Chapter 318 - 309 — The World Kept Climbing II

Chapter 318: Chapter 309 — The World Kept Climbing II

The colours were wrong before James understood why they were wrong — the crown holding the south, the north lost, everything reversed. They had sent Baldwin’s reserve north during Floor 23 instead of holding it, and the whole northern half of the map had gone a different colour and stayed that colour, and the final war had happened somewhere Team Zero’s final war had not.

The presenter mentioned China’s Baldwin as a fifth version and put it up briefly, and the thing James’s eye caught on that one was a single unit marker with a name on it he knew.

Morcant.

Alive at the end of the war. Sitting east of the capital on the crown’s own side, whole, with an army under him.

James had killed him on a road with a lightning strike and a formation and eleven minutes of very hard work.

---

He stood there and did not move for the whole segment.

It was not the rankings. The rankings had bothered him for about ninety seconds and then stopped.

It was the four maps.

On Floor 23 they had spent an entire evening in a tent working out which two of three settlements to save, as though there were a right answer buried in the problem and they were failing to find it. Maeve had told him then that there was not. He had believed her at the time in the way you believe something you have been told rather than something you have seen.

Now it was on a screen in his own building.

Four parties. Same kingdom, same princes, same five floors. Every single one of them had saved something the others had lost, and lost something the others had saved, and there was not one map up there that was a better version of the others.

There was one thing common to all five, and the presenter did not spend long on it, because it had been public for a year and nobody had ever explained it: a red light under the palace, in every recorded version, whichever prince won.

She moved on. James let her.

---

She moved on to the frontier.

South Korea and the United States, both through Floor 29. Neither had publicly registered entry to Floor 30.

James’s expression did not change and he did not say anything and he did not move away from the screen for a while after the segment had gone on to something else.

He knew what his Floor 30 had been.

He also had four maps of Caerleon sitting in his head from about ninety seconds ago, which made it very difficult to assume that anybody else’s Floor 30 was going to be his.

Maeve came and stood beside him.

"Anything from either bureau on entry dates?"

"I already looked. Nothing." She folded her arms. "The Koreans don’t announce until they’re inside and the Americans announce whatever they feel like."

"Right."

"We can’t plan somebody else’s floor, James."

"I know that."

"Just checking you know it."

---

The recruits were watching the same board from the other end of the building.

James saw it on the way down — six or seven of them standing in the corridor outside the smaller hall, still in training gear, looking up at a wall screen with the same six lines on it.

One of them, a woman with her hair tied back and a sleeve of the training kit rolled up, was not looking at the top line at all.

She was looking at the third one down, and then at something on her own phone, and then back up.

Fourteen. Her own record was fourteen.

James went past without stopping and without saying anything to any of them, because there was nothing he could have said that would not have been a speech, and because Ronan and Cillian had built a fortnight of orientation and six months of programme and none of it needed him standing in a corridor being inspirational.

---

He got home at seven.

The kitchen was going. His mother had the radio on and there was something in the oven, and Nyra was at the table with her books out and a pen in her fist, halfway through an argument.

"—it’s *not*, because you take it off the other side first, that’s the whole—"

"Then you have subtracted it twice," said Alice.

"I have NOT—"

"You have. Look at your own line."

James put his keys down and went to the fridge and it took him about fifteen seconds to notice.

Nyra’s hair was flat.

She was leaning halfway across the table jabbing a pen at a page with her whole body involved in the argument, elbows out, one knee up on the chair — and there was no horn coming out of her hairline and there was nothing behind her at all.

She was not doing anything about it. Her feet were not planted. Her shoulders were not up. She was not breathing carefully. She had one hand in her hair scratching at it while she argued, and the concealment was simply there, the way a coat is there, underneath somebody having a row about arithmetic.

The television in the front room changed programme by itself and went loud for about two seconds.

Nyra jumped.

Nothing came out.

She did not even look up. She said "*Mum*, the telly," and went back to the page, and there was still nothing there.

James stood at the open fridge with a carton in his hand.

Six weeks ago she had planted both feet on the lino and shut her eyes and screwed her face up to hold it across a hallway and back, and had let it go herself before it broke, and he had told her that was better.

She had been holding this for however long it took to eat, do half a page of maths and start a fight, and had not thought about it once.

Alice’s eyes came up and found him.

She did not say anything. She looked at him, and then at Nyra, and then back, and lifted one eyebrow perhaps a millimetre before returning to the page.

"You have still subtracted it twice."

"OH MY GOD."

Then Nyra caught James standing there with the fridge open.

She looked at him. She worked out what he was looking at. And her whole face changed.

"How long have you been *there*?"

"Long enough."

"I’ve had it since half four."

"Have you."

"Since *half four*. Since before dinner. And I did the whole—" she waved at the table, at the books, at the argument, at everything, "—all of that, and I didn’t even— I forgot. I actually forgot I was doing it."

She was extremely pleased with herself. She was so pleased with herself that she pushed the chair back and stood up to be pleased with herself properly.

The horn stayed down.

"Alright," said James.

"*Alright?*"

"It’s very good."

"It’s *class* is what it is."

"Sit down and finish your sum," said his mother, from the hob, "before it goes cold and I have to hear about that as well."

---

He looked at the board again that evening, on his phone, on the stairs, for no reason he could have defended.

Ireland thirty-one. South Korea twenty-nine. United States twenty-nine. England and China on twenty-eight.

The gap was still theirs. It was two floors instead of six, and it was going to be two floors for as long as they left it at two floors.

He scrolled past it and the feed went into ordinary business coverage — Challenger equipment contracts, a licensing dispute, somebody’s quarterly figures against last year’s, all of it riding the international race the way everything did now.

**GANNER CORP** was in a list of six names in the third paragraph.

James’s thumb stopped.

It sat there for about two seconds, at the top of the stairs, in the dark.

Then he kept scrolling.

---

He did the normal things instead, because they were the things he could actually do.

He put a note in the group about equipment: Ronan needed a shield and had needed one since Floor 29 and was not going to order it himself. He looked at what thirty-six thousand credits bought that was worth buying and did not buy anything. He wrote *Fri or Sat?* under it and got a *fri* from Finn inside a minute and nothing at all from Cillian.

`[FLOOR 32 AVAILABLE]`

He did not open it. He would open it at the table with everybody there and a screen up, the way they did it now.

He was putting the phone face down on the bedside locker when the tracker pushed a notification through on top of everything else.

`SOUTH KOREA — FLOOR 30 ENTRY REGISTERED`

James looked at it.

He did not know what was in their Floor 30. Nobody did, including them, and he had four maps of Caerleon in his head that said assuming anything was a mistake.

He looked at the notification for a while.

Then he looked at his own interface, and the one line sitting closed in the corner of it, and put the light out.