Chapter 299 - 290 — Not Today II

Chapter 299: Chapter 290 — Not Today II

There were nine reporters outside the front of the building and two vans.

That was fewer than the launch and considerably more than nothing, and they were not besieging the place — they were standing around the barrier drinking coffee, waiting for one of five specific faces to come out a door.

James turned the car toward the rear.

"You are going round the back," said Alice.

"I am."

"Because of me."

"No."

She looked at him.

"Because I’ve got a two-hour meeting in there," James said, "and if I walk in the front I’m doing twenty minutes on the step first, and I’ll be honest, I’d rather not." He pulled in at the reader. "If you want to walk out the front later, walk out the front later. That’s not mine."

Alice considered that.

"Fine," she said, and got out on her own side.

---

Inside, the building was working.

Two people came past them in the rear corridor arguing amiably about a delivery. Somewhere on the second floor a phone was ringing and somebody answered it in three words. Through the open door of what had been an empty office in June, four screeners sat at four desks with headsets on, going through applications, and one of them looked up, saw James, and went straight back to her screen, which he appreciated more than she knew.

Somebody was still drilling in the residential wing.

They went up to the third floor.

---

Finn, Maeve, Ronan and Cillian were already round the table. Maeve had three windows open across the wall screens.

"Sit," she said. "Nobody talks over the clips."

`FLOOR 25 — CAERLEON`

Baldwin, on the field, in the mud. Wrapped to the throat in red light.

They watched him take a hit that should have folded him and not fold. They watched a man who had been fighting for six hours stop moving like a man who had been fighting for six hours. His shoulder wound stayed open the whole time. It never closed. It just stopped mattering.

`FLOOR 28`

A warrior with a hand’s width of open meat above the knee, planting the foot flat and crossing four metres.

`FLOOR 29`

And this was the one.

Maeve ran it three times.

The red coming up around a dying man’s boots — hesitating — sliding off him. The wounded soldier still standing there. The light going *past* another wounded one, and up the terrace, into a Heavy with full health.

Then the same thing again, in reverse, forty seconds later: the red leaving that Heavy the moment they hurt it, running uphill past everything, into a soldier that had been retreating toward the stairs.

Then the last clip, sixty metres of straight line and an arch.

Maeve stopped it and turned round.

"Right. What we can actually stand over."

She counted it off.

"One. It doesn’t heal. Every host we’ve seen keeps every wound it had. Two. It makes bodies do things those bodies shouldn’t be able to do — Baldwin’s exhaustion, the Floor 28 leg, the Heavy that could suddenly sprint. Three. James’s scythe interferes with it. That’s the only thing in this room that’s ever touched it. Four — and this one’s new since yesterday — it stays active after it leaves a body. It doesn’t need a host to keep existing. It just moves slower."

She looked at James.

"And five. On Floor 29, it was going somewhere. That’s the only conclusion I’ll sign my name to. It wasn’t feeding, it wasn’t defending, it wasn’t picking the strongest thing on the floor. It kept picking whatever was further up the hill, and when the door opened it took the door."

Finn had his boots off the table for once.

"So if thirty starts with that stuff already inside something," he said, "what’s the plan?"

"There isn’t one."

"James—"

"There isn’t one, Finn, I’m not going to make one up for you." James turned his hands over. "The only thing we own that does anything to it is a broken scythe with a thirty-minute timer, and I have to be inside arm’s reach to use it."

Ronan had been quiet the whole way through.

"Can it get into us?"

The room went very still.

"Every host we’ve seen has been a Tower enemy," Maeve said, carefully. "That’s not the same as it being unable to."

"So we don’t know."

"We don’t know."

Ronan nodded slowly and did not ask a follow-up, which was somehow worse.

"Alright, but hang on." Cillian leaned in. "If we just kill everything that could possibly hold it — sweep the floor, no hosts left — does it not just sit there with nowhere to go?"

"It crossed a hundred and twenty metres of open ground on Floor 29 with no host at all," said James. "It went through a sealed exit with no host at all. Killing the bodies doesn’t kill it. It just makes it walk."

---

Maeve turned to Alice.

"You’ve watched all three now. Have you ever seen this before?"

Alice had been standing at the end of the table with her arms folded for twenty minutes without saying a word.

She asked Maeve to run the Floor 25 clip once more, and then the Floor 29 one, and she watched both of them with her head slightly tilted.

"No," she said. "Or — I have not seen enough of it to say what it is. I will not give you a name to make the room feel better."

James asked the question he had been carrying up three flights of stairs.

"The Seven. Did they all use the same kind of Authority?"

"No."

"You’re sure about that one."

"That one I am sure about." Alice’s chin came up slightly. "They were not seven people holding the same weapon with seven different names on it. They were not versions of each other. What one of them could do told you nothing about what another one could do." A pause. "That is why they were dangerous separately."

"Right." James let a beat go. "Wrath."

Something in Alice’s face changed.

Not much. Her hands came apart and one of them found the edge of the table.

"I remember the name," she said.

"And?"

"And a world burning."

Everyone waited.

"That is it," Alice said. "That is all of it. Not a face. Not an Authority. Not whether he is alive, or dead, or in this tower, or has anything whatsoever to do with a red light on a floor I have been on twice." She looked at James directly. "I have a name and I have a burning world and I do not know which came first. If I told you any more than that I would be making it up, and you would build a plan on it."

The room was quiet.

Cillian looked back at the frozen frame on the wall — the red line, halfway across a terrace, going for the door.

"’A world burning,’" he said. "Yeah. No. That’s grand. That’s exactly what I was hoping she’d say."

---

They stopped guessing after that and started on the part they could actually do something about.

Finn got up and drew it on the board with the side of his fist, which was how Finn drew everything.

"Right. Forget what’s in it. Here’s what we already know is true." He put a dot in the middle. "James has to get inside arm’s reach of the thing to strip the red off it. That’s Baldwin, that’s 28, that’s 29. Three for three. And every single time, the thing wearing it is faster than it should be."

"So the four of us hold it still," said Ronan.

"The four of us hold it still," Finn agreed, "for as long as it takes him to get one clean swing, and then again, and then again. That’s not a plan for Floor 30. That’s a drill, and we’re rubbish at it, because we’ve only ever done it by accident."

He started assigning it before anyone argued.

"Ronan takes the front and doesn’t try to stop it — turns it. Me on the side, off whichever shoulder Ronan’s turned open. Maeve calls the window. Cillian breaks the movement, and Cillian, that means small ones, not the big one, because you’ll get one big one and we might need it at minute nineteen."

"I *know*."

"I’m saying it out loud for the recording."

"There’s no recording."

"There’s always a recording."

"And James?" said Maeve.

"James does nothing," Finn said, "until we tell him the thing can’t move. That’s the drill. He doesn’t improvise, he doesn’t take a chance, he waits for the call and then he’s in and out."

James did not love it and could not fault it.

"Tomorrow," he said. "Training hall’s certified now. We might as well use the thing we paid for."

Cillian looked down the table.

"Is she training with us?"

Alice answered before James’s mouth was open.

"I am."

Cillian blinked.

"If something on thirty can actually survive me," Alice said, "I would rather not be learning your habits while it is trying to kill you. I do not know where any of you stand. I have been guessing for three floors."

Finn did not hesitate for even a second.

"Right. Then you’re the thing in the middle." He tapped the dot on the board. "You’re the fastest and the strongest and you don’t get tired. If we can hold *you* still for two seconds, we can hold anything."

Alice looked at the dot.

"Acceptable," she said.

---

They filed out. Cillian was already arguing with Ronan about something in the corridor.

"James."

He stopped in the doorway.

Maeve was still at the table, packing the tablet away, not looking up.

"Are you coming over later?"

James checked the clock on the wall out of pure reflex.

"I have to be home for half five, I told Nyra half five—"

"James." Maeve zipped the case. "I didn’t ask if you were vanishing for the night. I asked if you’re coming over."

"...Yeah. After. Nineish."

"Grand."

"Do you want me to bring—"

"Bring nothing. You always bring the wrong crisps."

---

Alice went out the front.

She did not announce it. At the bottom of the stairwell she simply turned right instead of left, toward reception and the glass and the nine reporters beyond it, and James followed her because his car was that way now.

The cameras came round the second the doors opened.

"James! James — any comment on the Floor 29 footage—"

"Mr Ganner, has the Bureau contacted Guild Zero about—"

And then somebody at the back, louder: "Alice! Alice, has it been confirmed — have you officially joined Guild Zero?"

James kept walking and did not open his mouth.

Alice did not stop either. She turned her head about fifteen degrees toward the voice.

"I have joined nothing," she said.

And kept going.

---

He got home at twenty-nine minutes past five.

Nyra was in the front room with the television on. She heard the door, and James watched her look at the clock on the mantelpiece first, before she looked at him.

Then she looked at him.

Then she went back to the television.

That was the entire transaction, and James stood in his own hall for a second with his keys in his hand feeling something he could not have described if somebody had paid him.

---

Dinner was chicken and rice and nobody said the word Tower once.

His mother wanted to know what the drilling at the guild was for. Nyra wanted to know whether a person could be arrested for a rabbit. Alice was asked her opinion on a programme she had watched forty minutes of and gave a review so comprehensively negative that Nyra defended it for ten minutes purely out of spite.

James ate two helpings and mostly listened.

---

He went to Maeve’s at nine.

She had the fire on and the football on with the sound off and a blanket she refused to share on principle for the first twenty minutes and then shared anyway. They did not talk about Floor 30 once. They talked about her sister’s wedding, and about whether the screening team needed six people or eight, and about a man in the flat above who had taken up the trumpet.

At some point Maeve fell asleep against his shoulder in the middle of a sentence about the trumpet.

James sat there for a while in the light off the television and did not move, because moving would have woken her, and because he had nowhere he needed to be.

---

He got in at half twelve.

The house was dark and warm and the radiator in the hall was ticking as it cooled. Nyra’s door was shut. His mother had left the small light on over the cooker, the way she had every night since he was fifteen.

Alice was in the front room in the dark, in the armchair, wings out, not doing anything at all.

James sat down on the arm of the sofa.

`[FLOOR 30 AVAILABLE]`

He did not open it. He looked at it, in the corner of his vision, hanging over a dark room in Ballymun.

"Wrath," he said.

Alice turned her head.

"Anything else? Anything at all. Doesn’t have to be useful."

She did not answer straight away. She sat there long enough that James thought she had decided not to.

"Not enough," she said.

Then, after another moment, quieter:

"A world burning."

That was all.

James looked at the prompt for a while longer.

Then he closed it, and went up to bed.