A Necromancer's Guide to Clearing a Game Like Tower

Chapter 226: Chapter 226 — Thirty-Five Missed Calls II

"James—"

Her breathing came through before anything else did, fast and broken and wet, the sound of someone who had been crying long enough to have stopped noticing.

Behind her, the noise did not belong to their house. Trolley wheels ran over a hard floor. A monitor beeped somewhere close by at a steady interval. Feet went past at speed, more than one pair, and further off a voice said something over a tannoy that he could not make out, and somebody nearer told somebody else to step back from the doorway please.

"Mum." His own voice came out strange. "What’s happened?"

She tried. He heard her take the breath for it, and heard the breath break in the middle, and the first words came apart before they reached him.

Then she got it out.

"It’s Nyra."

James’s hand closed on the phone hard enough to hurt.

"What happened to her?"

His mother started crying harder, and the explanation came in pieces with the pieces out of order — she went down in the sitting room, she was hot, James, she was so hot, and I couldn’t get her to wake up properly, she wouldn’t wake up—

"What happened?" It came out louder than he meant, loud enough to bounce off the basement walls. "Mum. What happened to her?"

Four heads turned.

Finn was off the table and across the floor before the others had moved, and he stopped a meter away with his hand half up. Maeve had gone completely still with the papers held against her chest. Cillian was sitting forward with every trace of the last ten minutes gone off his face.

"James," Finn said. "What is it?"

James did not hear him, or heard him and could not spare anything for him, because his mother was still trying to get through a sentence.

"Where are you?" he said into the phone. "Mum, listen to me. Where are you right now?"

She told him. It took her two goes.

The Bureau medical wing.

"Is she alive?" The words were out before he could pick better ones. "Is she awake? Mum, is she awake?"

"The doctors are still in with her, they’ve been in with her since we got here, they won’t—" and then it collapsed again into the wet, hitching sound of a woman trying to explain something to her son while standing outside a closed door.

James turned around and held out his hand to Finn.

"Give me your keys."

"What’s happened?"

"The keys, Finn."

Finn looked at his face for about half a second.

The keys were in the air before he had finished reaching for them.

"The estate car," he said. "The one you took to the Bureau in March, you know the gears on it. It’s parked nearest the door."

"Slow down on the road," Maeve said, following him with her eyes. "James. You did not survive that floor to die on the M50 — James—"

"Mum, I’m coming now," he said into the phone, already at the stairs. "Stay where you are. Twenty minutes."

He hung up on his own mother because he could not do both things, and he went up the steps three at a time.

He got the key into the ignition on the second attempt, because his hand slid off it on the first, and he pulled out of the Hale Estate gates faster than the gravel liked.

The car was silent, and that turned out to be worse.

There was nothing to listen to except his own thinking, and his own thinking kept going back to the last time he had seen her — three days ago, at the kitchen table, arguing that seven eights was a made-up number and being wrong about it.

She had been fine. She had been completely, ordinarily fine.

The lights on the quays took an unreasonable amount of time. He gripped the wheel until his fingers ached and made himself stay inside the speed limit through the last set of junctions, because Maeve had been right, and because the version of this night where he wrapped Finn’s car around a bollard on the way to his sister did not bear thinking about.

Twice he reached for the phone to ring back and ask whether anyone had come out yet.

Both times he put it down, because the answer would not change how fast the car went, and because she had nothing to tell him that she had not already told him.

He left Finn’s car at an angle across two spaces by the entrance and did not look back at it.

Inside, his boots were still marked from a fort in another world, and his coat had a spear tear along the ribs, and two security officers came off the wall the moment the doors opened.

"Sir, you can’t—"

The second one had already looked at his face and then at the tear in his coat and then at his face again, and put a hand on the first one’s arm.

"Ganner. That’s Ganner." A scanner came up, beeped, and dropped. "He’s cleared. Let him through."

James was at the reception desk before they finished.

"Nyra," he said. "She was brought in tonight. Where is she?"

The woman behind the desk was already typing. "I’ll need a surname, or a—"

"There isn’t one."

That made her look up, and something in what she saw made her stop asking. She switched screens, and the new one asked for a clearance code, and she entered it, and a loading bar began crossing the screen with the specific slowness of a system that dealt in protected patients.

James could not stand at the desk for it.

He turned around with his hands on the back of his head, turned back, watched the bar move a third of the way, turned again—

"James."

His mother was at the far end of the corridor.

She was on a plastic chair outside a closed treatment room with her phone still gripped in both hands, and she was wearing a cardigan over the top she had clearly been wearing at home, with the buttons in the wrong holes. Her hair was pushed back off her face in the way it got when she had been pushing it back for hours. Her eyes were swollen almost shut.

James left the desk mid-sentence.

She got to her feet as he came, and she started to reach for him, but he was already past that, already at the door, looking at the narrow strip of glass with the privacy screen drawn across the far side of it.

"Where is she? What happened, Mum, what actually happened?"

"She fainted." She said it to his shoulder, because he was still facing the door. "In the sitting room, right in front of me, she just — she went down. And I got to her and she was so hot, James. I couldn’t keep my hand on her. I’ve never felt anything like that off a person, and she wouldn’t wake up properly, she’d open her eyes and they weren’t — she wasn’t there—"

"Why didn’t—" He stopped himself, because he already knew.

"I rang you." Her voice cracked all the way through. "I rang you and rang you. It wouldn’t connect. It just went nowhere, over and over, and I knew where you were, and I knew it wouldn’t connect, and I kept doing it anyway."

Thirty-five times.

"I couldn’t put her in an ambulance," she said. "I couldn’t. Think what they’d have found the second they got her clothes off her, in a public hospital, with whoever standing around. So I rang O’Shea’s office. The detail was at the door in eleven minutes and they brought us straight in here, and they’ve been very good, they have, they’ve been—"

She ran out of the sentence.

James finally turned around and looked at her properly, at the buttons in the wrong holes and the phone she was still holding with both hands like it might ring again, and he made himself ask the only question that mattered.

"How is she?"

His mother wiped her face with the heel of her hand. She breathed in, and it shuddered, and she breathed in again, and got hold of her voice on the second try.

"The doctor said she’s all right."

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