Chapter 333 - 324 — Back to Work I

Chapter 333: Chapter 324 — Back to Work I

Adrian Ganner was at his desk by twenty past seven.

The Ganner Corp floor was quiet at that hour and stayed quiet after the rest of them arrived, because it was that kind of floor — carpet, closed doors, nobody’s voice carrying. There were three screens on the wall at the far end of the open area and all three of them were still on it, muted, with the ticker running along the bottom.

They were showing the post-fight coverage.

He watched about ninety seconds of it standing in the doorway with his coat still on.

They had James Ganner sitting on the ice with a medic’s hands inside his armour, and then James Ganner getting to his feet, and then James Ganner lifting one hand to eighty-two thousand people for three seconds while the whole stadium came apart around him.

Adrian looked at that for a while.

Then he told the nearest person to turn it off, and to take the printed headline off the board by the lift on his way past.

**CORMAC GANNER DEAD AT 24.**

---

He was not afraid of James Ganner.

That was the thing that would have surprised the entire country, if anyone had asked him. Half of Ireland had spent the night deciding that the man was untouchable, and Adrian had watched the same footage they had and had come away with nothing of the sort.

Cormac had signed. Cormac had gone out on a step in the wind a week ago and asked for it twice, with cameras on him, and he had been told by three separate people in this building that it was a stupid idea. He had lost a fight he had chosen.

That was Cormac’s.

And James Ganner had put a blade through his brother’s chest and then stood over him and raised his hand for the crowd.

That was James’s.

Adrian had stood eighteen inches from that boy in a hotel lobby with a room full of people watching and he knew precisely what he was, and nothing that had happened on a frozen platform yesterday afternoon had changed one single line of it.

He did not make a statement. The company had already said everything it was going to say about the writ, and saying more now would tie Ganner Corp to a dead man.

He did not send anything to James, either. There was no version of that which was not pathetic.

And he did not do what Cormac had done, because doing what Cormac had done would have made him look foolish rather than dangerous, and Adrian had spent two years learning the difference.

He sat down, opened his terminal, and requested a file.

---

It was an old one.

It had gone quiet eighteen months ago, at about the same time as everything else in this company had gone quiet, and the last substantive entry in it was a note from his father to a man in England that Adrian had read more times than he would admit.

*Nearly ready. A working unit inside the month. His Majesty will be pleased if it performs as promised.*

Adrian had never publicly denied that Ganner Corp held an England-linked contract. He had been asked directly, twice, and both times he had said that the company did not comment on client relationships, and both times every journalist in the room had understood him perfectly.

He did not open the technical sections.

He sent one request to the two people who were still cleared for it.

*Full status report on the prototype programme. Current physical state, current legal position, current contractual position, what survived the audits, and what would be required to move it again. I want it complete and I want it accurate. Nothing goes outside the three of us.*

Then he closed the terminal and got on with his morning, and did not look at the screens again.

---

James woke at ten past nine and immediately regretted every decision he had ever made.

The wound in his side had stiffened overnight into something with an opinion. The bandage had gone tight across his ribs and pulled at the dressing every time he breathed properly. His left thigh had three separate places in it that did not like being asked anything. Both his hands ached, particularly the right one, which had spent fifteen minutes taking impacts through a sword. His mouth was a dead thing.

He got as far as sitting up and had to stop and do it again.

And he was in a spectacular mood.

That was the part that nobody who had not been in it would have understood. The pain was one thing. The other thing was that there was no longer a document on a public register with his name and Cormac Ganner’s name on the same line, and there had been one every single morning for two years, and this morning there was not.

He got up, and it took a while, and he did it grinning.

---

The phone was worse than the ribs.

He gave it about forty seconds. It was still the only story in the country — clips, breakdowns, a frame-by-frame of the last four seconds with arrows on it, somebody’s slowed-down version of the whole arena rising off the floor at once, three separate videos titled variations of WHAT IS WINTER’S CLAIM.

He watched two seconds of himself being elbowed in the shoulder and closed the whole thing.

He had watched enough of himself fighting Cormac. The world could carry on without him.

---

Guild Zero was working when he got in.

He had half expected the building to be a wreck, because five of them had sat in the strategy room until one in the morning and Cillian had still been there when James left. Instead there was a delivery being signed for in reception, four people in the second-floor office going through something on a shared screen, and somebody’s cleaning trolley outside the room they had eaten in.

He went up past the training halls, and stopped.

The north hall had ten people in it and neither of the two men running it had been in bed before one either.

Ronan was at the far end with a clipboard he never wrote anything on, and Cillian was in the middle of the floor talking, and the ten new Challengers were in two groups of five.

The sound of it came through the glass in pieces — a shield going into reinforced flooring, boots changing direction, Cillian’s voice calling something across the room, the thin crack of ability output being deliberately held down to nothing.

James watched for about four minutes.

They were rotating them. That was the first thing he noticed — the two fives in the hall were not the two fives that had been in the hall yesterday, and there was a whiteboard by the door with about eleven crossed-out combinations on it. Ronan and Cillian had spent six weeks selecting ten individuals and were now doing the only sensible thing afterwards, which was finding out which of them could stand next to each other.

The second thing took longer to see.

The woman in the green trainers — the one from the corridor, the one with fourteen registered floors — had been chasing openings in the assessment. He had watched her do it twice on the day. She was not doing it now. Somebody two positions over got shoved off balance and she was in the space before the man went down, and she did not look at anybody to check whether that was her job.

Their caller got listened to faster than she had been listened to a fortnight ago. The support in the second group was standing where the pressure was going to be rather than where it currently was.

They were nowhere near Team Zero.

They were not supposed to be. Team Zero had thirty-one floors and five years.

But there were two groups of Challengers in that hall who were starting to look like groups, and neither of them had James Ganner in it, and that had been the entire point of building the thing.

---

Finn came up beside him and looked through the same glass.

"Number four’s an animal."

"Is she."

"She’s an animal and she’s in the wrong position. Cillian’s got her at the back and she wants to be second in." He tapped the glass. "Watch her feet when it kicks off. She’s leaning in the whole time."

"Have you said?"

"I’ve said. Ronan told me to mind my own business."

"Ronan’s right."

"Ronan’s *usually* right, which is different," said Finn. "I’ll say it again next week."

They stood there another minute.

Nobody came to get them. Nobody looked up at the glass. Cillian restarted the drill and Ronan put a mark on a sheet, and the session simply continued with the Guild Master and the Raid Captain standing on the other side of a window being of no operational relevance whatsoever.

---

Floor 32 had been available for two weeks.

They had let it sit for the Korean comparison, and then for Cormac, and then for the week of the writ, and nobody had brought it up on the night of the celebration, and every one of them had thought about it.

Finn brought it up on the Monday morning.

"We’re going."

"Yeah," said James.

"When?"

Maeve answered that, without looking up from what she was doing.

"When the doctor says. And the doctor said a week, and I have the list."

"Maeve—"

"I have the *list*, James. It’s in my bag. It says no Tower activity for seven days minimum and reassessment before entry, and I read it out loud to you in a treatment room while you were laughing at Cillian, so I know you weren’t listening."

"That’s not—"

"Friday," she said. "Reassessment Thursday. If the wound’s closed properly you go in Friday morning and if it isn’t you don’t."

Ronan, from the doorway: "She’s right."

"I know she’s right. I’m allowed to be annoyed about it."

---

So it was six days.

He spent them being profoundly bored. He walked the length of the building four times a day because sitting made the side worse. He read Ronan’s rotation notes and kept his opinions to himself. He drove Nyra to a thing on the Wednesday and got told off for how slowly he was getting out of the car. He went to Maeve’s on the Thursday evening and fell asleep on her sofa at nine o’clock like a man of eighty.

Alice, who did not sleep and did not have a great deal to do while everyone else was working, spent most of the week in the training halls watching the recruits, and on the Wednesday made one observation to Ronan about the second group’s spacing that Ronan wrote down and then implemented on the Thursday without mentioning where it had come from.

The reassessment on Thursday cleared him.

---

He checked his Status properly on the Friday morning, which he had not done since the arena.

`[JAMES GANNER — LEVEL 43]`

`[EXP: 53,065 / 72,000]`

`[STRENGTH: 64 | AGILITY: 96 | INTELLIGENCE: 156 | ENDURANCE: 97 | LUCK: 57]`

`[FREE STAT POINTS: 0]`

Not one number had moved.

He had fought a Level 39 Challenger to the death in front of eighty-two thousand people and killed him with a released Authority weapon, and the Tower had given him nothing at all. No experience. No proficiency. No line of text.

Because it had not been a floor.

James looked at that for a second and found it almost funny. Every goblin he had ever put a knife into had been worth something. His own cousin was worth a bandage and a week off.

He checked Fossor last.

`[FOSSOR — SUMMONED VIA UNEARTH]`

Nothing under it. No rank, no new line, no second ability. It was exactly the thing he had been given after the Burrower, unchanged, sitting in his list where it had sat for a long time being almost useless.

Two weeks ago he could not have told anybody what it was for.

Now he could. It was not a fighter and it was never going to be one. It was a thing that told him where people were, and a thing that took the ground out from under anybody who had committed their weight to it, and a thing that made a man look down at the wrong moment — and he had used it that way twice, in two completely different situations, and got the same result both times.

The summon had not improved.

He had.

---

They did the normal things.

Finn ran the readiness check because that was his job and he was pedantic about it in a way nobody else was. Ronan’s shield had finally been replaced, a fortnight late, and he spent ten minutes not liking the strap. Cillian’s focus had been serviced. Maeve went through consumables and mana-compatible supplies with the ops staff and signed for them.

James’s coat had come back from the armoury with a new left panel in it, because the old one had a hole through it.

He put it on and it felt wrong and it would stop feeling wrong in about a day.

On the way down he passed the north hall again.

The two fives were in there, and Cillian was talking, and Ronan was watching somebody’s footwork, and the whiteboard had two more crossed-out combinations on it.

James did not stop this time.

He went past, and it kept going behind him.

---

`[TEAM ZERO — PARTY CONFIRMED]`

`[JAMES GANNER — FINN HALE — MAEVE CALLAHAN — RONAN CLEARY — CILLIAN WARD]`

`[CHALLENGERS: 5 / 5]`

`[REANIMATED — ACTIVE]`

`[ANATHEMA — BOUND — MANIFEST]`

`[LIVE BROADCAST ACTIVE — REGION: IRELAND]`

The viewer count came up and then went up again, faster than it had ever gone up before a floor, because half the planet had watched this man kill somebody on television eight days ago.

James did not read a single line of the chat.

`[FLOOR 32 ENTRY CONFIRMED]`