Chapter 378 — No More Limits III (Bonus)

Finn was the only one who had not said yes.

He was sitting forward with his elbows on his knees again, the way he had been on the Waiting Room floor, and James watched him try to get round it.

Finn's whole week had been built round the next floor for as long as James had known him. The gym was for it, and the sleep, and the food. Take the Tower out of the week and James could see him looking at an empty week and not knowing what went in it.

"No floor attempts," Finn said. "Does that count guild expeditions? Supervised ones. If Team Two's going to Floor 10 on Saturday and they need an extra—"

"They've got supervision."

"Yeah, but if they need—"

"Ronan's on Saturday," said Maeve, without looking up.

"Right." Finn tried again. "Training floors, though. The low ones. That's not climbing, that's training. If I wanted to go into Floor 5 and—"

"Why would you want to go into Floor 5?"

Finn opened his mouth. He was trying to find the reason, and James watched him not find it.

"I don't know," he said eventually. "To keep sharp."

"You'll be sharp. You'll be training."

Finn sat back. The chair creaked all the way down.

"Fine," he said. "Two months."

Cillian grinned at the ceiling like somebody had just handed him a winning ticket.

---

Maeve had to go and tell operations, because operations had already built a draft Floor 39 prep schedule that afternoon, and six people downstairs had cleared their calendars around it.

It took about fifteen minutes for it to get outside the building.

By the time James came back down the stairs, RTÉ had a line running under the reporter in the rain. *TEAM ZERO: NO FLOOR 39 DATE SET.* The American box on the corridor screen had moved from solo clears to Ireland, and one of the men in suits was doing arithmetic on a whiteboard. How many floors could the US gain in two months. How many could Korea. Whether a lead of one floor was a lead at all. The other one was saying Ireland had earned a rest and anybody who had watched Floor 38 could see why.

James did not stay to watch which of them won.

He went out along the operations level toward the back stairs. Somebody was on the phone to a sponsor, saying "No, that's fine, we'll get you the numbers by Friday" and writing on the back of her hand. Two people were sorting a stack of new applications into trays. Someone else had the equipment log up and was talking to the armoury about a delivery of shield straps.

Nobody stopped him. Nobody asked him to look at anything.

He went down the back stairs and out to the car park.

---

Maeve caught him at the car.

She had come down the fire stairs with her coat on over her kit and her phone out, and she held it up to him before he had the door open.

"One more thing. Then I'll leave you alone."

"Is it Tower?"

"No."

He took the phone. It was a report, a clean one with Maeve's formatting on it, the kind she sent round to the founders every quarter about the guild. He scrolled the first page looking for the guild's name and did not find it.

It was his.

Streaming payouts, broken down by quarter. Licensing income from the strategy data, which had gone up every month since England had signed and had not stopped going up since. The commercial money from the early clears, from the months before Guild Zero existed. His distributions from the business, which he had taken because Maeve had told him to take them and had then not thought about again.

The total at the bottom was in the millions of euro. It was not one million. It was not close to one million.

Underneath it, in smaller type, she had written: *Excludes 40% equity in Guild Zero.*

He scrolled back up. He scrolled down again.

His thumb had stopped on one of the line items without him telling it to. It was the licensing payment from the second quarter, a single figure, and his thumb had stopped the way it used to stop on anything over a hundred euro in a shop. He looked at the figure and waited for the feeling that went with it.

It did not come. The figure was nothing. It was one line out of twenty.

He went further down, to the spending, and read it properly.

Tower equipment. Tower equipment. Guild costs. A physiotherapist, because Ronan had made him go. Something for the house that Nyra had picked and Maeve had ordered. Tower equipment.

There was nothing in the list he had bought because he wanted it.

"What?" said Maeve.

She had seen him stop. He looked up.

"Nothing."

"You've gone a colour."

"There's nothing wrong with it," he said. "That's the thing. There's nothing wrong."

Maeve looked at him for a second.

"You have two months off," she said. "And an amount of money that you appear to be fully determined to die without spending. I'm pointing out that one of those problems is going away."

"Mind your own accounts."

"I do," said Maeve. "That's how I know they're in better shape than yours."

She took the phone back and kissed him on the side of the head, quick, the way she did when there were people who might be watching from the windows. Then she went back up the fire stairs, typing already.

---

He got into the car and did not start it.

He looked at it instead. It was the first time he had looked at it in a long time as anything except a way of getting from home to the guild to the Tower and back.

The plastic on the dash was worn pale where his hand always rested when he reversed. There was a crumpled receipt in the door pocket and an empty water bottle beside it, and something at the bottom that used to be a car air freshener and now just smelled faintly of the idea of pine. The seat had a dip in it exactly the shape of him.

He turned the key. The engine turned over the way it always did, first time, not a sound out of place.

It worked perfectly well. There was nothing wrong with it either.

He took his phone out, and before he had quite decided to, he typed *most expensive cars Ireland* and looked at what came back.

The first number made him blink. It was the kind of number that, two years ago, he would have laughed at and shown Nyra.

Then he looked at it again against the report he had just read, and it was smaller than two of the single payments on the second page.

He sat there with the rain on the windscreen and the wipers off and looked at that for a while.

Then he closed the search and drove home.

---

The television was on too loud when he came in, which meant Nyra was home.

"—no, no, *listen* to yourself," she was saying to it. She was standing in the middle of the front room in her socks with the remote in one hand, pointing it at the screen like she was trying to change the channel by force. "It doesn't say solo floors are easier. It says the floor *adapts*. So it's not easier, it's just one of you. You're going to get somebody killed, you absolute—"

"Nyra," said his mother, from the kitchen.

"He's being thick on purpose, Mum."

The kitchen smelled of onions. The pan was going and the extractor fan was going over it, and the radiator in the hall knocked twice as he took his shoes off, the way it had knocked every evening since the day they moved in.

Alice was on the sofa.

She had her wings folded tight behind her so she could sit back properly, and a book open on her knee. She looked up when he came in, looked at him for the length of a breath, and went back to the book. She did not say anything about Floor 38 or the channels or the thing that had gone through the door. She turned the page.

His mother came to the kitchen doorway with a plate in one hand.

"Are you eating before your next thing?" she said. "Because I'm not keeping it warm again. I kept it warm on Monday and you ate it standing up at half eleven."

"There's no next thing."

"There's always a next thing."

"Not today." He put his keys in the bowl by the door. "Not for a while, actually. We're not climbing for two months."

Nyra stopped talking to the television in the middle of a word.

His mother stood in the doorway with the plate. She did not say anything. She looked at him the way she looked at a bill that had come in lower than she expected, like she was waiting to find out what was wrong with it.

Then she turned back into the kitchen, and he heard the spoon go into the pot, and when she came back out there was an extra potato on the plate.

"Sit down, then," she said.

Nyra had lowered the remote. "Two months," she said. "Like, actually? You'll be here?"

"I'll be at the guild some days."

"But you'll be *here*."

"I'll be here."

Nyra turned back to the television, where the man she had been arguing with was still talking. She had lost the thread of what she was going to say to him, and she frowned at the screen like it had done it on purpose.

Alice closed her book on one finger.

"Does this mean," she said, "that you'll be in the kitchen at the same time as me every morning?"

"Probably."

"Hm," said Alice, and opened the book again, and moved her wing an inch to make room on the sofa, which was the nearest thing to a welcome she had.

He sat down with the plate on his knee and ate his dinner while it was still hot.

---

It was late when he went up.

The house had gone quiet around him. His mother was asleep, Nyra's light was off, and the radiator had stopped knocking. He lay on his bed with the room dark and did not feel tired in the way he normally did after a floor, where everything shut off at once. He was awake in an easy way. Nothing was coming.

He opened his interface.

`[FLOOR 39 AVAILABLE]`

It was where he had left it in the chamber that afternoon, the same line in the same place.

He looked at it. He did not open anything under it or try to guess what was behind it. His head did not start a list of things to check, or people to ring, or kit to replace.

He closed it.

Then he opened the report Maeve had sent him and read the number at the bottom again. It still looked slightly unreal. It looked like it had been printed for somebody else.

Two months. No floor. Nobody at the door.

He went back to his phone, to the car search from the afternoon, and this time he did not close it. He scrolled past the first result and the second and started actually looking, reading what they were and what they did and what he might want, while the blue light of the screen lit his face in the dark room.

It was the first thing in a long time he had wanted that had nothing to do with the Tower.