A Necromancer's Guide to Clearing a Game Like Tower

Chapter 227: Chapter 227 — Still Nyra I

”The doctor said she’s all right.”

She said it the way people repeat a phrase they have been given to hold on to, and James heard that in it, so he did not let go of anything yet.

He looked past her at the closed door and the privacy screen behind the glass.

”All right meaning what?” he said. ”Tell me what he actually said to you.”

His mother pressed the heel of her hand under one eye.

”She woke up. Only for a minute, but she knew me, and she said my name.” Her voice went thinner. ”And her temperature’s coming down. It’s been coming down since about an hour before you rang. He said she’s not in danger anymore.”

”And what caused it?”

”That’s the part.” She looked at the door too. ”They don’t know.”

The treatment-room door opened.

The doctor who came out into the corridor had his sleeves pushed to the elbow and a tablet held against his side, and he did not begin with reassurance, which James decided he liked.

”You’re the brother.” A glance at the tear in James’s coat and the state of his boots. ”You came straight in.”

”How is she?”

”Stable. That word is doing real work, so let me be exact about it.” He turned the tablet so both of them could see. ”Her heart rate is normal for a child her size. Her lungs are clear. Kidney function, liver function, blood chemistry — all inside the range we would expect, and all of that despite a core temperature that should have done organ damage and did not. There is no infection. No poison. No inflammatory marker consistent with an ordinary fever, and no internal injury we can find.”

”Then why did she collapse?”

”Because her body was busy.” The doctor swiped to a second screen. ”We measured her on admission because that is what we do with everyone. We measured her again two hours later, when the temperature started falling, and I made the technician do it a third time because I assumed we had made an error.”

James looked at the two columns of numbers and did not need any of them explained.

”She’s grown,” he said.

”Four centimetres in height since she came through that door. Her body mass is up, and it is up as tissue rather than fluid. The structure across her shoulders and upper back has changed — the sockets where the wings attach have broadened, and the musculature over them has thickened. Her wingspan measured a hundred and six centimetres on admission and a hundred and nineteen when we checked again.”

His mother made a small sound.

”Understand what I am and am not telling you.” The doctor lowered the tablet. ”She has not become an adolescent overnight. She is still, physically, a child, and everything about her proportions is still a child’s proportions. What appears to have happened is that she has moved through perhaps a year of ordinary growth, possibly two, in the space of about five hours, and her body produced an enormous amount of heat doing it.”

”Is it finished?” James asked.

The doctor was quiet for a second longer than a doctor with an answer would have been.

”I cannot tell you that. There is no medical literature for what she is. There is no other Tower-born child anywhere on record to compare her against, and I have no way of knowing whether what I just measured was a single event that has now completed, or the first cycle of something that recurs.” He said it flatly, because dressing it up would have been worse. ”Anyone who gives you a confident answer to that question tonight is guessing.”

James’s mother folded her arms around herself at the word recurs, and her fingers dug into the wool of her sleeves hard enough to pull the shape of them out.

James saw it, and let a second pass before he spoke.

”Can I see her?”

”Yes. One thing first.” The doctor put a hand flat on the door but did not open it. ”Do not let her use the concealment. Not the horn, not the wings, not any ability she has. We do not know what started the temperature surge, which means we do not know what could start it again, and exertion of any kind is on that list until proven otherwise. If she wants to show you she can still do it, and she will, you stop her.”

James went in alone.

The room was dim and cool, and it smelled of nothing at all. Nyra lay under a light sheet with cooling lines running along both sides of the bed and monitoring patches taped to her chest and temple, and the monitor above her shoulder kept a slow, even rhythm.

Her wings did not fit under her anymore.

One was folded down along the left side of the mattress, and the other lay half across the bed’s edge with its tip hanging over open air, because there was nowhere else for it to go.

James got three steps in and stopped.

Her feet reached further down the bed than her feet reached. That was the first thing, and it was such a stupid, ordinary thing to notice that he checked it twice against the outline of the sheet before he believed it.

Her hand lay open on the blanket and looked bigger against it. The horn above her hairline had lengthened and taken on a harder, more finished edge, no longer a bump under the skin but a shape with a point on it. The dark feathering that had always sat close around the roots of her wings had spread further out across her upper back, past where he remembered it stopping.

It was her. There was not a single feature that was not hers.

Everything was just slightly in the wrong place.

Her eyes opened at the sound of him.

She did not look at herself, or at the machines, or at the door. She looked at his face first, and then dropped to his chest, and then to his arms, checking him over the way she had checked him over in the hall after Floor 20 and every floor since.

”You came back,” she said. Her voice had almost nothing in it.

James was in the chair beside her before she finished.

”I came back.” He took her hand. ”It’s done. Floor twenty-two is finished, and I’m not going anywhere.”

Nyra’s fingers closed around his and stayed closed, and she held on to him for a long few seconds without saying anything.

Then she looked down at their hands.

Her fingers reached further around his than they used to. He watched her notice it. He watched her open her hand slightly, and close it again, measuring.

She pushed herself upright.

She did it too fast, and she did it having forgotten that the wing on her right was six and a half centimetres longer than the wing she had gone to sleep with. It caught the bed rail on the way up and swept a steel tray of dressings and cannulas off the trolley beside her.

James caught the tray against his forearm and put it back without letting go of her hand.

Nyra stared at the wing.

She turned her head and looked along it the whole way to the tip, and her face was the face of someone examining a thing that had been left in her bed by a stranger.

Then she shifted her legs under the sheet, and felt where her knees came to, and where her heels came to.

She looked at James.

”Why am I bigger?”

He did not tell her it was normal. She had already worked out that it was not normal, and lying to her now would cost him more than the truth did.

”We don’t know yet,” he said. ”But the doctor’s fairly sure your body wasn’t sick. It was growing. That’s what all the heat was — it was you growing, very fast, all at once.”

”That’s not how growing works.”

”Not for me it isn’t. Nobody knows how it works for you.”

Nyra thought about that.

”Am I going to keep doing it?”

”I don’t know,” James said.

He watched her wings come in around her as far as their new size would let them, and she looked down the length of her own body under the sheet, at her feet, at her hands, at all of it, and her breathing started coming faster and shallower.

James put his other hand over hers.

”Hey. You’re still Nyra.”

She did not look up.

”Do I still look like me?”