A Necromancer's Guide to Clearing a Game Like Tower

Chapter 281: Chapter 272 — Their First Day Out II

She came out in it.

It suited her completely. It knocked about eight hundred years off her. James, who had learned some hard lessons this week about which observations were worth making out loud, said nothing whatsoever.

Alice looked at herself in the mirror for two seconds, went back in, came out in her own clothes, and put the burgundy jumper on top of the pile in her arms without comment.

Nyra’s head came round.

She did not say anything either.

She simply looked at the pile, and then at Alice, and then went back to the sunglasses with the serene, glowing, insufferable expression of a person who has won an argument that was never formally held.

James caught it, and pressed his knuckle against his mouth, and had to look at the ceiling for a second.

---

Nyra found her own thing on the way to the till — a small enamel pin of a bee, ninety cents, on a card by the register — and turned round and held it up to James without one word of preamble, because that was simply the mechanism by which the world worked.

James got his card out.

Alice watched the whole exchange. The holding up. The lack of a question. The card coming out.

”Twenty-four hours,” James said, to nobody. ”Yesterday I was fighting a crown prince. Today I’m bankrolling two people’s wardrobes and a bee.”

”It’s ninety cent.”

”It’s the principle. It’s the *speed*.”

”You said the money wasn’t the thing to worry about,” Nyra said.

”I’ve created a monster.”

He paid.

---

The girl behind the till handed the bags across the counter.

Alice’s hands did not come up straight away.

It was half a second, maybe less — the bags hanging there over the counter in the girl’s hand, and Alice looking at them, at three paper bags with string handles containing a coat, some trousers, a green dress, a black top and a burgundy jumper that she had chosen herself, with her own judgement, for no reason except that she wanted them.

Then she took them.

She looked inside the top one once, folded the handle over in her fist, and when James put his hand out for them she moved them to her other side and walked off.

---

Food was Nyra’s jurisdiction and she claimed it before they had finished the escalator.

”You don’t know what any of it is,” she informed Alice.

”I have eaten food.”

”You’ve eaten *shepherd’s pie*, once, at midnight.”

”Which was food.”

”You don’t know what’s good,” Nyra said, with the crushing certainty of an eleven-year-old with local knowledge, and marched them to a table.

Alice sat down with the air of a woman being professionally insulted.

What Nyra came back with, in the end, was a portion of chips with garlic sauce on them.

Alice inspected it.

”What has been done to these.”

”Garlic sauce.”

”Why.”

”Because it’s *good*, oh my God, just—” Nyra pushed the tray an inch closer. ”Just try it. One. You have to actually try it.”

Alice picked one up with two fingers, examined it from the side, and ate it.

Her face did something for about a quarter of a second.

Then it stopped doing it, and went back to being a face that had watched three empires fall, and she set her hand down on the table and did not reach for a second one.

Nyra sat bolt upright.

”You *liked* it.”

”It was adequate.”

”You did the thing! You did the face, you did the little—”

”I did nothing of the kind.”

James, who had absolutely seen the face, took a drink of his Coke and kept his eyes very carefully on the middle distance.

Alice looked at Nyra. Then at James.

Then at James’s extremely neutral expression, which was, by some distance, the most incriminating thing at the table.

”You are both insufferable,” she said, and took another chip.

---

Which was, of course, when James reached over and took one.

He did it without thinking about it in any way. It was the same hand movement that had been taking food off Finn’s plate since they were nine, off Cillian’s since Floor 12, off Nyra’s every day for a year, an entirely unconscious action performed by a man mid-sentence about parking.

Alice’s hand came down on his wrist.

Not hard. Not fast, even. It simply arrived, closed, and stopped everything below his elbow from participating in the world.

James looked at her.

Alice looked back.

”Whatever it was you promised me on that field,” she said, ”I did not understand it to include this.”

She let go.

James withdrew his hand and his chip stayed where it was.

”Fair enough.”

There was a pause of perhaps five seconds.

Then Nyra leaned across the table, took a chip off Alice’s tray, and got it about halfway to her mouth before she realised what she had done.

She froze.

Chip in the air. Eyes enormous.

Alice turned her head and looked at her.

The food court carried on around them — a tray going into a bin, somebody’s child shrieking two tables over, a machine grinding coffee.

Alice held the look for four full seconds.

Then she turned back to her tray and picked up a chip of her own and ate it.

Nyra ate hers, very quickly, before anything could be reconsidered.

James did not say a word. He did, however, look at Alice.

Alice met his eye, and the message in it was so clear it may as well have been printed: *do not.*

James picked up his Coke.

---

Nyra talked for the rest of the meal, and by about the third question she had stopped talking to James at all.

”When you fly with them, is it — do you feel it in your back or in your chest? Because mine’s in my chest and I thought that was wrong.”

”Your back, when you are learning. Your chest, when you have stopped fighting them.”

”So mine’s *right*?”

”Yours is early.”

Nyra took that as a win.

”Have you ever hit something? Bringing them out. Have you ever, like, actually broken something.”

”Yes.”

”What?”

”A pillar.”

”A *pillar*—”

”Load-bearing,” Alice said, and ate a chip.

”WHAT HAPPENED—”

”Something else.”

”That’s not—”

”That is all of it you are getting.”

Nyra tried three more angles on the pillar and got nothing off any of them, and did not appear remotely discouraged, and James sat back with his drink and watched an eleven-year-old cross-examine a Fallen Divinity about property damage.

---

They came out of the food court and headed down the far side, Nyra now walking on Alice’s right instead of at James’s elbow, which she had done since she was old enough to walk anywhere.

Then she saw the pet shop.

There were rabbits in the window.

”OH—”

She was four steps ahead before James’s hand closed on nothing, moving fast, up on her toes, and James saw the exact moment it went.

She stopped dead.

Her shoulders locked up around her ears. One hand came up and pressed flat against the side of her head, fingers spread into her hair, and she did not turn round.

Under the back of her jacket, on the right side, the fabric pushed up and out into a shape that had a joint in it.

A dark point came up through the hair beside her knuckles.

Her breathing went short and high and completely useless.

James was eight or nine feet back with a woman and a double buggy between him and her.

Alice was two feet away.

Alice did not call out. She did not grab her.

She stepped across in front of Nyra, turned her shoulders square to the walkway, and lifted the three shopping bags in her right hand so they hung at exactly the height of a small girl’s back, and in half a second she had put a wall of paper and coat and body between Nyra and every pair of eyes coming up that side of the concourse.

”Stop,” Alice said, very quietly.

”I can’t — it’s coming, it’s—”

”You are pushing. I can see you pushing. Stop pushing.”

”If somebody *sees*—”

”Nobody has seen. Look at me.”

Nyra’s eyes were wet and enormous and going everywhere over Alice’s shoulder — the buggy, the rabbits, a man on a phone, a security guard forty feet off looking at his own shoes.

”Not there,” Alice said. ”Here. At me.”

Nyra looked at her.

”Now stop trying to make it go. You are frightened, so your body has asked you a question, and you are answering *no* while holding it shut. It will not close while you are lying to it.” Her voice did not rise once. ”Breathe out. All of it. Slowly.”

Nyra tried to force it instead.

The wing pushed further, hard enough to tent the whole right side of her jacket, and she made a small broken noise.

”Out,” Alice said. ”That is all I asked for. Out, slowly. Again.”

Nyra breathed out.

Her shoulders came down about an inch.

”Again.”

She did it again.

The dark point beside her fingers sank back into her hair.

”Again.”

The shape under her jacket eased, and folded, and went, and the fabric fell flat against her back.

Nyra stood there shaking slightly, entirely human, in the middle of a Saturday crowd that had walked past the whole thing without one single person turning a head.