A Necromancer's Guide to Clearing a Game Like Tower

Chapter 280: Chapter 271 — Their First Day Out I

James came down the stairs at half nine expecting toast.

Nyra was standing in the hall with her shoes on.

Not near her shoes. Not carrying them. On, laced, and she had a jacket over her arm and she was facing the front door like a greyhound in a trap, and when the third step creaked under him she spun round so fast her hair went with her.

"You’re up."

"I’m up."

"You said we’d go out."

"I said we’d see—"

"You said *we’ll see* and that means yes, you always say we’ll see and then it’s yes, Mum says it too, and it was last night so it’s still—" She stopped, took a breath, and started again at a slightly more survivable speed. "Are you ready? Because I’m ready. I’ve been ready. Are you having toast? How long does toast take?"

"Nyra."

"Because if it’s the toast I can do the toast."

James rubbed his face.

Alice was in the kitchen doorway.

She was not standing near the door. She was not holding a coat and she had not said one single word about the morning. She was leaning against the frame with a mug of tea she was not drinking, in a grey jumper that belonged to his mother and a pair of jeans that were a fraction short in the leg, and her shoes were on too.

She had been standing there long enough for the tea to stop steaming.

James looked at the shoes. Then at her.

"Sleep alright?"

"The radiator knocks."

"It does that."

"Twice," Alice said. "Then it stops. It is not a mechanism, it is a personality."

She still had not mentioned going anywhere.

"Right," James said. "Ten minutes."

Nyra made a noise like a kettle.

---

It genuinely did need doing.

Alice owned nothing. Not in the way people say they own nothing when they mean they have too little of it — she owned the clothes she had been reanimated in, which were the clothes she had died in, and which were currently in a bin bag in the back room because there was no version of that outfit anyone could wear down Swords Road. Everything on her right now belonged to somebody else and had been handed to her that morning by his mother.

And Nyra had been in this house for eight days straight while James was inside a tower on the other side of a portal, watching him on a nine-inch television in the kitchen.

So. Out.

---

They did the concealment in the hall.

Nyra went first, because Nyra was always going to go first.

She planted her feet on the carpet, rolled her shoulders back twice, and breathed out slowly through her nose the way she had been practising for three weeks. Her hands opened and closed once. Her eyes shut.

The horn went down first, sinking into her hairline until her fringe lay flat over the place it had been. Then the wings, drawing in from the tips, slow and even, both of them together, folding smaller and smaller until there was nothing behind her but the back of a jacket.

She held it, opened her eyes, and stood there breathing slightly harder than she had been thirty seconds ago.

"Done," she said.

"That’s good," James said. "That’s better than Tuesday."

Alice came off the wall.

Her wings were gone before she finished the second step. The halo thinned out behind her head at the same time, cracked ring going to nothing, and she did not stop walking, and she did not close her eyes, and she reached past Nyra to take her jacket off the hook while the last of it was still happening.

Nyra stared at her.

She stared for a good four seconds, jaw set, with an expression James recognised from every parents’ evening he had ever been dragged to.

Alice noticed.

"Three weeks," she said, putting an arm in a sleeve. "You have been practising for three weeks."

"So?"

"So I have been doing it since before this island had a name on anyone’s map." She shrugged. "It is not a talent. It is repetition. You are irritated by the wrong thing."

"Mine’s fine, anyway," Nyra said. "Mine was fine. Mine’s *completely* hidden, it’s been completely hidden this whole—"

Alice’s eyes flicked up to her hairline.

James followed them.

A single dark point, about a centimetre of it, was easing up through the hair above Nyra’s left eyebrow.

"Nyra."

"WHAT."

"Your head."

Nyra’s hands went up. She flattened her fringe down over it with both palms like a woman holding a lid on a pot, made a strangled sound, screwed her eyes shut, and the horn slid back down out of sight.

She lowered her hands very slowly.

"That was the door," she said. "There was a draught."

"There was no draught," said Alice.

"There was a *draught*."

James opened the front door. It was, in fact, a beautiful morning.

---

He picked Omni.

It was twenty minutes up the road, it was indoors, and it had enough shops under one roof that they would not have to walk the length of a city with Alice in borrowed jeans. Somewhere with a car park and a food court and doors you could leave through quickly if you had to.

He wore the flat grey hoodie and a cap. Nothing clever. Anything cleverer would have looked like a man in disguise, and a man in disguise is the most recognisable thing in a shopping centre.

Alice, on the other hand, needed no help at all.

Forty million people had watched a Fallen Angel with a four-metre wingspan and a broken halo catch a crown prince’s blade on live television yesterday afternoon. Nobody in Santry was going to look at a woman in a borrowed grey jumper and a pair of Dunnes jeans and make that leap.

Probably.

He kept an eye out anyway.

---

The place was heaving. Saturday morning, school holidays, the whole of North Dublin apparently doing one shop.

James watched Alice walk into it.

She did not gawp at the doors. She did not stop for the escalator, or the lights, or the lad with the trolley of phone cases. She had lived through empires and had a fairly clear grasp of what a market was.

What she did do was walk with her hands unoccupied and her weight slightly forward, the way she had walked onto a battlefield yesterday.

A woman with a buggy cut across her path and Alice broke stride to let her by.

Two teenagers went past on the left arguing about somebody called Dara.

A man in a Dublin jersey looked at her for exactly as long as men look at strangers and then looked at the sign above Boots instead.

An older woman came the other way, saw her coming, said "sorry, love," and stepped round her.

Nobody stopped. Nobody knelt. Nobody drew anything. Nobody stood waiting for a boy with a scythe to tell her what she was allowed to do next.

By the time they got to the top of the escalator Alice’s shoulders had come down, and her hands had gone into the jumper pocket, and she was walking the way the rest of the crowd walked.

"Alright?" James said.

"They are extremely loud."

"That’s Saturday."

"It is not a criticism," Alice said, and kept walking.

---

He had a plan for the clothes, which was to get four practical outfits, something warm, and out inside forty minutes.

He got as far as holding up a plain black jacket.

"No."

"It’s—"

"No."

"You haven’t looked at it."

"I have looked at it," Alice said. "It is what a man buys when he wishes to stop buying. I am choosing them."

James lowered the jacket.

He had the next sentence loaded and ready — *look, just take these for now and we’ll* — and he heard it in his head before it got out, and he heard exactly how it sounded, and he put it away.

"Right," he said instead. "Fair. Then here’s the number."

He told her the number.

Alice’s eyebrow moved.

"That is a great deal."

"It’s a day’s clothes and it’s not really the issue. Guild Zero cleared Floor 25 yesterday. Money is genuinely not the thing to worry about here."

"How is it acquired?"

"Sorry?"

"Money. Here." She was looking at the rails, but she was not looking at the rails. "How do people obtain it. What is it exchanged for. And do you expect it returned."

"People work. Or they clear floors, in my case, which is the same thing with worse hours." He shrugged. "And no."

"Why not."

"Because you’ve been on Earth for about seventeen hours and you own a bin bag. Somebody has to start you off. That’s it, that’s the whole reason, it’s not a gesture."

Alice considered that for a moment.

"I will regard it as a debt."

"You can regard it as whatever you like."

"I am telling you what I am regarding it as," Alice said, "so that you do not later discover you assumed otherwise."

"Noted."

She turned to the rail.

---

Nyra lasted eleven seconds before she inserted herself.

"That one."

It was pink and it had a cartoon fox on it.

Alice moved past it without her eyes changing direction at all, as though the entire garment had failed to reach the threshold of light required for vision, and took down a long charcoal coat instead.

"You’ll boil in that."

"It is October."

"It’s *August*."

"Then I will boil in it in October," Alice said, "and be correct in advance."

She built the rest out of three things, and she built them fast, which surprised James. Dark, straight, expensive-looking without being loud. A high-necked black top with long sleeves, which he understood about four seconds later — long sleeves, high back, nothing that would sit awkwardly if something ever came out through it in a hurry. Charcoal trousers with an actual crease. A deep green shirt-dress she held against herself in front of a mirror for slightly longer than she held anything else.

She looked, in the mirror, like a woman who ran something.

"That’s very serious," Nyra said, from a beanbag she had commandeered. "It’s all very serious. It’s like you’re going to a meeting about a *war*."

"I have been to meetings about wars."

"Well you’re not now, you’re going to Santry."

Alice ignored her.

Ten minutes later Nyra got up, pulled something off the end of a rail without any apparent thought, and held it out.

It was a burgundy jumper. Soft, plain, slouchy, and about as far from a meeting about a war as it was possible for a garment to be.

Alice looked at it.

"No."

"You didn’t—"

"No."

Nyra put it back on the rail with enormous dignity and went back to the beanbag.

Four minutes after that, when Nyra was fully occupied with a rack of sunglasses, Alice walked past the end of the rail, took the burgundy jumper down, and went into the changing room with it.

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