d go mad otherwise, not because we’d starve if I didn’t. Herself does her lessons at this table every morning and walks to the shops like anyone else. You did that. It’s done."

She set her own fork down.

"You went in because we had nothing. I know why you went in, love, I was there for the nothing. But there’s no nothing left." Her voice stayed level and it cost her something visible to keep it there. "So what are you still climbing for?"

Nyra’s hand tightened on his sleeve. She looked between them, and she didn’t understand every corner of it, but she understood the shape.

James sat with the question.

The honest answer had names in it. Alice, who had come off the fifteenth floor to look at him specifically. The Seven, and whatever "Father" meant in the mouth of a fallen angel. Azrael, and a fragment, and a black ring behind his own head that a First Disciple had recognized before she recognized him. A Tower that had opened a door and let him walk into what was waiting behind it. He couldn’t put those names on this table, between the salt and the shepherd’s pie, in front of a small dragon with lessons in the morning.

"The reason changed," he said.

His mother waited.

"It’s not money anymore. You’re right, that’s done, and I’m — I’m glad it’s done. That was the whole plan, and it worked." He turned his glass a quarter-turn on the table, looking at it. "But things happened in there, Mum. Not just this floor. Things in the Tower know who I am now. Powerful things. My class, the weapon I carry — they react to it. One of them came looking for me months ago, on a floor she had no business being on. That’s already happened. It doesn’t un-happen if I stay home."

"So the Bureau can—"

"The Bureau can’t." He said it flatly, without raising his voice. "I wish they could. If I stop climbing, I don’t become safe, I become someone who can’t get any stronger, sitting in a house with the two of you, waiting for the Tower to decide what it wants with me. Walking away doesn’t take me off the board. It just takes away my ability to do anything about it."

His mother listened to all of it with her hands folded in front of her mouth. When he finished, she was quiet for a long moment.

"You know," she said, "your father used to sit in that chair and make exactly that shape of sense."

James went still.

"Different words. Same shape. There was always one more floor that had to be done, one more thing in there that only he could handle, one more reason it would be more dangerous to stop than to keep on." She wasn’t crying. Her voice had the dry steadiness of ground gone over too many times to be muddy anymore. "He was protecting us too. He said it just like that, just like you, and he believed it, and I believed him, because it was true. It was true every single time. Right up until the time it wasn’t."

It’s different, James thought. He didn’t have what I have. He didn’t know what I know. It’s not the same—

The thought stood up inside him with its full architecture, and then he looked at his mother’s face and understood that his father’s version of that thought had stood up inside his father just as tall, with just as many floors of reasons under it, in this same shape of kitchen, to this same woman.

He didn’t say it’s different. He couldn’t make the words leave.

"I can’t force you," his mother said. "You’re eighteen, you’re richer than the bank, and half the country would take your side against me by tomorrow lunchtime. I know all that." She reached across the table and put her hand flat over his. "But you’ll not sit there and tell yourself the money was the only thing this cost me. It never was. Not with him, and not with you."

She squeezed his hand once, and got up, and started clearing plates, because the conversation had gone as far as it could go tonight. The tap ran. Nyra held on to his sleeve.

Nyra followed him through the whole night routine.

She stationed herself outside the bathroom door while he showered, and he could see the shadow of her feet under the door the entire time. She escorted him to the airing cupboard for towels. When he went back downstairs for his phone, she came too, and checked, casually, that his boots were still by the door and the Bureau duffel was still slumped in the hall — that nothing about the house said leaving.

"I’m not going anywhere tonight," James said, on the landing.

"I know," she said, and kept standing there.

"Or tomorrow. There’s a debrief, but that’s an office. With chairs. The most dangerous thing there is the coffee."

"I know."

She scuffed one foot on the carpet. Her wings were out, because it was nighttime in the house, and they moved the way they moved when she was working herself up to something, a slow uneasy flex, like hands wringing.

"Floor 21," she said, to the carpet. "After the office one. You’re going to go in again."

It wasn’t a question, so he didn’t insult her by treating it like one.

"Yeah. Not right away. But yeah."

Nyra nodded, still looking down. Then she looked up, and there was nothing childish anywhere in her face, only the oldest thing in her, the thing that had looked at him from inside the shell before she ever had eyes.

"Will you come back?"

Of course I will.

It was already in his mouth. It cost nothing, it was what you said, he’d said it before every floor since she hatched, and she collected those promises and kept them somewhere and they had all, so far, been true.

Right up until the time it wasn’t.

His father had said it in this house. Same landing, maybe. Same easy weight, to people who kept it long after he stopped being able to make it true. And James had been on the other end of that promise once, and he knew exactly how much it was worth on the day the door didn’t open.

He caught the words before they left, and stood there for a second holding them, and let them go unsaid.

James crouched down instead, so his eyes were level with hers, and took her small shoulder in his hand, wings and all.

"I’ll do everything I can."

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