Chapter 400 — The Ones We Left Behind II

Chapter 400: Chapter 400 — The Ones We Left Behind II

The funeral was two days later.

James saw the coffin at the front of the room and understood something he had been carefully not understanding for five days.

The Tower restored things. The light came down after every floor and closed every wound, and you stood up whole. He had died twice and come back. He had brought one of the Seven back from ash. He had more Authority in his hands than any human being on Earth.

None of it could do anything about the box at the front of that room.

The family had asked if he would say a few words.

He had written something. He had written it at his desk at two in the morning, and it said that Ronan Cleary had held the front line of Team Zero for every floor they had cleared. It said he had taken more damage for other people than any Challenger in the country, and that Floor 40 would not have been cleared without him.

All of it was true. When he stood up at the front and looked at the paper, it read like a casualty report.

He folded it and put it in his pocket.

"Ronan checked everything," he said.

His voice came out smaller than he wanted. He kept going.

"Every strap. Every shield. Every buckle, before every floor, even the ones that didn’t need checking. Especially those. If you got hurt, you didn’t get to say you were grand. He’d make you sit down. He made me go to a physio once, for a shoulder, because I said it was fine and he said *it’s not fine, James, I watched you lift your arm*." Somebody near the front made a sound that was nearly a laugh. "He looked after all of us. The strong ones as well. Me as well. Every day. And I got so used to it that I stopped noticing he was doing it."

He stopped there. He did not have an ending, so he did not make one up. He went and sat down.

When they lifted the coffin to carry it out, James saw Finn take a half-step forward.

It was not much. It was the step you take toward a mate who is carrying something heavy, the automatic one, the one that means *here, give me an end of that.* Finn’s hand even came up.

Then he stopped, and put the hand back down at his side, and stood where he was.

James saw it because he had done it himself, four or five times since they came home. He had turned to say something to someone who was not there, and reached for a shoulder that was not beside him.

---

Darragh’s family held his service in his home town, three hours west. Mara’s was in Dublin, two days after. Ren’s was the following week.

Fianna made the arrangements with the families. Guild Zero went where it was asked to go. James and Finn and Maeve and Cillian sat in the back rows at all three, and Ciara and Declan sat at the front of every one.

At Darragh’s, the shield was on a stand beside the coffin. It was broad and scarred, with the strap still adjusted to his arm. James looked at it the whole way through the service. He thought about how many times that shield had been between somebody else and the thing trying to kill them. He thought about the last time, when Darragh’s mark had flashed white on Ciara and pulled what was meant for her onto him, exactly as he had been trained to.

At Mara’s, people came up to Ciara afterward and spoke to her about Mara’s life. They told her about her studies, the awards she had won and the people she had taught, and Ciara could barely answer them. James had watched her run a command negotiation in his founders’ room without a flicker. Here she managed *thank you* and *she was* and *yes*. Twice she stopped in the middle of a sentence and could not find the end of it, and Declan quietly finished it for her.

At Ren’s, the katana lay sheathed across the top of the coffin.

James knew that scabbard. He had watched Ren stand with his hand on it through whole fights, through Floor 39, through most of Floor 40, waiting with more patience than anyone James had ever met for the exact moment James said *now*. The blade had stayed in. And the one time it came all the way out, it had done exactly what it was meant to do, and it had killed him.

---

He found Ciara after the last service.

She was outside, round the side of the building, away from the cars. She had her back against the wall and her hands in her coat pockets.

He did not tell her they had died as heroes. She had been there, and she knew how they died better than anybody.

He stood beside her.

"I keep thinking about what I said," Ciara said eventually. She was looking at the car park. "In your room. Before Thirty-Nine. *All five or none.*" She laughed, short, with nothing in it. "I said it like it was a condition. Like I was protecting them. I brought all five of them into that Tower, James. I’ve got Declan."

"That was my call. I accepted it. If anyone—"

"Don’t."

She did not raise her voice.

"I’m not doing that. Not today. I don’t care whose fault it is today." She took one hand out of her pocket and pressed the back of it against her mouth for a second. "I just miss them. I miss my people."

Then her face went.

It did not go loudly. She put both hands over it and bent forward a little against the wall, and her shoulders went, and she made no sound at all for a long time.

James stayed where he was.

He did not tell her it would be all right, or explain anything, or put his arm round her. He stood beside her against the wall until she was finished. When she straightened up and wiped her face with both palms and breathed out, he was still there, and he did not say anything about it.

"Thanks," she said.

"Yeah."

She went back round to the front to find Declan.

---

Guild Zero paused everything major for two weeks.

The staff kept the building running. Routine expeditions went ahead for the recruits under supervision, and nothing else. Nobody asked the founders for anything.

Maeve handled what had to be handled for the families, insurance and Bureau forms and the guild’s payments to the next of kin, all of it, quietly, from her own laptop. Then one day her out-of-office came on, and stayed on for four days, and nobody asked her where she had gone.

Cillian stopped answering his phone. Messages went into the founders’ chat and sat there with one grey tick for a day, two days. When he did reply, it was a thumbs-up, or *grand*, or nothing.

Finn went back to training first, on the fifth day after Ronan’s funeral. James heard about it from one of the staff. Finn had gone down to the lower hall and run his usual defensive drill on his own, the one he had run with Ronan a thousand times. Halfway through he had stopped, because every drill in it had a second person in it, and the second person was a shield. He had stood in the middle of the hall for a while. Then he had run it again, on his own, with a gap where Ronan went.

James stayed at home.

He slept badly. Some nights he slept straight through and woke feeling as if he had been hit. Some nights he woke at three with Turiel’s hand going through his chest, and lay in the dark with his own hand flat over the place, waiting for his heart to slow down.

He did not open anything to do with the Tower. When an email from the guild had *Floor 41* in the subject line, he archived it without reading it.

Nyra tried. She dragged him to the shops and made him carry things. She made him watch something stupid with her on a Tuesday. Halfway through he laughed out loud, properly, at a man falling off a ladder, and Nyra looked at him sideways as though she had won something.

The next day the internet went off for twenty minutes, and he snapped at her about it as if it were her fault. He went up to his room, sat on the edge of the bed, and was ashamed of himself for an hour.

His mother kept feeding him. She made him go for a walk on the Thursday. "Out," she said, holding the door. "Round the block. I don’t care where. Out."