Chapter 401 — The Ones We Left Behind III (Bonus)

Chapter 401: Chapter 401 — The Ones We Left Behind III (Bonus)

Alice did not try to comfort him.

She had watched him lead a raid against one of the Seven. Now she watched him lie on the sofa at two in the afternoon with the curtains shut. She said nothing about the difference.

She did not tell him anything about mortality, or death, or what came after. She knew he had heard more about death in the last month than anyone alive.

She did small things. She put a glass of water on the table beside him without saying anything. She said, "Your mother’s been calling you from the kitchen for some time," in a voice that suggested she had been counting. On the Sunday she opened the curtains, and when he groaned she said, "It’s daylight. You used to like it," and went back to her book.

He was more grateful for that than he could have said.

---

He went to see Turiel once.

The Bureau had put him in the secure annex under the Tower, a sealed room with two of O’Shea’s people on the door in shifts. He was there on James’s standing order to stay there and do nothing. The officers on the door looked like they had not slept since Floor 40.

Turiel was standing in the middle of the room when James came in. As far as James could tell, he had been standing there for nine days.

He looked at James. James looked back.

The strategic value of what was standing in that room was enormous. James knew it. Everyone in the Bureau knew it. Two of the Seven were bound to one man, and one of them was Wrath.

It was also the thing that had killed Ronan.

James could not look at Turiel for long without seeing Ronan’s arm hanging off his shoulder, and the shield gone, and Ronan stepping sideways anyway.

"Are you comfortable?" said James. It was a stupid question, and he knew it as he asked it.

"No," said Turiel.

James nodded, checked the officers had what they needed, and left. He did not go back that week.

---

The rest of the world kept going.

International analysts had moved on from mourning to the frontier within a few days. What did Floor 40 mean for the Tower? Was a Story Floor with a forced transition going to happen again? What was James Ganner’s Death Authority, actually, and how much more of it was there? Two Fallen Angels on one contract, what did that do to the balance of power on Earth? What was on Floor 41?

The messages to Guild Zero did not stop either. There were recruitment enquiries, and sponsorship offers, and a European equipment company. Its email opened with two sentences of condolence and went straight on, in the third, to a proposal for a co-branded shield line.

Maeve forwarded that one to James with no comment except a single word: *Declined.*

He read it on his phone on the sofa, and then he read the next one, and the next. He felt sick in a way that had nothing to do with grief.

The world had already started working out what their victory was worth.

---

In the third week he went into Guild Zero.

He did not tell anyone he was coming. There was no meeting. He just wanted to see the place.

It was running. Staff went up and down the stairs with tablets. Someone was on the phone in the operations room. Down in the lower hall he could hear weights going down and a recruit being shouted at, not cruelly, about their spacing.

He walked past the training floor and stopped at the glass.

Ronan should have been down there with his arms folded, watching the defensive drill, saying *again* every time somebody planted badly. The drill was being run by one of the staff instructors. She was good, and she was not Ronan.

He went up to the founders’ room.

Five chairs stood round the long table, where they always were. Nobody had moved any of them.

He did not turn the screen on. He sat in his own chair and looked at the table, at the four chairs facing his. After a while he stopped looking at anything.

He had been sitting there for about forty minutes when the door opened and Maeve came in.

She stopped when she saw him. Then she came in and sat down in her own chair and did not ask why he was there.

"How’ve they been?" he said. "The staff."

"Good. Better than us." She put her bag on the table. "They’ve kept everything going. Nobody’s asked me for a decision in a fortnight. I think they’ve been told not to."

"Who told them?"

"Me."

He nearly smiled.

They talked about the messages for a bit. They talked about the shield company, and the Bureau’s report, and the money that had gone to the families.

"Finn?" said James. "Cillian?"

Maeve did not pretend.

"Finn’s been in every day this week. He trains on his own and he goes home. He doesn’t talk to anyone much. Cillian’s been in once. He sat in the car park for an hour and went home without coming in." She looked at the table. "I’m not sure he knows I saw."

James nodded.

"I’ve been staying away," he said. "From here. Because coming in makes it real. More than the funerals did. That’s stupid."

"It’s not stupid."

"The funerals were awful. But they were *for* him. This place is just where he isn’t."

Maeve was quiet for a moment.

"I know," she said. "I’m not going to tell you that coming in means you’re ready. You’re not. I’m not either. None of us is going to walk in here one morning and act like it’s normal."

They sat with that.

"We can’t stay like this, though," said James eventually. "I’m not climbing next week. I’m not. But we can’t just stop either."

"No." Maeve looked at him. "We built this place so it would keep going without any one of us. That was the whole point of it. There are ten recruits downstairs, and every one of the staff, and they’re all still here, waiting to see what we do."

"I’m not putting anyone back into a floor because the world’s throwing a party about the last one."

"Nobody’s asking you to."

"The world is."

"The world’s not in this room," said Maeve.

---

Later that week the four of them sat down together.

James was there first. Then Maeve, then Cillian, who looked as if he had not slept, and then Finn.

Nobody chose a seat. They sat where they had always sat, and the chair at Finn’s left stayed where it was, pushed in, with nobody in it.

For a while it was ordinary and awkward.

Cillian asked Finn about a match at the weekend. Finn answered, and Cillian said something about the referee that was almost a joke. Maeve mentioned a leak in the roof of the second hall that the staff had already dealt with. There were moments when the old rhythm came back, a sentence handed across the table and caught.

Then the conversation would come to something Ronan would have dealt with, like kit, or a recruit who was carrying a knock, or the armoury schedule, and it would stop. There would be a little gap with nobody in it, and someone would have to start again from somewhere else.

Finn was the one who said it.

"Are we climbing again?"

Nobody answered him straight away.

James looked at the empty chair.

Ronan would have had something to say at this point. He always did, when the plans in this room got bigger than they should have. It would be something short and practical that let a little air out of everybody. *What’s the kit like. Who’s carrying a knock. Have we actually thought about the third room.*

James thought about the shield, about how the formation had come apart, and about the moment Ronan stepped sideways when James stepped sideways.

The Tower was not going to stop. England had not gone anywhere. Korea was climbing, and America, and everyone else, and there were more floors above Floor 40 than anyone had counted.

But they had come back with four bodies. He was not going to let that become something they nodded at, as if it were just what progress cost.

"Yes," he said. "I want to keep going."

Finn looked at him.

"But not now," said James. "And not the way we went into Forty. We went in thinking we’d worked it out. We need to know what this team can actually do now. What we can’t do without him. And whether we’re all ready to lose someone again, because that’s the question, isn’t it. That’s the real one."

"I don’t know if I am," said Cillian, quietly. It was the most he had said in a fortnight.

"Then we don’t go until you do," said Finn.

"And we don’t decide it with James on his own in a room at two in the morning," said Maeve. "We decide it here. All four of us. Every time."

James looked at her, and nodded.

Nobody said anything about a fifth member of Team Zero, or a replacement, or a new shield. Nobody even came close to it. There were five founders of Team Zero and there always would be, and only four of them were alive.

---

Maeve had the guild records open on her laptop for something else. When she turned it round to show him a figure, James saw the old roster still pinned at the top of the founders’ folder, where it had been since the day they signed the papers.

*Team Zero.*

*James Ganner. Finn Hale. Maeve Callahan. Ronan Cleary. Cillian Ward.*

His eyes stopped on the fourth name.

He did not touch it. He did not move it, or mark it, or take it off. He left it exactly where it was.

Then he looked up at the other three, and for the first time since the light had brought them home from Floor 40, they started to talk properly about what came next.

Ronan was not there to help them decide.