Chapter 282 - 273 — Their First Day Out III (Bonus)

Chapter 282: Chapter 273 — Their First Day Out III (Bonus)

James got there four seconds later.

He came round the buggy with his hand already halfway out and his mouth already open — and he saw the two of them, Alice square across the walkway with the bags up like a screen, Nyra behind her breathing out through her mouth, and he understood the entire shape of it before anybody said anything.

He also saw Nyra’s face, which was pink to the ears and braced for exactly one thing.

So he did not do that thing.

"Rabbits," he said. "Any good?"

Nyra swallowed.

"...There’s a grey one."

"Right." He put his hands in his hoodie pocket. "We’re not getting a rabbit."

"I didn’t *ask*—"

"Just heading it off."

She laughed, wetly, once, and wiped her face with the back of her wrist and pretended she was fixing her fringe.

James lifted his chin at Alice.

"Thanks."

Alice lowered the bags.

"If she had opened a wing in the middle of that," she said, "there would have been forty phones out inside a minute, and all three of us on the news by two o’clock. I did it for myself."

James looked at her.

He let it go two seconds longer than the conversation needed.

Alice looked away first, and adjusted her grip on the bags, and started walking.

---

Nyra stayed at her shoulder.

They went thirty feet before she said anything, and when she did she said it to the floor.

"How do you not panic?"

"I did not say I do not panic."

Nyra’s head came up.

"You don’t."

"I have been very frightened," Alice said. "More than once. It does not stop being unpleasant." She stepped round a cleaning trolley. "What changes is whether the fear is permitted to decide anything. It may be present. It does not get to choose. That is the entire skill and it takes years and nobody can do it for you."

Nyra chewed on that.

"Mum says count to ten."

"Counting to ten is a method of doing what I described badly."

"I’m going to tell her you said that."

"I did not say it to her," Alice said. "That was deliberate."

Nyra snorted, and it turned into a proper laugh, and she wiped her face again and did not pretend about it this time.

---

At the top of the escalator Alice went back to the first shop, because the burgundy jumper had been on a two-for offer she had not been told about.

The girl at the till looked up, and spoke to Alice.

"Sorry — do you want to grab a second one? It’s two for thirty on those, you’re better off, like."

Alice’s head turned toward James.

It was pure reflex. Every single transaction she had experienced on this planet had gone through him — his card, his answers, his voice, seventeen hours of a world in which she was an item accompanying a person.

James looked back at her and said absolutely nothing.

Alice caught herself.

She turned back to the counter.

"No," she said. "One is sufficient. Thank you."

"No bother. Have a good one."

"And you."

That was all of it.

Alice walked away from the counter holding her own bag, having been spoken to by a stranger who did not know she had died, or been reanimated, or been sealed under a floor of a tower for three months, or killed eleven people in a throne room, and who would go home this evening having thought nothing about her at all.

She did not look back at the till.

She did put the bag into her other hand and take the handle properly.

---

They got recognised on the way to the car park.

A man about thirty, in a Bohemians jersey with a kid on his shoulders, went past them, slowed, glanced back, and stopped.

"Sorry — sorry, are you James Ganner?"

Nyra went completely still beside Alice.

"I am, yeah," James said.

"Ah, God. Sorry. My young lad was watching yesterday, he was going mental." He shifted the child on his shoulders. "Floor 25. Unbelievable. The whole street was out."

"Cheers. It was a long one."

"Could I — sorry, could I get a photo? He’ll never believe me."

"Course."

James did it fast. In beside him, chin up, one photo, thumbs up for the child, done in under fifteen seconds, because fifteen seconds is a photo and forty-five seconds is a crowd.

"Legend. Sorry now. Enjoy your day."

"No bother."

The man turned to go, and his eyes went across Alice on the way past.

They stopped on her.

He frowned, very slightly. The half-second look of a man whose brain has flagged something and cannot produce the file.

Alice looked back at him. Not away. Not down. Perfectly calm, the way you look at a stranger who has looked at you, mildly and without interest.

"...Sorry," he said. "Thought you were somebody."

"I get that," said Alice.

He laughed and walked off with the child kicking his chest.

Nyra let out a breath that sounded like it had been in there since the escalator.

"He nearly—"

"He did not," said Alice.

She looked at James, and there was something distinctly enjoyable happening at the corner of her mouth.

"You," she said. "Not me. I am the former Floor 20 boss and I have walked through this entire building unremarked, and you cannot reach a car park."

"Yeah, alright."

"I find it very funny."

"Enjoy it while it lasts," James said. "Yesterday’s clip’s at forty million. Give it a fortnight and somebody’s going to make the jump."

"Then I shall enjoy it for a fortnight."

---

They came out into the car park and James found himself walking behind.

Not far behind. Four or five steps. But behind.

Nyra was on Alice’s left, going at about a hundred words a minute, and Alice was answering — properly answering, occasionally arguing, once stopping dead in the middle of the row to make a point with one finger — and neither of them had turned round to check where he was in about two minutes.

He had spent seventeen hours being the thing that held every conversation in this trio together.

He shifted the bags in both hands and let them go on.

Then Nyra saw the cinema sign.

"OH — we should do that. We should do that next time. Alice, we should do the pictures."

"The what?"

Nyra stopped walking.

She turned round in the middle of the car park and looked at Alice with her mouth open in an expression of pure, undiluted disbelief, as though Alice had just admitted she did not know what water was.

Alice’s chin came up immediately.

"What."

"You don’t know what the *cinema* is—"

"I know a great many things you do not—"

"It’s a *cinema*—"

"Explain it, then," Alice said, in the voice of a woman who has decided to lose this with dignity, "instead of standing there like that."

"You sit in a dark room," Nyra said, "with loads of other people, and there’s a screen the size of a *house*, and they show you a story on it for two hours. And there’s popcorn."

Alice absorbed this.

"You pay money," she said. "To sit in the dark."

"YES—"

"With strangers."

"Yes!"

"Watching something that has already happened to somebody who is not there."

"That’s not — you’re saying it *wrong*, you’re saying it in the worst possible—"

"I have described precisely what you described."

James, walking behind with four bags, decided that this was not his fight and that he had never been happier about anything in his life.

"You have to go," Nyra said. "You can’t say it’s stupid if you’ve never been. That’s not *allowed*."

"I have survived without one for a considerable length of time."

"That’s the *problem*—"

"It is not a problem, it is an outcome."

"You can’t judge a cinema from outside a cinema!"

"I have just done so."

"You HAVEN’T—"

They went the whole length of the car park like that.

Nyra had her hands going. Alice had not once said she would not come — she had said it was stupid, and that she had managed without it since before the Normans, and that popcorn sounded like a punishment, and that Nyra’s argument was structurally unsound — but somewhere in among all of it there was not one sentence that closed the door, and Nyra, who was eleven and relentless and had been negotiating with adults her entire short life, had absolutely noticed.

James unlocked the car and started loading bags neither of them had offered to carry.

He straightened up with his hand on the boot lid and looked at the two of them arguing across the roof of the car about popcorn.

Yesterday he had stood on a field with a broken scythe and made a promise he did not know how to keep.

He was not, at present, required for any part of this.

He shut the boot.