At the Bureau, the board meeting started in chaos.

"He executed a royal aide." One of the members was on his feet before the door had closed. "He could have restrained the man. He had two summons and that — that weapon. He chose to kill him. On a stream. For the whole world."

"England will treat this as an act of war," another said. "Do you understand what we are now standing in? One boy from Ballymun has put us on the edge of a conflict with the Crown."

"Civilians died in that building. Irish civilians. He fought in a hotel full of people—"

"We cannot be the country that shelters a necromancer who does this in public."

The loudest voices were the ones who had the most to lose, and they pushed hardest, because every second the room spent talking about James was a second it did not spend talking about the stream.

O’Shea sat at the head of the table and let them run.

He let them get it all out, every righteous line, every careful piece of fear dressed up as principle, until the worst of them had said enough.

Then he brought his hand down on the table.

BANG.

The room stopped.

"Every person in this room is under investigation as of this morning."

He said it flat, and he watched it land.

"That stream exposed leaks out of this Bureau. Procurement decisions stalled by people sitting at this table. Floor-access softened. Meetings with a foreign delegation that never appeared in any log. Internal cooperation with the operation that just collapsed a hotel onto our own citizens." He looked down the length of the table. "So before anyone in here says another word about James Ganner, understand that I have spent the morning reading about you."

He kept going before they could recover.

"Every trip on this Bureau’s books is cancelled. All outgoing travel for anyone connected to this case is blocked. Every England-linked flight is grounded. The government is mirroring the order across airports, private fields, diplomatic convoys, and every Tower-linked movement permit in the country."

"You’re dodging it." One of the members found his voice. "A boy killed Langford. Live. You can’t bury that under paperwork."

"Langford was not a diplomat with a briefcase." O’Shea did not blink. "He was a royal Paladin who manifested combat authority inside our borders, in the middle of a kidnapping and an extraction plot, with the man who owns Ganner Corp standing beside him. If that boy had let him walk out of the country, the takeover would have started before any of us understood we were under attack."

He let that sit.

"I am not telling you James Ganner is innocent. People died. That gets answered. What I am telling you is that this board does not get to use one eighteen-year-old to hide its own treason."

The room came apart.

"That is a slander, and you will retract it—"

"Where is your proof? You can’t freeze a man’s accounts on a livestream—"

"You are overreaching, O’Shea, and when this is reviewed—"

One member shoved his chair back hard enough to scrape and pointed across the table. "I will be on the phone to London within the hour, and they will hear exactly how this Bureau is conducting itself."

"Go ahead," O’Shea said. "Every external contact made from this room is already logged. Make the call. Add your name to the file yourself."

The man’s mouth shut.

O’Shea stood, gathered nothing, and walked out while the shouting was still building behind him. He did not stop to win the argument. The argument no longer mattered. The exits were closed and everyone in that room had just understood it at the same time.

He had not only stepped in front of James.

He had declared war on the rot in his own house.

They held James in a containment room, not a cell.

White walls. Mana-dampening seals worked into the corners. Artifact cameras in the high angles, no loose metal anywhere, and a chair built to hold a Challenger who should not be able to move. He sat in it with his hands bound in his lap.

He was not afraid. He was past afraid. The scythe release had hollowed him out, the holy burns still pulled at his chest and shoulder, and the fight had taken the rest. He looked tired in a way that had nothing to do with sleep.

The door opened and O’Shea came in. Niamh stayed at the doorway, half in the hall.

O’Shea pulled the one other chair around and sat.

"I’ll be straight with you, because you’ve earned that much." He set his hands on his knees. "I can’t get you out today. People died in that building. You killed a Crown representative on a live feed watched by the whole world. The board is going to try to make you the only name anyone remembers."

James looked at him and waited.

"But that stream did something they can’t undo," O’Shea said. "It put a foreign operation inside Ireland on the record, in front of forty million people. That changes the whole board. So here is what I can do. I can keep you inside Irish jurisdiction. I can keep England’s hands off you while we dig every last person out of this. That part, I will hold."

James’s first question was not about himself.

"My mother."

"Safe. Under guard, in a place no one on that board can reach."

"Nyra."

"With her. Both of them. I’ve seen to it personally."

Something in James let go by a small amount. His shoulders came down. He sat back in the restraint chair for the first time since they’d put him in it.

"I’m not going to tell you that you did the right thing," O’Shea said. "I don’t know that yet, and neither do you. What I’ll tell you is that you survived, you put them on camera, and you made the only choice that was left in front of you when a Paladin came down to take you home."

James said nothing.

"It doesn’t end here," O’Shea went on. "England will demand answers. The Ganners will try to hand you to them to save themselves. The families of the people who died are going to want someone to pay, and you’re the face they have. And the board will hold you up as the proof they’ve always wanted, that a necromancer can’t be allowed to walk around free." He paused. "You understand what’s coming."

"I understand."

James did not ask to be forgiven. He did not argue any of it.

He asked one more thing.

"My uncle. Is he alive?"

"Alive," O’Shea said. "In custody. Two rooms down from where you’re sitting."

James nodded once, slowly, and let his head rest back against the chair.

O’Shea looked at him a moment longer, then stood and left him to the white room.

♢♢♢♢

Outside Ganner Corp headquarters, the cameras had been waiting for an hour.

Reporters packed the steps three deep. Flashes went off without stopping. The banners along the bottom of every live feed had already named it three different ways — the Ganner–Langford scandal, the Ashford Grand disaster, the Necromancer Stream Killing — and they cycled through all three while the crowd waited.

A company representative stepped out first and raised both hands for quiet.

"Ganner Corp will be making a statement," she said. "Please."

The doors opened again.

Adrian Ganner came out.

The second son was dressed without a thread out of place, dark suit, calm face, the look of a man who had stood in front of a mirror and practiced exactly how much grief to show. He did not look like a man whose family had just been dragged out of a burning car park in handcuffs. He looked wounded. He looked responsible. He looked like the most reasonable man in Ireland.

The cameras tightened on him as he climbed to the podium.

He set his hands on either side of the microphones, let the flashes wash over him, and waited until the steps went quiet.

Then he leaned in.

"Hello, everyone."