A Necromancer's Guide to Clearing a Game Like Tower

His mother coughed.

The sound went through James harder than any of the screaming had. He was off the leader and at her side before the cough finished, one knee in the broken glass, his hand under her shoulder.

She came halfway awake, eyes unfocused, face creasing at the pain in her head and her arm. Her lips moved before they made sound.

"Nyra," she said. "Is she— is she safe—"

That was her first question. Not where she was, not what had happened to her, not who the men were. Nyra.

It broke the child more than the men had.

Nyra came down out of the air in an awkward rush, wings shuddering, and landed badly and crying harder, because Nana was awake and still asking about her.

"She’s safe." James kept his hand under his mother’s shoulder. "Nyra’s safe. She’s right here. You’re both safe."

His mother’s eyes slipped closed again, but her face eased.

"Nyra." James turned his head. "Come here."

Nyra crept closer, shaking, her hands twisting in front of her. "I didn’t mean to. I broke the house and I hurt the men and I didn’t— I didn’t mean to, Daddy, please don’t—"

"You did nothing wrong."

He said it short and he said it certain, and it cut straight through whatever she had been about to beg for.

"Nothing," he said again. "Do you understand me? They came for Nana. You stopped them. That’s all that happened."

He gathered his mother up off the floor, careful of her head and her arm, and carried her through to her room. He laid her down on the bed and pulled the blanket up over her, and her breathing settled into something deeper.

"Stay with her," he told Nyra. "Sit right here. Don’t open this door, no matter what you hear out there. Promise me."

Nyra grabbed his sleeve. She was still scared he would leave angry, still searching his face for it.

"You did nothing wrong," James said a third time.

Then he gently took her hand off his sleeve, stepped back, and closed the door.

He returned to the living room.

The leader was breathing hard through the pain in his hand. One of the other men had come awake enough to understand the shape of what was happening, and he started begging, low and fast. Another had got an arm working and was trying to drag himself toward the door an inch at a time.

James did not make a speech.

They had seen Nyra’s wings. They had put their hands on his mother. They had walked into his home knowing he was gone, because that was the part that made it safe.

He drew his sword.

What followed was fast. He moved through the room without hurry and without hesitation, and the begging stopped, and the man crawling for the door did not reach it, and it was quiet inside a handful of seconds. He did not linger on any of it. There was nothing in his face the whole time.

When it was done, the only sound in the flat was the faint crying from behind the bedroom door.

James cleaned the blade and put it away.

He took what he needed. The leader’s phone. The car keys from the leader’s coat. He checked the time against the broker’s twenty minutes and found he had most of it left.

He looked once at his mother’s closed door.

Then he left the flat.

The Ashford Grand sat lit up gold against the dark, all glass and polished stone, the kind of hotel where the doormen wore gloves.

It felt wrong after the flat. Everything about it was clean and warm and untouched, and James walked past the front of it without slowing, around to the side where the cars went down.

He took the ramp into the underground on foot and came out on B2.

The level was quiet. Concrete pillars ran in rows under cold white lights. Painted arrows pointed traffic in loops across the floor, camera domes sat dark in the ceiling, and the service lift waited at the far side behind a set of double doors.

James read the space in seconds.

He found a pillar with a clean line of sight to the ramp, the service lift, and the stretch of floor in between where a car would stop. He set himself in the shadow of it, out of the cameras’ easy angles, where he could see everything arrive before anything saw him.

He was not thinking about Maeve anymore. He was not thinking about the press conference, or the clips, or the number of people who wanted a piece of him this week.

He was thinking about his mother coughing on the floor of her own home. About Nyra crying in the air with a horn pushing out of her head because grown men had decided his family was a handle they could grab.

He waited.

The first car came down the ramp slow and smooth and expensive.

Then a second slid in behind it.

Then a third. 𝘧𝘳𝘦ℯ𝓌𝘦𝒷𝘯𝑜𝑣𝘦𝓁.𝒸𝘰𝓂

Vrmm.

The lead car rolled across the level and stopped near the service lift, exactly where James had guessed it would. The engine ticked off. The door opened, and a man stepped out.

He had a cigarette already in his mouth and a tailored coat hung over his shoulders without his arms in the sleeves. His shoes were polished enough to throw the parking lights back up at the ceiling, and a gold watch caught the light when he raised his hand to check it. He looked rich, he looked bored, and he looked completely at home standing in an underground car park at this hour, the way a man only looked when places like this had always belonged to him.

He checked the watch and looked toward the ramp like he was waiting on a delivery that was running behind.

Behind him, the second and third cars stopped in a loose spread, not parking so much as taking positions.

Their doors opened one after another.

The figures who got out did not move like the men James had left dead on his floor. There was no hurry in them and no nerves. They stepped out and stood easy and let their eyes move over the level the way people moved when they had come expecting trouble and did not mind it.

James stayed still in the shadow of the pillar and counted them.

The broker pulled on his cigarette and let the smoke go in a long stream toward the lights.

"They’re late," he said to no one in particular.

The broker had not come alone.