The meeting closed on a rough shape.

Marcus would lead, if he accepted the Bureau’s final conditions. Several seats would go to Emerald Spire’s Floor 19 elites because their guild master was leading. The other major guilds would split a limited number between them. The independent S-ranks would be considered on fit. Three provisional seats would be held for Team Zero, pending their acceptance.

Every name on the roster had to have cleared Floor 19 or carry a Bureau exemption tied directly to the main story quest. The attempt was set for two weeks out.

"Team Zero gets contacted privately first," O’Shea said, gathering nothing, already standing. "Nobody announces anything until they’ve answered. The press waits."

He sent for them that evening, away from the conference room, in a plain Bureau office with the door shut.

All five of Team Zero came. O’Shea laid it out without dressing it up.

"The Bureau’s holding three seats in the Floor 20 raid for your team. Provisional. You decide whether you take them, and you decide who goes." He nodded at the page Niamh set down. "My recommendation is James, Finn, and Maeve. James because of the Angel. Finn because he’s one of your strongest, and he proved it again yesterday. Maeve because reading an unknown floor is worth more than another blade on it."

He did not soften the next part.

"That leaves Ronan and Cillian out of the first attempt. Twenty seats, and the Bureau wants the best fit for a floor nobody understands. That’s the only reason. It’s not a verdict on either of you."

The room was quiet for a second.

Ronan took it first. "It’s the right call," he said, and meant it. "You don’t pad a blind raid. If three of us going in gives the team the best shot, three of us go in."

Cillian’s jaw was tight. "Doesn’t mean I have to love it."

"You don’t," Ronan said. "You just don’t make it the others’ problem."

Cillian breathed out through his nose and let it go. "Fine. Yeah. Fine. Just — clear it and come back so I can be annoyed about it later."

That was as childish as he let it get, which was not very.

James did not jump at it. He asked questions.

"What do we actually know about the floor?"

"Almost nothing past the announcement," O’Shea said. "No layout, no monster type, no win condition. Whatever killed that advance team, the System didn’t show it to anyone."

"Who leads."

"Marcus is expected to. It’s not finalized."

"And if the raid fails?"

"Then twenty more people are gone, and the country is worse off than it is tonight." O’Shea didn’t dress that up either. "I won’t tell you it’s safe. It isn’t. I’m telling you it’s relevant to you, and that you’ll go in with the best Ireland can field around you."

James looked at the three names.

"Can we keep clearing our own floors before the attempt?"

"Under the same conditions. Notice first. Yes."

Finn spoke for the first time. "I’m in."

He said it plainly, and it was his own to say, and no one in the room missed that.

"Same," Maeve said. "This is exactly the kind of floor where being strong isn’t the thing that gets you out. It’s the kind that wants you to read it. That’s mine."

James was last.

"The Angel of Lust is mine whether I take the seat or not," he said. "I’d rather walk in with the team than wait for it to come for the people at my house again."

He looked around at them.

"Team Zero takes the three seats."

Not James. Team Zero. He said it that way on purpose, and they all heard it.

The Bureau held the press conference only after that.

Marcus was not there. It was O’Shea’s announcement, made as Bureau Director, brief and controlled.

"In two weeks, Ireland will mount its first official attempt on Floor 20," he said. "The raid will field twenty Challengers, drawn from our top guilds, our independent S-ranks, and Team Zero." He paused. "I won’t be releasing the full roster today. I can confirm that Team Zero has accepted three provisional seats."

The room came apart.

"Director — three seats for a team that’s barely two years old, when there are veteran Challengers who—"

"Is it safe to put James Ganner into a national raid after the Ashford Grand?"

O’Shea answered without heat.

"Team Zero has a clear record, direct experience with abnormal floors, and a documented connection to the entity this main story is named for. That makes them operationally relevant to this specific raid. The Bureau’s job is to field the team most likely to bring people back out of that floor. That’s the only standard I’m using."

He did not argue past it. He gave them that much and left the podium while the questions were still flying.

It did not settle anything. It lit the rest of it.

Some outlets backed the call, pointing to Team Zero’s run of clears and the momentum behind them. Others tore into it as favoritism, as recklessness, as O’Shea spending the Bureau’s credibility to protect the boy he’d already released once.

@towerclips: there are LITERALLY dozens of stronger challengers and we’re giving 3 seats to a teen team. be serious

@redbrick_ronan: "connection to the entity" is doing a lot of work in that statement

@CrownAndCountry: Ireland is putting a supervised necromancer and a pack of teenagers into a main story raid. their own Bureau has lost the plot

@dublin_mam_of_3: they’re the ones who keep clearing the floors that kill everyone else. maybe listen to that

The country split again, the way it had been splitting since Ashford Grand, between the people who wanted to cheer for them and the people who were afraid of what cheering for them meant.

Three seats in a twenty-person raid was a large thing to give a young team. That part, at least, was fair to argue.

♢♢♢♢

Marcus was not at the press conference, but he watched it.

He watched O’Shea confirm the three seats. He watched the roster line that did not have names on it yet but might as well have. And he learned, the same way the country did, that Team Zero had accepted, and that his son was one of the three they would send.

He was moving before the broadcast finished.

He did not call ahead. He did not send a message through the guild, or a polite request for a meeting, or any of the careful distance he had kept between himself and Finn for years. He drove across the city himself and went up to Finn’s rooms and put his hand on the door.

The fear was under everything, but it came out as anger, the way it always did with him.

He pushed the door open.

Finn looked up from where he sat, and there was no warmth in his face, because from where Finn sat his father had simply come to control him again, the way he always tried to, and Finn did not know there had been a meeting, or what Marcus had said in it, or that the man in the doorway had spent the afternoon fighting to keep his name off that roster.

"Why," Marcus said, "would you accept?"