Chapter 331 - 322 — Still Standing I

Chapter 331: Chapter 322 — Still Standing I

The last of it was still coming down.

From the top of the Hill it looked like the arena was under a squall — sixty metres of ruined platform white from edge to edge, the broken stumps of ice towers standing up out of it, two black holes torn through the reinforced floor, and over all of it a fine continuous rain of ice as the shards that had been hanging in the air came down and kept coming down.

It struck the floor. It struck the collapsed flooring and rang. It struck the containment field and slid off in sheets.

And through the middle of it, spreading slowly out across the white from underneath a man lying on his back, was a wide dark shape that did not soak into anything.

Alice stood eight metres away with her wings half open and ice falling off them.

James stood over his cousin.

---

`[CHALLENGER BLOOD WRIT COMPLETE]`

`[CORMAC GANNER — DECEASED]`

`[VICTOR — JAMES GANNER]`

The screens at both ends of the ground carried it four storeys high.

For about a second and a half, Croke Park did nothing at all.

Then eighty-two thousand people came off their seats at once, and the noise that hit the containment field was not a cheer so much as a physical event — a solid wall of sound arriving from every direction of the bowl at the same instant, pressing on the outside of the barrier, coming through it flattened and enormous.

James stood in the middle of it and breathed.

He was not sorry.

That was the honest shape of it and he did not have to go looking for it. He had spent two years with this on a public register. He had been dragged in front of forty cameras at eighteen and made to sign for it. He had watched this man stand on a step in the wind a week ago and use a dead brother to get an arena built.

Cormac had wanted a fight where nobody was allowed to give up, and he had wanted it badly enough to ask for it twice, and he had nearly won it.

James looked down at him and felt exactly what he had expected to feel, which was that it was finished.

He let his head go back, and shut his eyes, and let a stadium make that much noise at him for a few seconds.

---

Then the adrenaline went, all at once, the way it always did.

His left leg stopped pretending.

He caught himself before he went down — not gracefully, half a step sideways with the butt of the scythe going onto the ice for support — and his side lit up from the hip to the bottom of the ribs in a way it had somehow not been doing ninety seconds ago.

The hole was still there. He could feel the edges of it moving when he breathed.

His hands had started shaking. Both of them. And there was blood down the whole of his left side, inside and outside the armour, cold now, stuck to him in some places and still running in others.

`[JAMES GANNER — HP: 588 / 2,048]`

The containment barrier came down in sections.

---

TRB personnel came across the ice in grey, quickly and without any ceremony at all.

One team went to Cormac. Two of them knelt, and a third put a screen up, and after about forty seconds somebody spoke into a collar and the confirmation went to the officials at the edge.

Four medics got to James before he had finished deciding whether he could walk.

"Sit down, Mr Ganner."

"I’m—"

"Sit *down*."

He sat down on the ice.

Somebody got the shoulder plate off him and somebody else cut the strapping on his left side and there was a specific noise a person makes when they see a wound and are professional enough not to say anything about it.

"Right. This is going to be unpleasant."

It was.

James put his hand flat on the ground while they worked and dismissed Fossor with the other one, and the summon went down into the broken floor under the arena and the dirt closed over it.

Alice did not go anywhere.

She stood four metres off with her wings still out, watching the TRB personnel move around James, not interfering with any of them and not stepping back either, and nobody in a grey jacket asked her to move.

---

The announcer came back over the stadium system.

"Ladies and gentlemen — the winner, by completion of Challenger Blood Writ — **JAMES GANNER.**"

Croke Park did it again, louder.

The floodlights were full on now and the giant screens had him on both ends, sitting on the ice with a medic’s hands in his side and his hair stuck to his forehead. Phones were up in every stand, thousands of them, a field of small white lights all the way round the bowl. His name was going round the ground in waves, one stand picking it up as another one dropped it.

James got his right arm up.

That was all. He lifted one hand about as high as his shoulder and held it there for three seconds and put it down again.

The reaction to that was almost as big as the result.

---

In the pub off Dorset Street the sound came about half a second after the screen.

A man at the bar went straight up out of his seat with both arms above his head and his stool went over backwards behind him, and about forty other people did more or less the same thing, and two pints went off a table near the window and nobody looked at them.

"*TWENTY!*" he was shouting. "Twenty euro! I *told* you—"

"You’re getting about four back."

"I don’t care what I’m getting back, Ciarán, I care that I was *right*—"

Ciarán was sitting with his phone in both hands looking at a settled bet.

"He had him," he said.

"He did not have him."

"He had him. That bit with all the ice up in the air, if he’d—"

"He had him for about *eleven seconds*—"

"That’s longer than anyone in this room said he’d last," said the woman two tables over, who was now standing on the rung of her chair to see over the crowd. "Nobody in here gave him eleven seconds."

Somebody at the back was already replaying it on a phone with the volume up, and four people were leaning over him, and the argument about whether the wings or the digging thing had done more of the work had started before the broadcast had even cut to the analysts.

---

They came out of Croke Park in a slow river along Jones’ Road with phones out everywhere, and every second person was watching the same eleven seconds.

"—no, because she broke *three* walls and he still got up, that’s the bit nobody’s—"

"The mole. The mole’s the one. Every single time he tried to get away from it—"

"It’s not a mole."

"It’s a mole."

"Did you see when all the ice went up? Did you see the *whole ground* go up?"

"My ma nearly rang the Guards."

Somebody’s homemade sign, **NO SURRENDER**, was going home under somebody’s arm, folded in half, and it was still not clear which of them it had been for.

---

The broadcast went straight into it, the way broadcasts do.

They had the finish up inside ninety seconds. They ran it at full speed, then at a quarter, then frame by frame — the sprint through the gap, the collision, the plate going up in front of Cormac’s chest, and the black blade coming back the other way.

"He built it on the wrong side," one of the hosts kept saying. "Look. *Look.* He puts the best defence of the entire fight up in front of him and the weapon’s already behind him—"

"He’s got a quarter of a second and no information."

"I’m not criticising him. I’m saying that’s the whole fight in one image."

And they said the other thing too, more than once, because it needed saying.

"Everybody in this country had that man written off at twelve to one this morning. Cormac Ganner put the world’s leading Challenger through fifteen minutes of the hardest work we have ever seen him do on camera, and took a Fallen Divinity off her line four separate times, and turned every single thing they broke into a weapon."

"And Ganner still had to finish it himself. That’s the part I’d put a line under. He had Alice, he had the summon, he had every advantage the public thought was going to make this an execution — and it came down to him running at a man in a straight line and taking a blade through the ribs to do it."

**JAMES GANNER WINS BLOOD WRIT — CORMAC GANNER DEAD AT 24**

**"WINTER’S CLAIM": THE SKILL NOBODY SAW COMING**

**82,300 INSIDE CROKE PARK AS GANNER FEUD ENDS IN BLOOD**