A Necromancer's Guide to Clearing a Game Like Tower

Chapter 148: Chapter 148: The Terms Of Freedom

They took James out through a private exit, not the front doors.

The corridor was too clean and too quiet, the kind of quiet that came from money and control. Bureau guards stood at every turn, and the suppression seals were still live along the walls, humming low enough that he felt them more than heard them.

He could hear the rest of it through the concrete. Reporters and protestors out front, his own name coming through the wall in broken pieces, drones buzzing somewhere above, every camera in the city waiting for one frame of the necromancer who had killed Langford on stream.

He did not give them the frame. O’Shea’s people walked him straight into a Bureau vehicle in a covered bay before anyone outside saw him move.

The door shut.

Thunk.

The seal around his wrist pulsed once, cold against his skin, and that was the whole truth of it. He was out of the cell. He was not free.

The safehouse was a plain residence on a quiet street, Bureau agents on the door and the windows blacked from the inside.

His mother reached him before the door had fully closed.

She held him hard enough to hurt, both arms locked around him, her face pressed into his shoulder. Then she pulled back and held him at arm’s length and looked him over, up and down, like she needed to see every part of him to believe he was actually standing there.

Nyra hovered close to Nana’s side. She watched James with wide eyes and her small hands twisting in front of her, trying to look braver than she was.

”You’re thin,” his mother said. Her voice was not steady. ”They didn’t feed you properly in there.”

”I’m fine, Mam.”

”Don’t tell me you’re fine.” She let go of him and wiped her face with the back of her hand, fast, angry at herself for it. ”I watched them drag you out of that car park. After — after I watched the rest of it. The whole country watched the rest of it.” Her eyes came up to his. ”I watched my son pull dead men up off the ground.”

James did not have a clean answer for that. He did not reach for one.

”I’m sorry I scared you,” he said.

”You raised the dead on a screen, James. In front of everyone.”

”They came into our home.” His voice stayed low. ”They put their hands on you. They took you out of your own kitchen to use you against me.”

His mother went quiet.

She heard the thing he had not said, which was that he was sorry for frightening her and not sorry for one second about Langford, and the two of those did not cancel out, and he was not going to pretend they did.

Nyra stepped in against his leg and looked up.

”Are the bad men gone?” she asked.

”They’re gone.”

”All of them?”

”The ones who came to the house. They’re gone.”

She thought about that. Then the question that actually mattered to her.

”Are you staying?”

James crouched down to her level.

”For now,” he said. ”I’m staying for now.”

His mother turned away and put the kettle on, because her hands needed something to do.

She filled it too full, set it down wrong the first time, and had to do it again. James watched her from the doorway and did not offer to help. Helping would have meant standing close, and she needed the few feet of counter between them for another minute.

”They gave us this house,” she said, with her back to him. ”Strangers walking past the windows all night. A man standing outside the bathroom door.” She set out two cups, then a third for Nyra without thinking about it. ”I keep reaching for things that aren’t where they should be. Nothing in here is ours.”

”I know.”

”Do you?” She turned around. ”You were in a cell. I was in a stranger’s kitchen, jumping every time a car slowed down outside, telling that child you’d be home and not knowing if it was true.”

Nyra had gone still by the table.

His mother saw it, and the edge went out of her at once. She crossed the room and laid a hand on the small girl’s hair, and her voice came back lower.

”He’s home,” she said, to Nyra and to herself. ”He’s home now.”

O’Shea let them have a few minutes before he came in with Niamh and laid the conditions on the kitchen table.

The television in the next room was on with the sound off. Bureau agents moved past the window every so often. O’Shea did not sit.

”Supervised release,” he said. ”Not freedom. I want the difference clear before you nod at anything.”

Niamh read the terms out, flat and precise.

”You don’t leave Ireland. You don’t contact anyone in Ganner Corp’s executive line. You don’t enter the Tower without giving the Bureau notice first. You don’t raise a single undead on Earth unless your life is under direct threat, and the seal will tell us if you do.” She looked up. ”Your mother and the girl stay under Bureau protection. Any breach of any term, and you go straight back into containment.”

”And the Blood Writ,” O’Shea said.

James’s eyes came up.

”You don’t pursue it,” O’Shea said. ”Not Cormac, not the Ganner family, not while you’re wearing that seal.”

”That writ is signed.” James’s voice was quiet, but it had an edge under it now. ”Death decides it. He stood in front of the cameras and made it public. I can’t just walk away from—”

”You can stand still, which is all I’m asking.” O’Shea put both hands on the back of a chair and leaned on it. ”Listen to me. This morning I arrested a line of people for letting England reach into this country. Every one of them, and everyone protecting them, is waiting for you to do something stupid so they can stand up and say my release was a mistake. You go hunting a Ganner right now, in this climate, and you hand them the rope yourself. The writ waits. It’s still there when this is survivable. Hunt it now and there won’t be a you to fight it.”

James held his stare for a long moment.

He did not like it. He did not pretend to.

”Fine,” he said.

When they were done, James saw for the first time how the world was talking about him.

He turned the television sound back up, low, and his phone had been returned to him with the seal’s monitoring built into it.

The headlines did not agree on what he was.

”—the Bureau confirming this morning that the events at the Ashford Grand are now part of an investigation into foreign interference—”

”—James Ganner released under supervised conditions, a decision already drawing sharp criticism from—”

”—the United Kingdom continues to deny any official role, calling the delegate’s actions those of one man—”

”—Ganner Corp has welcomed the investigation while reiterating that its former chairman acted alone—”