A Necromancer's Guide to Clearing a Game Like Tower

Chapter 194: Chapter 194 — The Reason Changed I

The TRB car dropped James at the end of the road a little after two in the morning, because even now, even here, there might be a photographer, and he walked the last stretch to the house with his hood up and his ruined gear in a Bureau duffel over his shoulder.

The kitchen light was on. Of course it was.

He got as far as putting his key in the door. He never got to turn it.

The door was wrenched open from inside, and something hit him at chest height moving at a speed that would have flagged on a Tower scanner. Two arms locked around his ribs. Two dragon wings snapped out to their full span behind her, knocking the umbrella stand over, blocking the entire doorway, and Nyra buried her face in his chest and gripped him like the house was flooding.

”Hey—” James got one arm free and put it around her. ”Hey. Nyra. I’m here.”

She didn’t answer. She didn’t let go either. Her wings stayed spread, curved forward around the both of them, and he could feel her heart going through her back, fast, like something small in a trap.

”Nyra. Look at me. I’m fine.”

She pulled her head back just far enough to check. Her eyes went over his face, one side, then the other. Then she let go of his ribs with one hand, grabbed the collar of his shirt, and yanked it sideways to look at his chest, at the exact spot where, on every broadcast diagram she was never supposed to have seen, the reports had guessed the boss’s final attack landed.

Smooth skin. Nothing.

She checked the other side anyway. Then she checked his arms, shoving each sleeve up in turn, businesslike and shaking at the same time.

”Are you done?” James asked gently.

She wasn’t. She reattached herself to his arm with both hands, wings finally folding down flat against her back, and when he stepped into the hall she came with him like a splint, matching his stride, refusing to occupy any space that wasn’t directly against his side.

The horn caught the hall light, small and pearl-dark above her hairline, uncovered. No hat, no scarf, no hood. Home meant not hiding, and she was home, and now so was he.

He looked down at her properly as they came into the light of the kitchen doorway. She’d grown. Not much — a couple of centimeters, the top of her head finding a new spot against his arm — but enough that his eyes noticed the change before his brain named it. And the clothes were new. A proper jumper, dark green, and actual jeans, instead of the soft mismatched things she’d lived in since the egg. Clothes for going somewhere.

Life had gone on while he was inside. It always did, and it always caught him off guard.

His mother stood by the kitchen table with a tea towel in her hands that she wasn’t using for anything.

She looked at him standing in her hallway, upright, unhurt, home, and her whole body sagged half an inch with the breath she let out. But she stayed where she was, and nodded at the barnacle attached to his arm.

”You’ll get nothing done tonight,” she said. ”She’s been on the stairs since the press conference. Wouldn’t go up. Sat there with the phone in her lap watching the door.”

Nyra’s grip tightened, which was apparently her comment on the matter.

”I’m not going anywhere,” James told the top of her head. ”Promise. I’m going to sit down and Mum’s going to make tea, because those are the rules of the house. You can hold the sleeve. All right?”

A pause. Then a small nod against his shoulder. She transferred her grip from his arm to his sleeve, official and precise, like a handover of custody, and let him move as far as a kitchen chair.

”We’ve started lessons,” his mother said, putting the pot down.

James looked up. ”Lessons?”

”School. Here, at this table, every morning.” She said it the way she announced all major logistics, flat, already done, no committee. ”Reading, writing, sums. She’s flying through the reading. The sums are a war.”

”You’re teaching her yourself?”

”Who else.” His mother poured. ”There was talk of a real school. I looked into it, for about a day.” She set the pot down and looked at him. ”Then I thought about last time.”

She didn’t say any more than that, and she didn’t need to. The words went across the table and James felt his shoulders tighten around the memory. Nyra had gone still in her chair too, eyes down, one thumb rubbing the handle of her mug.

”We’re not doing last time again,” his mother said, quietly and finally. ”So she learns here, with me, where a wing out of place is nobody’s business but this family’s.”

”Mum, that’s — that’s a lot to take on.”

”It’s not just the letters, either.” She sat. ”Half the lessons are her. What she can do. What sets it off, how long she can hold it, what it costs her. Somebody has to sit down and actually work that girl out, James, and the Tower’s had you for months. So it’s been me. Three weeks of it, before I’d let her past the front gate.”

James looked from her to Nyra, who had come back to life and gone very straight in her chair, sitting on something like a kettle coming to the boil.

”Show him,” his mother said.

Nyra let go of his sleeve, which told him how big this was.

She stood up, planted her feet on the kitchen tiles like she was about to lift something heavy, and shut her eyes. Her face folded into a scowl of absolute concentration. For a second nothing happened.

Then the horn sank. It didn’t vanish so much as withdraw, the pearl-dark spiral smoothing down into her hairline until there was only forehead, only hair, only an ordinary kid. The wings went with it, folding in and in and in past the point where there was anywhere left for them to fold, and then they weren’t there at all, and a slightly small girl in a green jumper stood in the kitchen where a dragon had been.

She opened one eye. Then the other. She looked down at herself, confirmed it, and looked up at James with her chin out and her whole face lit like a match.

”Nobody can tell,” she said. ”Nobody. Not even up close.”

”That,” James said honestly, ”is the best thing I’ve seen all week.”

The wings shot back out.

Whump. Full span, knocking a cushion off the chair behind her, the horn spiraling back up out of her hair, all of it undone in half a second of pure delight. Nyra froze. She looked over her own shoulder at the wings, betrayed.

”They came back,” she said, outraged.

His mother didn’t even look up from her tea. ”Excitement. Every time. She held it through two whole practice walks and then a dog looked at her funny outside the shop and, well.”

”It was a big dog,” Nyra said.

”Sit down and breathe, love, like we practiced.”

Nyra sat down and breathed like they practiced, glowering at nothing, and James watched the horn sink again, slower this time, steadier, the wings folding away with control instead of effort. She held it. Ten seconds. Twenty. Then she let it all back out with a huff, because they were home and home meant not hiding, and she took repossession of James’s sleeve.

”Lessons are good?” he asked her.

”Lessons are fine. Reading is easy. Sums are a trick somebody made up to be annoying.” Then her voice shifted into the careful register of sentences she’d rehearsed. ”And if anybody outside ever asks, I’m from my cousin’s family up north and I stay with my auntie now. I did not hatch. Nobody hatches. Saying hatched is—” she glanced at his mother ”—a red-flag word.”

”It is,” his mother agreed peacefully.

”And no wings when I get excited. Even if nobody’s looking. Even under the coat.” She recited it like scripture, and then, quieter, with the fierce pride coming back: ”But I can go outside now. To the shops and the green. On the actual street.”

James looked at her — at this small person who six months ago couldn’t be left near a window in daylight, who now had morning lessons at the kitchen table and a cover story she guarded like treasure and a green jumper for going outside — and something in his chest that had been clenched since the throne room let go by a degree.

”That’s brilliant,” he said, and meant every letter of it, and watched her fight the wings to a draw this time, shoulders trembling, face triumphant.

His mother came to him when the tea was done.

She didn’t ask. She took his face in both hands and turned it to the light, one side, the other, exactly as Nyra had, because Nyra had learned it from somewhere. Then his arms, pushing the sleeves up, her thumbs pressing along the forearms. Then she pulled the collar of his shirt aside and looked at his chest for a long time, longer than anywhere else, at skin the System had made perfect.

James sat still and let her. No joke arrived, and he didn’t send for one.

She stepped back, finally, and folded her arms, and looked at him the way she looked at a bill she’d already read twice.

”Nine came home standing,” she said. ”Eleven came home on stretchers. I watched that man at the podium say it, and then I sat in this kitchen for two hours before your name came through as one of the nine.”

”Mum—”

”How close was I to getting your body instead?”

The kitchen was very quiet. Nyra’s hand went still on his sleeve.

James looked at the table. He had answers ready for reporters, for the Bureau, for the debrief tomorrow, whole architectures of carefully missing information. He had nothing built for this room.

He could lie. She’d let him, probably. She might even want him to.

”Close,” he said.

His mother didn’t move.

”Closer than any floor before it. It went wrong in the last stage, badly wrong, and if a few things hadn’t broken our way—” He stopped, and chose the truest sentence he could afford. ”You came very close, Mum. I’m not going to pretend you didn’t.”

Her relief died in her face, and what replaced it wasn’t shouting. It would have been easier if it were shouting. Her hand came off his arm. She stepped back from him, turned, and stood at the sink with her back to him, gripping the edge of it, and stayed there a moment, and the tap dripped once into the silence.

”Right,” she said, to the window. ”Right.”

She didn’t look at him again until dinner.