Chapter 279 - 270 — Alice Comes Home III (Bonus)

Chapter 279: Chapter 270 — Alice Comes Home III (Bonus)

Afterward, in the sitting room, Nyra started asking about the wings, and did not stop.

Could Alice actually fly with them or were they just for looking at. How fast could she put them away. Did she have to think about it. Did it get harder if she was tired.

Alice answered most of it in about six words each, dryly, the way you deal with a persistent child.

Then Nyra asked the last one, and her voice changed slightly when she did.

"Do they ever come back out? Like — when you’re not doing anything wrong. When you’re just — when something’s exciting, and you didn’t mean to."

The room was quiet.

Alice looked at her properly then. At the wings currently out and folded down the back of the armchair, and the horn up through her hair, and the way she had asked it while looking at the carpet rather than at anybody.

"You lose it when you feel anything," Alice said. "You put a coat on the floor in the hall and did not notice."

Nyra’s chin came up defensively and then went down.

"Both together’s the hard one. One’s grand. Both together it goes about four seconds and then something happens and I get — and they come out."

Alice was quiet for a moment.

"It is not strength," she said. "You are treating it as though you must hold something closed, and the harder you hold it the more of you is arguing with it. It is not a lid. It follows what you actually intend, and your body will keep asking you whether you mean it, and the answer will keep being no while you are excited." She shrugged one shoulder. "It becomes easier when the two of you stop disagreeing. That is all. It took me a very long time."

Nyra thought about that.

Then she put both feet flat on the carpet, closed her eyes, and tried it.

The horn went first, sinking down into her hairline. The wings drew in slowly, both of them, together.

They went.

She held it. Four seconds. Six. Ten.

Alice watched without saying anything.

At about fifteen seconds Nyra opened one eye to check.

"That is longer than four," Alice said.

That was all she said. No praise, no encouragement, nothing that could be mistaken for kindness — a flat observation from someone who did the same thing without effort — and Nyra lit up like a struck match.

Which was, of course, the end of it.

Her concentration went, and both wings came out at once with a *whump* that swept the lamp clean off the side table.

Alice’s hand came out and caught it a foot above the carpet, shade and all, without spilling the bulb.

She did not look at it while she did it. It was pure reflex, the way you catch a falling glass, done before any part of her had decided whether she cared. She set it back on the table and squared it with the edge.

James, in the doorway with two mugs, saw it.

Alice looked up and saw him seeing it.

Neither of them said one word about it.

---

By half twelve James was finished.

He had been fighting since a crossroads that morning and his body had been rebuilt twice and none of that had made him less tired, and he got as far as standing up and saying goodnight before the day’s last problem walked up and hit him.

"James," Alice said. "Where do I sleep?"

He stopped.

That was it. That was the whole thing — no Tower, no boss, no timer. A woman in his sitting room asking a reasonable question about a bed, and James standing there with absolutely nothing prepared, because he had made a promise on a battlefield and had genuinely not thought one single step past *she stays out*.

"Right," he said. "Yeah. That’s — I hadn’t—"

"You had not."

"NOT my room," Nyra said instantly, from the armchair.

"Nobody said your room."

"I’m just *saying*."

James opened his mouth to start organising something and his mother came out of the kitchen drying her hands and simply took the entire matter off him.

"The back room," she said. "It’s full of boxes and there’s a bed under half of them. Nyra, get the good sheets out of the airing cupboard and don’t argue, I’ll do the rest of it." She looked at Alice. "It’s small and the radiator’s temperamental. It’s a room."

Alice looked at her for a moment.

"It’s a room," she agreed.

---

James stood in the hall while it happened.

Nyra went up the stairs at speed with an armful of sheets and no wings at all, because she had remembered on step three. His mother followed with a pillow under each arm, telling somebody to mind the banister.

And Alice went up after them.

James watched her go.

Since the moment Baldwin had gone down on that field — through the reward panels, through the Waiting Room, through a Bureau car and a wet road and a hall and a kitchen table and an argument about soda bread — she had not disappeared once.

No interface. No slot. No stored thing waiting quietly in the corner of his vision until the next time he needed something killed.

Just a person going up his stairs to a room with boxes in it.

Nyra came back down two steps at a time and stopped in front of him, and she had that particular face on, the one that meant she had already been three moves ahead for some time.

"James."

"No."

"You don’t know what I was going to—"

"I do, actually."

"When we go out." She said it in a rush. "Tomorrow, or whenever, when we go out — can she come? Because she’s *hiding hers* as well, so it’s not like — and she’d be able to tell if I was slipping, and—"

James looked up the stairs, where a Fallen Angel was being handed a pillowcase by his mother.

Then at the small girl in front of him, who had solved the entire social problem in under four hours and moved directly on to logistics.

"We’ll see," he said.

Which they both understood perfectly well was a yes.*