A Necromancer's Guide to Clearing a Game Like Tower

Chapter 228: Chapter 228 — Still Nyra II

"Do I still look like me?"

"Yes," James said, with nothing in front of it.

Her free hand went up to the horn. She found the new point of it with her fingers, felt along the ridge, and James saw her jaw set.

"Don’t—"

Her eyes were already shut.

The horn withdrew. It sank down into her hairline the way it always had, smooth and complete, and something eased in her face.

Then the wings.

The left one began folding away out of the world, going thin, going transparent at the edges — and stopped halfway, hanging there half-present, while the right wing stayed exactly where it was, entirely solid, entirely visible, not even beginning.

Nyra’s brows pulled together.

She pushed harder.

The half-hidden wing flickered — there, gone, there — and the other one did not move at all, and James felt the heat come up under his palm where her hand lay in his, from warm to hot in the space of four seconds.

The monitor above her shoulder changed its rhythm.

James took her by both shoulders, carefully, and made her stop.

"Nyra. Look at me." He waited until her eyes opened. "You don’t have to hide in here."

Both wings came back all at once, fully, heavily, and lay where they had lain before.

Nyra’s face crumpled.

"I’m sorry — I’m sorry, I think I’ve broken it, I didn’t mean to, I don’t know why it won’t—"

"You didn’t do anything wrong."

The door opened. His mother had heard the monitor from the corridor and came straight across the room to the far side of the bed, and she put her palm flat on Nyra’s forehead, which the machines were already measuring to a tenth of a degree and had been all night.

Nyra reached for her, and she sat down close enough that Nyra could hold her hand and James’s at the same time.

The doctor came in behind her, read the monitor, and read the trace back over the last two minutes.

"Point six of a degree," he said. "It has already stopped climbing." He looked at Nyra rather than over her head. "You tried to hide the wings."

Nyra’s chin came up defensively, and then went down. "It didn’t work."

"No, and I would like you to leave it alone until it does." He wrote something. "Not because you have broken anything. Because your body has just changed shape, and that ability works on the shape of you, and I would rather you did not ask it to do difficult things this week."

"Could that be it?" James said. "The concealment. She’s been holding the wings and the horn down for hours at a time, most days, for months. Could that have caused this?"

"It could." The doctor did not soften it into a no, and he did not inflate it into a yes. "It could also be entirely unrelated, and the truth is that I cannot separate the two on the evidence in front of me. What I can tell you is that she has spent a long time using an ability that hides or reshapes parts of her own body, and nobody on this planet knows what that costs her biologically, because nobody has ever had a patient who could do it."

"So what do you think happened?"

"My working conclusion is that this was a developmental episode driven by her own mana, and not an illness." He turned the tablet toward James one last time. "The heat, the mana readings we took during the surge, the growth, the wingspan, the change in the shoulder structure — those things fit together as one event. They do not fit anything I would treat with antibiotics. What I cannot do is predict it, and the Bureau cannot either, and I have told your mother the same thing."

Nyra had been following the conversation with her eyes.

"Do I have to stay here?" she asked.

"Tonight. We watch the temperature overnight, and if it stays where it is now, you go home in the morning."

She turned her head immediately and looked at James, and did not ask the question out loud.

"I’m not leaving," James said.

Across the bed, his mother went still for a moment, and looked at him — properly, for a second and a half, in a way she had not looked at him since he walked into the corridor.

Then she turned back to Nyra and started fixing the sheet that did not need fixing.

He stayed the night, and it went in pieces.

Nyra fell asleep somewhere before midnight with two fingers hooked into the cuff of his sleeve, which was a thing she had stopped doing months ago, back around the third week after Floor 20 when enough dinners had ended with him still in the house.

Some time after two, James woke because a wing had come across his lap. Neither of them had learned the new reach of it yet, and it was heavier than it looked, and he sat there for a while in the dark with the weight of it on his knees rather than move it and wake her.

His mother slept badly in the chair on the far side of the room. Every time the monitor changed pitch she came awake and looked at it, and nine times out of ten it was nothing, a shift in position or a lead pulling slightly, and she went back down and did it again twenty minutes later.

James watched the temperature line on the screen until it settled into a flat, boring band and stayed inside it for two straight hours.

Then he slept.

In the morning, the doctor cleared her to go home under Bureau monitoring.

The TRB set up the follow-up examinations before they left the building and gave his mother a direct emergency number that bypassed everything, because Nyra could not be walked into a public emergency department if this happened again — not with wings that might come out on their own and blood work that would put her on a research desk in a week.

Nyra went home in a medical-wing shirt three sizes too big, because what she had arrived in no longer closed properly across her shoulders.

She held the collar of it away from her neck and looked at it.

"It’s fine," she said, to nobody.

"It’s temporary," his mother said, in the same tone. "We’ll cut proper slits for the wings this time instead of that nonsense with the buttons, and we’ll do two of everything, one for wings out and one for wings in. You can pick the colours, and if you pick that green again I’ll say nothing."

Nyra chose to be slightly less humiliated about the shirt after that.

She clipped the kitchen doorway on the first day home.

She came through with both wings open because she had come through that doorway with both wings open a thousand times, and the right wingtip caught the frame hard enough to make her stop dead.

She turned around and looked at the door frame.

"It moved."

"The doorway was there first," James said, from the table.

"That doesn’t mean it’s right."

Two mornings later, his mother stood her against the kitchen wall where a pencil mark and a date already sat, and drew a new line above her head.

The gap between the two marks was not subtle.

She wrote the date beside it, and then stayed there a second longer with the pencil still touching the plaster, looking at how far apart the lines were and how few weeks lay between them, before she straightened up and put the pencil back in the drawer.

Nyra examined both marks with great interest.

"So I’m taller," she said. "Does that mean I can stop doing the sums that are for small children?"

"No."

"Then it’s not as good as everyone says."

The lessons went on exactly as before. She still argued that seven eights was a made-up number, and she still rewrote the rules of her own card game the moment it started going against her, and she still tracked James from the sink to the counter to the doorway whenever he moved anywhere near the front of the house.

Her body had changed. Nothing else had.

They worked on the wings in the back garden, where the protection detail already had eyes and nobody was going to be surprised by them.

"Both together," James said. "Slowly. Even."

Nyra set her feet and opened them, and the left one went further than she meant it to, and her whole body turned sideways with it and kept turning.

James caught her under the arms before the flowerbed did.

She was furious about it, and not with him.

"I could do this," she said, into his shoulder. "Before. I was getting good at it. I could hold them both, and I could hold them both and walk, and now it’s like—"

"Like they’re new."

"They are new. They’re bigger and they’re heavier and they go too far."

"Then you learn them again," James said, and set her back on her feet. "You learned them the first time when you were half this size and you’d been alive about a week. Do it again. I’ll catch you."

The concealment came back in pieces over those days, and never all at once.

The horn she got back inside two days, reliably, on demand.

One wing at a time she could manage by the fourth day, either side, held for a minute or so before it began to thin at the edges.

Both wings together stayed out of reach. She could get them most of the way down, and then the tips would stay stubbornly visible, or the whole thing would come apart the moment something excited her — and something always excited her.

That became the new wall in front of her, and she went at it every day with the specific determination of a person who had already climbed one wall exactly like it.

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