Chapter 380 — The Price Didn’t Matter II

Chapter 380: Chapter 380 — The Price Didn’t Matter II

Over the next week he trained most mornings, but not for long.

There was no floor on the far side of the training and no deadline to build up to. Some mornings he sparred with Finn in the lower hall, and Finn hit him harder than he needed to because he had nowhere else to put it. Other days he went into Guild Zero, used the gym, said hello to people at their desks, and signed the two things that actually needed his signature. Then he left again before lunch.

He was home for dinner. His mother stopped asking if he would be.

The new frying pan went onto the hob on the first night without a word about it. On the second night his mother said it was "very heavy". On the fourth she said it was "fine". Then she told Nyra not to put it in the dishwasher, which was how James knew it was hers now.

He took his mother and Nyra into town for dinner one evening, and to the cinema another. Alice came to the cinema. Four enormous black wings did not fit anybody’s idea of anonymous, and nobody looked at James once.

His wardrobe started to fill up with clothes he did not recognise as his. He reached for the old jacket one morning and found it had gone. Maeve said she had no idea where it was.

He went to Maeve’s on a Thursday, and they cooked badly and watched something stupid, and neither of them mentioned a floor all night.

At the guild, the operations calendar for the founders had gone mostly white.

Then, on the sixteenth day, his phone buzzed with a message from the dealership. *Your vehicle is ready for collection.*

---

There were photographers outside the dealership when he got there.

Four of them stood on the footpath across the road with long lenses, and a fifth was crouched by the forecourt wall. Somebody had talked.

He collected the keys, signed the last form, and drove out past them without looking. That was the end of it as far as he was concerned.

It was not the end of it as far as anybody else was concerned.

He pulled in at a petrol station on the way home for a bottle of water and checked his phone in the car park, and he was the internet’s main story. There was a clip of him leaving the dealership with three different captions. There was an article that had worked out what the car cost, and then guessed his income from it, wrongly. There was a list ranking Team Zero by estimated earnings, and an opinion column asking whether Challengers were paid too much. Under it were four thousand comments from people who had very strong views on the matter.

He scrolled past most of it with his thumb.

Then he stopped, because the headline under the opinion column had nothing to do with him.

**SOUTH KOREAN FRONTIER ADVANCES AGAIN**

He opened the international tracker.

The lead was smaller than it had been sixteen days ago. Korea had cleared a floor since the break started, and then another. The United States had matched them nearly step for step. China had moved up behind them, and the cluster after China had moved too, with three flags shuffling past each other in the middle of the board.

Nobody had reached 38. But the gap that had looked like a wall on the night of the update was starting to look more like a lead.

There was a short recap video at the top of the page. He pressed play.

It was a montage of the update’s first two weeks. A Brazilian guild had walked twelve people into a floor that it normally ran with six and come out having fought twice as much, which the commentator found very funny. A Japanese team had stuck rigidly to five and said so in a statement. A German organisation had tried twenty, and the clip ended with them coming out of a floor exit looking like they had been through a car wash full of knives.

Then it cut to American footage, and the commentator’s voice changed.

"And then there’s this."

James watched a man walk into a floor alone.

It was a lower floor, one that American teams had cleared months ago. The camera was the Tower’s own feed, and it showed him at the entrance with nobody either side of him. He did not hesitate in the doorway or look back for anybody.

The next clip was the encounter. It was a room built for five, the kind where one person usually pulled, two held, and the rest cleaned up, and it was all coming at one man at once.

He did not try to do what five people would do. He gave ground. He walked the whole fight backwards across the room into a corner that should have been a death trap, and James’s stomach tightened, because he would never have gone there. Then the corner turned out to be the point. Everything that wanted him had to come through one gap to reach him, and it did, one at a time. He dealt with them in that order.

The last clip was him walking out of the exit, rolling his shoulder.

"That’s the update," the commentator said. "That’s what it actually changed. Countries are still racing. But for the first time, the best individual Challengers in the world don’t need a country to climb."

James watched the clip again, and then he watched the corner part a third time.

He had made two decisions in that fight that James would not have made. He had given up the doorway early, when James would have held it. He had spent something big on the first wave instead of saving it. Both had looked wrong for about four seconds, and both had been right.

That was all James took from it. He had watched a man who was very good at this.

His phone buzzed in his hand. It was Finn, in the Team Zero chat, posting the same clip.

**Finn:** have you seen this

**Cillian:** americans finding out they’re allowed to have fewer friends

**Ronan:** Say what you want about how they’re selling it. That’s a real clear.

**Maeve:** It’s a second race. Countries still compete, but individuals can build a name now without a national team behind them. Watch the sponsors move.

James did not reply. He played the corner a fourth time.

Before it finished, a banner dropped down from the top of the screen.

*TOWER TRACKER: New clear — South Korea.*

He opened it. It was one of the leading Korean parties, a floor higher than this morning. That was the gap closing at exactly the speed everyone had predicted on the night he announced the break.

He closed it.

He did not open his interface. He put the phone in his pocket, started the car, and drove the new Porsche home.

---

Nyra heard it before he was out of it. Or rather she heard nothing, saw it come down the road too quietly, and was at the front window with the curtain in her fist before he had shut the door.

She came out onto the step in her socks. She did not look impressed.

"Why have you bought a car," she said, "that looks like it can’t carry anything?"

"It can carry things."

"Like what? A cat?"

"That wasn’t one of my requirements."

"What were your requirements?"

He thought about it. "I liked it."

His mother came out behind Nyra, drying her hands on a tea towel, to see what the shouting was. She looked at the car for a long moment and then at him.

"Is that what’s been on the news?"

"Probably."

"It’s very low," she said. She went back in.

Alice came out last. She stood at the top of the step with her wings folded and looked at the car carefully, the whole length of it, the way she looked at things on a floor. Then she looked at James.

"Is it a weapon?"

"No."

"Hm," said Alice, and turned round, and went back inside.

---

That evening the television was on in the front room with some quiz show that nobody was really watching. His mother was in the armchair, and Nyra was on the floor with the new headphones round her neck, telling the contestants they were wrong.

James’s phone was face down on the coffee table.

Every so often it buzzed against the wood. It went off again during the second round and twice during the third. He knew what most of them were. A clear here, a clear there, the board moving while he sat on the sofa.

He left it where it was.

He knew that another country was climbing while he sat there. He did not turn that into a date, or a list, or a plan. He watched a man from Mullingar get a question about rivers wrong, and Nyra threw a cushion at the screen.

---

Two weeks later, at the halfway mark of the break, he went into Guild Zero for a training session, and the operations floor felt different.

Nobody was panicking, but almost every wall screen had the international tracker up.

The United States and South Korea had both kept going. The broadcasters had stopped calling Floor 38 untouchable somewhere in the last week, and now called it a lead.

James stopped in front of the biggest screen.

Behind him, a few of the recruits were arguing quietly by the stairs.

"Korea. Korea gets there first. They’ve been quicker every week."

"The Americans got two in nine days."

"Yeah, with what, twelve people?"

"Doesn’t matter how many. It counts."

Somebody from operations walked past them. "If I see money change hands about this again," she said to one of her own staff at a desk, not to the recruits, "you’re on the phones for a month."

"It was a fiver."

"On duty."

Somebody else pointed at a notification still pinned in the corner of the screen. It was an American clear that had come through at six that morning.

James stood and listened for a few seconds.

Finn came up beside him with his gym bag over his shoulder. He looked at the same board for a while without saying anything, and then said it anyway.

"You thinking of ending it early?"

"No."

Finn waited, in case there was more.

"We said two months," said James. "We’re taking two months."

Finn nodded. He did not look surprised. He looked like he had needed to hear it more than he had needed to argue with it.

"Right," he said. "Hall, then."

They went toward the training hall together.

Behind them, the board updated again. On the corridor screen, the American broadcast cut to its studio. The anchor turned to the camera, and the graphic over her shoulder showed a man walking out of a floor exit alone, rolling his shoulder.

"Next up," she said, "we look at the solo campaign everybody’s talking about, and ask how far up the Tower one man can—"

The training hall door swung shut behind them, and James did not hear the rest.