A Necromancer's Guide to Clearing a Game Like Tower

She turned, hard, and got one hand on Nyra’s shoulder.

"Run," she said. "Nyra. Go, now, run—"

Nyra did not run.

She stood with her back against the couch and shook, and the tears came, and she did not move an inch toward the door her grandmother was pointing at. She did not understand half of what was happening. She understood that strangers were in the house and that they had their hands on Nana.

"Look at it," the youngest said. He almost laughed. He crouched a little, the way grown men did when they talked down to children, and reached toward her. "It’s just a—"

"Don’t touch Nana," Nyra said.

Her voice was small. It was a child’s voice, wet with crying, and it did not stop anyone.

The leader hauled Mrs Ganner up by the arm and pulled her toward the door, and her foot caught the broken chair and she cried out as she went down to one knee.

The man’s hand kept reaching for Nyra.

The crying stopped.

The air in the flat changed.

It came all at once, a drop in pressure that pushed against the ears, the kind of pressure that came before a storm broke. The light overhead flickered, buzzed, and dimmed.

Hummmm.

Nyra’s feet left the floor.

Her wings opened. Not the folded, hidden, tucked-under-a-jacket wings the flat had grown used to. They unfolded all the way out to either side of the small room, dark feathers spreading wide, the tips brushing the walls. From the center of her forehead a single small horn pushed up through the skin, pale and curved.

Her eyes were not a child’s eyes anymore.

The youngest man froze with his hand still out.

"What—" His voice cracked. "What is that. Nobody said—"

"Move," the leader said. He had Mrs Ganner half-up off the floor and he was already pulling. "Whatever it is, we move, now—"

Nyra looked down at her grandmother, at the hand on her arm, at the way Nana had been dragged.

"Leave Nana alone!"

The scream left her and did not stay a scream.

It came out as a wave, a wall of force that filled the room in an instant and threw everything in it backward.

BOOM.

The men left their feet. The youngest went into the far wall and dropped. Two more were flung across the room and into each other. The leader was torn away from Mrs Ganner and hurled into the doorframe hard enough to splinter it. Furniture broke. The window cracked across in a single line. Glass came down. Long clean gouges opened in the plaster where the wave’s edge cut through.

Mrs Ganner went down in the middle of it. She had already been on one knee, already off balance, and the wave took her the rest of the way to the floor, and she did not get up.

When it passed, the flat was wreckage.

Nyra stayed in the air, wings out, horn showing, breathing in short hard pulls, her face still wet.

The room was scattered with men.

Some groaned where they lay. Some did not move at all. Near the broken doorframe the leader stirred, got one arm under himself, and started to push up.

Nyra’s head turned toward him.

Whatever was in her face stopped him cold. He sank back down and stayed down, and did not try again.

Then her eyes went to the floor, to Nana, and everything in her changed.

She had done the thing. She had made the bad men stop. But Nana was on the ground and not moving, and that was wrong, that was not how it was supposed to end, and Nyra did not know what to do about it.

"Nana?"

Her voice came out tiny.

"Nana, wake up."

Mrs Ganner did not wake up.

Nyra could not bring the power back down. She wanted to. She wanted to be small again, to be on the floor with her blocks and her warm milk, but it would not fold back into her, and her wings kept trembling and the horn would not go and she hung there in the ruined room crying with no one to hold her.

She did not look like a monster. She looked like a child holding something far too big, with no way to put it down.

The door pushed open.

Hours had passed. Nyra had not moved much from the air, and the men had not moved at all, and then there were careful fingers on the door and it swung in with a low groan of stressed hinges, and James stepped through.

He took in the wreckage first. The broken furniture, the glass, the gouges in the wall.

Then the men, scattered and down, three in his first sweep of the room and more he had not counted yet.

Then his mother.

For one second everything in him stopped. Everything. The Tower, the duel, Maeve, the phone full of names, all of it gone, and the only thing in the world was the shape of her on the floor near the kitchen, on her side, not moving.

She was breathing. He caught it on the second look, the slow rise of her back, and the cold certainty cracked just enough to let air back in.

But she was not only fainted. There was blood at her hairline, dark and dried, and bruising coming up along the arm thrown out across the floor, and a stillness to her that he could not read from the door.

It hit him harder than Alice’s hand around his throat had.

Because Alice had been the Tower. The Tower was where these things were supposed to happen.

This was home.

He looked up.

Nyra was in the air.

Her wings were still out. The small horn was still there on her forehead. The tears were still running, but under them her eyes were still full of the thing that had wrecked the room, rage and fear wound together into something a child should never have had to hold.

She did not look like the Nyra who waited at the window for him.

She looked like something the Tower should have warned the world about.

"Nyra," James said.

Her head turned toward him.

And when she saw him, the tears came harder, not less, the way they only ever did when the person you had been waiting for finally walked in. Her mouth opened. Her voice tried to come and broke before it got out, and she looked from him to the woman on the floor and back, like she was waiting to see which one he would be — angry, or afraid.

James did not move toward the men.

He moved toward his mother on the broken floor, and above him Nyra cried in the ruined room, and he had been gone for one night.