Chapter 277 - 268 — Alice Comes Home I

Chapter 277: Chapter 268 — Alice Comes Home I

The chamber under Dublin Tower smelled of cold steel and machine oil, and somewhere above the ceiling tiles an air handler was running with a faint rattle in it that nobody had fixed in three years.

James stood in the middle of all that with a broken scythe still in his hand and did the thing he always did at the end of a floor.

His left hand came up toward the corner of his vision, where the interface sat, where the Reanimated section lived — the small unconscious movement of a man tidying up after himself. Skeletons dismissed. Slots cleared. Done.

It got about halfway.

Then it stopped.

Alice was watching it. Not his face — his hand, entirely, the way you watch a knife somebody has picked up while still talking about something else. Her eyes had gone to it the moment it moved and stayed there, and her whole body had gone very still in the particular way she went still, which had nothing to do with relaxation.

Only when the hand stopped did she look up at his face.

She did not remind him of anything. She did not say a word. She simply stood there in the fluorescent light, two enormous black wings folded down her back, the broken halo hanging dark behind her head, waiting to find out whether the deal survived the disappearance of forty million witnesses.

James dropped his hand to his side.

Alice’s shoulders came down about a centimetre. That was all. She did not thank him, and he had not expected her to, and something about that was easier than gratitude would have been.

"Right," he said. "Problem."

"Which one."

"You can’t walk out of here looking like that."

He gestured at the whole of her — the wingspan that would have filled a suburban living room, the dark ring of a halo cracked along its arc, the long tail resting in a loose curve on the concrete behind her heels. Somewhere out past the security cordon there were reporters, and buses, and a chip shop.

Alice looked at him as though he had asked her whether she could close a door.

Then the wings went away.

There was no light and no sound. They simply folded in and in past the point where anything that size could fold, and were gone, and where they had been there was a woman in dark clothing with an ordinary back. The halo thinned out of existence at the same time. The tail went last, unhurried, like a cat deciding to stop being interested.

It took perhaps two seconds and cost her nothing at all. She did not close her eyes, or brace, or hold her breath. She kept looking at James the entire time with the faintly bored expression of somebody demonstrating that they can, in fact, whistle.

James thought about a small girl in a kitchen in Ballymun, standing with her feet planted like she was lifting something heavy, face screwed up with the effort, holding it for ten seconds before a dog looked at her funny.

"Huh," he said.

"Was there a second problem?"

There was. Her face had been on that broadcast for six full minutes and there were people on this island who could recognise her from a still frame at forty meters.

"Tomorrow’s problem," James said.

---

Team Zero saw her concealed before anyone left.

Ronan looked at her the longest. He was sitting on an equipment bench with the wreck of his shield beside him and his newly restored arms resting on his knees, and his eyes went to Alice and stayed there — not hostile, just permanently aware of exactly where she was standing, which was what he had done with every dangerous thing he had ever shared a room with.

Cillian got there first with words.

"So we went in with five," he said, to the room in general. "And we’ve come out with the Floor 20 boss. Just — walking about. In a jumper."

"It’s not a jumper," Maeve said.

"It’s *conceptually* a jumper."

Finn was not laughing. He had one hand pressed to a shoulder that no longer had a wound in it, and his attention went from Alice to James and stayed on James.

"Right," he said. "So where’s she going."

"...Home. With me."

"And after that?"

James opened his mouth.

"Because you promised her she stays out," Finn said, unhurried, the way he laid out a floor plan. "Grand. Out *where*? Where does she sleep? What does she wear tomorrow when that’s the only outfit she owns? What happens when your ma wants the kitchen at eight in the morning? Does she have a name that isn’t the name of the thing that killed eleven people on national television?"

Silence.

"I hadn’t got past the promise," James admitted.

"No," Finn said. "You hadn’t."

Alice was standing four feet away listening to all of it with her hands folded, being discussed.

Maeve noticed.

She turned — not to James, to Alice — and said, "Do you want to be called Alice out there? Because you don’t have to be."

It was the first question anybody had asked Alice instead of asking James about Alice, and it landed visibly. Alice’s head came round, and she looked at Maeve for a moment with something recalibrating behind her eyes.

"I’ll think about it," she said.

"Fair enough."

Ronan stood up and picked up the dead shield.

"I’m going home," he said. "If she eats anybody, ring me."

"That’s not—" James started.

"It’s a joke, James." A pause. "Mostly."

---

They took a Bureau car out through the tunnel exit because the front of the building had lights on it and vans.

It was gone eleven and Dublin was wet. The city slid past the window in the way it did after rain — orange sodium smeared across the road surface, tail lights doubling in the puddles, a chipper on the corner with three lads outside it eating out of paper and a taxi rank with nobody in it.

Alice sat looking out of the window at all of it and did not say anything for four minutes.

James checked his phone once, which was a mistake.

It came up in his hand like something alive. The notification count was not a number anymore. The top eight things on the screen were all the same three clips.

He thumbed past a few.

**[ZeroFan]:** HE ACTUALLY HAD ALICE THIS WHOLE TIME

**[GalwayGoblin]:** bro kept a 102k hp boss in his pocket 😭

**[ShieldMainSiobhan]:** SHE SAID NO AND HE NEGOTIATED WITH HIS OWN SUMMON

**[FloorTheoryIE]:** THAT WAS A DEAL. SHE CHOSE TO FIGHT.

**[FrontierWife]:** team zero has six members now idc

**[CorkClimber]:** imagine being floor 26 and seeing alice walk in

"What are they saying about me?"

James looked up. She had stopped watching the window.

He had somehow assumed she would not care. Which was stupid, since twenty minutes ago she had negotiated at swordpoint for the specific right to be seen by exactly these people.

He turned the phone so she could see and scrolled slowly.

She watched the clip of Baldwin going three meters backward through the air with something close to satisfaction. She watched herself catch his strike and stop it dead, and her mouth moved very slightly at the corner.

Then a caption went past — *JAMES GANNER’S SUMMON DEBUTS ON FLOOR 25* — and everything in her face closed.

"Summon," she said.

"Yeah. That one’s going to keep happening."

She said nothing.

Then she reached over and took the phone out of his hand, which he had not expected at all, and scrolled back up to a different clip — the one where she had folded her arms in the middle of a battlefield and told him no, and he had stood there holding a scythe and had not made her.

She watched that one twice.

Then she gave the phone back without a word and looked out the window again, and James decided not to ask.

---

He got about eight steps up the path before he stopped.

The house looked exactly the way it always looked at half eleven — the hall light on behind the frosted glass, the sitting room curtains not quite closed, somebody’s shoes kicked off inside the door where he could see the shape of them.

Behind that door were his mother and Nyra.

Beside him, on a garden path in Ballymun, in the rain, stood a Fallen Angel who had killed eleven Challengers on the floor of a marble throne room three months ago while he lay dead on the tiles.

James stood there with his key out.

"You’ve gone very still," Alice observed.

"Give me a second."

"You fought a prince this afternoon."

"Yeah, and my ma wasn’t in the room."

Alice smiled. It was small, entirely genuine, and completely at his expense, and had the manners not to say anything else.

James put the key in.