"There’s more, and you need to hear all of it before you answer." O’Shea set his hands on his knees. "The Bureau is recommending supervised release. Not freedom. Release."

James waited.

"You’re still under legal review. Langford is dead by your hand on a public feed. People died at the Ashford Grand. You raised human corpses on Earth, and that alone is its own line of inquiry." He didn’t soften any of it. "But this morning’s work proves something else along with it. You were the target of a foreign-backed operation to take you out of this country. That changes what you are on paper. You’re not only a suspect now. You’re a protected witness, and a national Tower asset, and those two things buy you out of this room."

He listed the terms plainly.

"You don’t leave Ireland. You don’t contact anyone in Ganner Corp’s executive line. You don’t enter the Tower without giving the Bureau notice first. You don’t summon a single undead on Earth unless your life is directly threatened, and you’ll be wearing a seal that tells us if you do. Your mother and the girl stay under our protection." He paused. "Those are the conditions. All of them."

James was quiet for a while.

He did not trust the Bureau. He had no reason to. But a cell helped exactly two people in this whole thing, and both of them were England and Ganner Corp.

"I accept," he said.

O’Shea faced the cameras an hour later.

He looked like a man who had not slept, because he had not, but his voice came out level and stayed there.

"This morning, a number of individuals connected to Bureau processes, public administration, and private-sector Tower operations were detained or suspended," he said. "This is part of an ongoing investigation into foreign interference in Irish Tower affairs."

He did not give a single name. He did not call anyone guilty. He did not put a single piece of evidence on the table.

"The investigation concerns unauthorised communication with foreign representatives, improper access to protected Challenger records, obstruction of a procurement review, and attempts to bypass emergency travel restrictions." He let it sit. "That is as much as I will say about live arrests."

The questions came hard.

"Director — does this involve James Ganner?"

"James Ganner remains under legal review for the events at the Ashford Grand," O’Shea said. "I won’t pretend otherwise, and I won’t rush it. But the evidence gathered this morning confirms that he was the target of an unlawful, foreign-backed operation on Irish soil. In light of that, the Bureau has approved his supervised release under protective conditions."

The room came apart at that. Reporters shouted over each other, half a dozen questions colliding into noise.

"You’re releasing the man who killed a royal aide—"

"Director, England is calling this murder—"

O’Shea waited until the worst of it broke, and he did not argue with any of it.

"Ireland will follow its own law and its own evidence," he said. "We will not let a foreign government, a private company, or compromised officials inside our own walls decide the future of an Irish Challenger. That’s all."

He left the podium while they were still shouting.

♢♢♢♢

In England, the King was not eating.

That alone told the room how bad it had become. He sat at the head of the long table with his hands flat on the wood and his food untouched in front of him, and the advisers around him had learned in the last hour to speak only when spoken to.

"Langford is dead," the King said. "Ireland has arrested the first layer of our people. That Bureau dog has stood in front of the world and turned the whole thing into our crime. And the boy — the boy is walking out of his cell." His voice stayed flat, which was worse than shouting. "Tell me how every single part of this failed at once."

"They moved faster than we expected, Majesty," one of the advisers said. "O’Shea froze travel before we could clear our personnel—"

"I did not ask for an excuse."

Another leaned in. "We have options. Pressure through the trade councils. A formal extradition demand for the boy. A public condemnation of Irish instability. We make this loud, and we make Ireland pay for the embarrassment—"

"No."

The word came from further down the table, calm and unhurried, and the room turned toward it.

The Duke had not raised his voice once during the meeting. He set his glass down before he spoke again.

"Make it loud and you confirm we were behind it," he said. "Every camera then points at us, not at the boy. That is the opposite of what we need."

The King’s cold eyes moved to him. "Then what."

"We deny that Langford acted under any direct instruction from this throne. He was a delegate who exceeded his authority — a tragedy, an embarrassment, a man we trusted who went too far. We announce our own investigation into his conduct. We mourn him publicly, loudly, with grief." The Duke folded his hands. "And then we do nothing else, and we let Ireland do the rest for us."

"Ireland is releasing him," the King said.

"Ireland is releasing a necromancer who killed a man on camera and dropped a building onto its own people." The Duke said it the way a man states the weather. "They are afraid of him already. Their officials are afraid of him. Their public is split down the middle about him. We failed to take him by force, Majesty, so we let that fear keep working, and we wait. A frightened country does not need our soldiers. It hands us the boy itself, in time, just to feel safe again."

The King studied him for a long moment, and the anger in his face slowly cooled into something more patient.

"You’ve thought about this," he said.

"I think about all of it."

On the far wall, a screen held a frozen frame from the stream — James in the dark of the broken car park, the black scythe finishing in his hands, the light dying around him.

The Duke looked at it without expression.

"Force failed," he said. "Fear won’t."