Chapter 399 — The Ones We Left Behind I

Chapter 399: Chapter 399 — The Ones We Left Behind I

"Ganner."

O’Shea had not moved. Behind him, three of the security officers had their hands on their holsters, and two more had stopped with their hands halfway there, because James was standing between them and the thing with the wings.

"What is that?"

James still had Ronan’s shoulders. Cillian had his feet. Neither of them put him down.

"Turiel," said James. "He’s reanimated. He’s mine. He does what I tell him."

"The announcement said—"

"I know what it said. I killed him, then I raised him." He turned his head without letting go. "Turiel. Don’t move. Don’t speak. Stay exactly where you are until I tell you otherwise."

Turiel did not move. He stood at the back of the platform with his wings half open and his eyes on James, and the hatred in his face was very quiet and very patient. The broken pieces of his halo hung behind his head in the white light of the recovery room, and nobody in the room could stop looking at them.

"He won’t touch anybody," said James. "Let them work."

O’Shea looked at Turiel for another two seconds. Then he raised one hand, flat, without looking round, and the officers’ hands came off their holsters.

"Medics," he said.

---

The medical staff came forward with the stretchers and a tablet. One of them had the raid roster up on it, the ten names from the departure sheet, and she went down the platform checking faces against it.

"Ronan Cleary," she said.

James and Cillian lowered him onto the first stretcher.

"Darragh Nolan."

"Mara Doyle."

"Ren Mori."

James had heard every one of those names three days ago in the departure area under the Tower, called out in the same order off the same sheet. Each one had answered *here* and stepped forward into the light. Now a woman in a medical tabard read them off a screen in a bright room full of trolleys, and nobody answered.

Ciara stood beside Declan while her three were lifted. She did not help with the lifting. She watched each of them go onto a stretcher, and her face did nothing at all.

Finn followed Ronan’s stretcher across the room. He had the ruined shield in one hand, the split face turned in against his leg, and nobody had asked him to carry it.

O’Shea came over to James.

"I need a debrief."

"Not now."

"I know." O’Shea looked at the stretchers, then at Turiel, then back at James. He had done this before. "Here’s what’s going to happen. That one goes into the secure annex downstairs, under your supervision, with my people on the door. Casualty documentation gets started tonight. Nobody outside this building hears a name until the families have been told, in person, privately. Then you and I sit down."

"Later," said James. "I’ll give you everything. Just not while they’re—"

"Later’s fine."

The medics turned the first stretcher toward the doors.

James looked round for Finn, and his eyes went automatically to the space beside Finn, at Finn’s right shoulder, where Ronan would be, with the shield slung over his back the way he always carried it out of a gate. He caught himself before he said anything.

The stretcher went through the doorway. As it turned, one of Ronan’s hands slid a little way out from under the cover, palm up, and hung there for a moment before the doors swung shut.

James stood in the middle of the recovery chamber.

There was nothing left that he was any use for.

---

By the next morning, the whole world had it.

RTé led with it. So did the BBC, and Seoul, and every American network. *IRELAND CLEARS FLOOR 40. ONE OF THE SEVEN SLAIN.* They played the last minutes of the Floor 39 stream on a loop, ten Challengers around the Echo, Ren’s draw, the scythe going through the broken lattice. Studio panels drew diagrams of the retaliation cycle. A man in a grey suit on Sky said James Ganner was now the first Challenger in history to have killed two of the Seven, and then asked, quite reasonably, what had actually happened on Floor 40, because nobody had seen it.

There had been no stream on Floor 40. There had been a broadcast that ended on a victory, a worldwide panel ten minutes later, and nothing else.

At eleven, Guild Zero and Fianna put out a joint statement.

*Guild Zero and Fianna confirm, with great sadness, that four Challengers died during the Floor 40 encounter: Ronan Cleary, Darragh Nolan, Mara Doyle and Ren Mori. Floor 40 could not have been cleared without them. We ask that their families’ privacy be respected at this time.*

Within the hour the graphics had changed. The flags and the *HISTORIC* banners came down, and four photographs went up in a row.

James watched it happen on his phone, in his bedroom, with the curtains still shut.

The same accounts that had been screaming about Floor 39 three days ago were posting under every repost.

**@ShieldMainSiobhan:** no. not ronan. not him

**@dub_zero_fan:** i don’t understand. they cleared it. the panel said they CLEARED it

**@fianna_til_i_die:** darragh. mara. ren. i can’t. i can’t do this

**@saoirse_k:** four people. four actual people. i’m going to be sick

**@climbgod_99:** 4 for one of the seven is honestly a good trade. harsh but true

**@saoirse_k:** say that to their mothers

**@tower_facts_daily:** why were they forced into 40 with no waiting room. has the tower ever done that before. genuine question

**@GalwayGoblin:** ronan cleary held the line on every floor i ever watched. every single one

**@kellyb_nyc:** first the american and now this. who’s going to want to go up there now

**@ShieldMainSiobhan** had posted a clip. It was from a Story Floor months ago. A collapsed street, people running, and Ronan in the middle of it with his shield up over three civilians while something hit him from above, again and again. There were ninety thousand likes under it, and the comments were all about what a guardian he was. *Textbook.* *Nobody plants like him.* *Best shield in Ireland and it’s not close.*

Somebody had posted another one further down. It was nothing much, a clip from an ordinary floor. Ronan took a hit meant for Cillian, shrugged it off, looked at the dent in his shield, adjusted his grip and stepped straight back into the line as if nothing had happened.

James watched the dent, and the adjustment, and the step.

He knew exactly what the next time Ronan had done that looked like. Nobody on the internet would ever see it.

He closed the video before it finished.

---

He went home in the afternoon. He had been sleeping at the guild because it was closer to the Bureau, and because he had not wanted to walk through his front door.

His mother opened it before he had got up the path.

Her face was full of relief for about a second. Then it saw his, and the relief went somewhere else.

She did not ask about Floor 40, or the announcement, or what he had got. She put her arms round him on the step, and held on, and did not say anything.

Nyra was in the hall behind her. She had her phone in her hand, and her mouth was already open, and James could see the first word of a question about Turiel in it. Then she looked at him properly, and closed her mouth, and put the phone in her pocket.

His mother let go.

"Have you eaten?"

"I’m not hungry."

He tried to think when he had last eaten a proper meal and could not find it. It was before the departure area. It might have been the day before that.

She went into the kitchen anyway. He heard the fridge, then the pan. Ten minutes later a plate appeared on the arm of the sofa beside him, and she went back into the kitchen without a word.

He ate about half of it. When he looked up, Nyra was sitting on the stairs, pretending to look at her phone, and she was not looking at her phone.

---

Ronan’s family set the arrangements. Guild Zero did not.

Maeve had been very clear about that on the phone. "We do what they ask us to. Nothing else. If they want help, we help. If they want us at the back, we’re at the back."

They asked for help with some things and not others. The guild covered what the family let it cover. Staff drove people from the airport. Maeve dealt with the Bureau’s paperwork so nobody in the family had to read a form with the words *Tower fatality* on it.

They asked James to tell them about the end.

He sat in a small front room with a cup of tea going cold on his knee and told them where Ronan had been standing. He told them about the shield breaking, and the arm. He told them that Ronan had stayed exactly where he was, between the thing that killed him and James, and had not moved out of the way.

That part was easy. It was the kind of thing James knew how to say. It was a report.

Then someone asked him what Ronan had been like.

"Away from all of that," they said. "Just him."

James opened his mouth.

What came into his head was the Tower. Ronan checking the straps on every shield in the armoury before an expedition. Ronan making him go to the physio. Ronan saying *I know you know, I’m saying it anyway.* Ronan with his back to a wall on a floor in the twenties, holding a door. Every memory James had of him was standing on stone.

"He was," James said, and stopped. "He was careful."

It was true, but it was nowhere near enough. They let him sit with it, and somebody poured him more tea.

---

The wake was at the family’s house.

The coats came first. They were hung three deep on the hooks in the hall and dripping onto the floor, because it had rained all day. The kitchen had more sandwiches in it than anyone could have eaten, under clingfilm, and somebody kept bringing more. Cups went round on trays and came back on trays. In the front room people stood close in their good clothes and talked low, and every now and then somebody remembered something and the whole corner went up in a laugh, and then came down again, a bit embarrassed.

Some of the faces James knew. There were Guild Zero staff, half the operations floor, standing together near the door looking unsure whether they were allowed to be there. There were Challengers from other guilds. Two of the recruits had come, Team One’s caller and the woman with the green trainers, in black, holding their cups very carefully.

Most of them he did not know.

He stood by the window and listened.

A man in his sixties told a story about Ronan at fourteen, fixing the chain on a bike for every child on the road for a whole summer because he had taught himself how and liked doing it. A woman said he had driven her to every hospital appointment for a year after her hip and never once let her pay for petrol. Someone from a club James had never heard of said Ronan had coached their under-twelves on Saturday mornings for two seasons, before the Tower got too busy, and the kids still asked about him.

James had trusted Ronan with his life on every floor for years. He had not known about the bikes, or the hospital, or the under-twelves.

He stood at the window with his cup and felt that like a hole in a floor he had thought was solid.

---

Finn was worse.

He moved through the house as if he were looking for somebody. He shook hands and said the right things, and James watched him stop every few minutes in the middle of a room and look about, with no idea he was doing it.

Then someone near the kitchen asked Finn about training, and Finn started telling them about an argument.

"He used to go mad at me about my footwork on the left. Every session. *You’re open on the left, Finn, you’re always open on the left.* And I’d say I’m not, and he’d hit me on the left to prove it, and then I’d—"

He almost smiled. James saw it start at the corner of his mouth.

Then it stopped. The smile went out of his face like a light being switched off, and he stood there with his mouth still slightly open and did not finish the sentence. The argument was never going to get finished either.

He put his cup down on the nearest surface and went out of the back door.

James gave it a minute, and then followed him.

Finn was standing in the garden in the rain, with no coat on, looking at a shed.

James stood beside him.

"He was right about the left," said Finn, after a while.

"He was."

"I was always open on the left."

"I know."

Rain ran down the shed roof and dripped off the gutter.

"I keep seeing it," said Finn. "The end. The shield was gone. It was *gone*, James. His arm was hanging off him. And he still—" He stopped. "He just moved over. When you moved, he moved. Like it was a drill."

James did not have anything to say to that. He had seen it from two feet behind.

"Yeah," he said.

They stood in the rain until Finn’s shirt was soaked through. Then Finn wiped his face with his sleeve, though it was hard to tell what was rain, and said, "Right," and went back in.