Finn had barely sat down when the door opened without a knock.

His room was too neat, the way it always was, nothing on the floor and nothing on the walls, and he had not had time to do anything in it but sit since the press conference.

He had three Floor 20 seats to think about, his name on one of them, and a head full of nothing useful.

Marcus was standing in the doorway with his coat still on.

He did not look like a guild master. His face was tight, and the first thing out of him came fast and hard.

"Why would you accept?"

Finn did not get up.

He looked at his father, and his hands stayed flat on his knees.

"You knocked on the wrong door," Finn said. "I’m not Emerald Spire."

---

"Floor 20 ate a team," Marcus said. "Mine. Six people, gone, no survivor, no report, no cause. We don’t know what’s in there. Nobody does."

He took a step into the room. "And you want to walk through that gate because the Bureau handed your little team three seats?"

"My team."

"You have no business on a floor like that."

"I cleared Floor 16 yesterday." Finn’s voice stayed flat and cold. "MVP, if you watched. I qualify. That’s the whole conversation."

"Qualifying isn’t surviving." Marcus’s hands were tight at his sides. "I have people who cleared to Floor 19 and I’m still afraid to send them through that door. You cleared sixteen. Sixteen. And you think that’s a number that means something against whatever did that to my team?"

"I think it’s not your decision."

"I’ll lead the raid myself." Marcus said it like it settled things. "I’ll take responsibility for the names that died under my banner. I’ll go in first. You stay out. I’ll give the Bureau five of my best to fill the gap, they can have whoever they want from Emerald Spire, but you are not on that roster."

There it was.

Finn almost laughed, except there was nothing in him that wanted to.

"You’ll go in," he said. "And I’ll stay where you put me. Same as always."

"That is not what this is."

"That’s exactly what it is."

---

Finn stood, finally, and the argument turned away from Floor 20.

"You don’t get to do this," he said. "You don’t get to walk in here with your coat still on and play the father because a floor finally scared you."

Marcus’s jaw set. "Watch yourself."

"When Mam was dying," Finn said, "where were you?"

The room went colder.

Marcus didn’t answer straight away, and Finn didn’t wait for him to.

"I was there. The nurses were there. The staff knew my name because I was the one who was there." Finn’s voice did not rise. He had said these words to himself for years, in the dark, until they came out smooth and even. "I learned which machine meant what. I learned how she liked the pillows. I was fourteen and I learned all of it, because the one person who should have been in that room was three hundred floors away."

"I was in the Tower," Marcus said.

"You were always in the Tower."

Marcus did not deflect it, because it landed somewhere too deep to deflect. His hand had come up halfway, like he meant to put it on something, and there was nothing in the neat little room to put it on, and it dropped back to his side.

---

"You don’t know what I was doing up there," he said, and for the first time his voice was not firm. "I wasn’t climbing for rankings. Not that year. I sold half of what the guild owned that year, did you know that? I was buying entries, buying intel, buying my way onto floors I had no business on, looking for something. A healing artifact. A reward drop. A miracle the hospitals couldn’t give her." His breath caught for half a second. "I thought if I cleared one more floor, if I reached one more reward, I’d bring it home in time and you’d both forgive the rest."

"Don’t."

"Finn—"

"She didn’t need a drop from Floor 40." Finn cut through it, quiet and final. "She needed you in the chair next to the bed. That’s all she ever asked me to ask you for. And every time I called, you were one more floor away from saving her."

Marcus stopped.

The explanation hung there between them, half-said, and Finn would not take the rest of it.

---

Marcus tried once more, lower. "I was trying to—"

"Don’t turn her into another floor you almost cleared."

It was quiet, and it did more damage than anything else in the room.

Marcus went still.

He looked at his son the way a man looks at a thing he has been told and told and finally heard, and whatever he had walked in believing about himself did not survive the look.

He did not break. He did not beg. He just stood there with it, and that was worse than shouting would have been.

Finn did not soften. The explanation did not get to walk in and rearrange seven years in one night.

---

"Are you taking that seat to punish me?" Marcus asked.

"No." Finn met his eyes. "I’m taking it because I chose to. That’s the part you’ve never understood. You don’t get to decide when I’m allowed to risk my life."

"You could die in there."

"Then I die on my feet." Finn’s voice didn’t shake. "Not behind your name. Mine."

Marcus looked at his son for a long moment.

He had come in to stop him, and he was not going to.

At the door he paused, his hand on the frame, and looked back like there was one more thing he could say that might land. Whatever it was, he didn’t find it.

He did not say goodbye. He turned and went, and the door closed behind him, quieter than he’d opened it.

Finn stood in the too-neat room and breathed for a while before he moved.

---

When he came back to the others, James saw it on him at once.

Team Zero had a shared room at the Bureau-approved residence now, and all five of them were in it — James checking a strap on his gear, Maeve with her circlet in her lap, Ronan and Cillian on the far couch with a floor map open between them. Finn came in with his face shut like a door.

James clocked it and did not ask.

Maeve looked up, read the same thing in two seconds, and went back to her circlet without a word.

Finn dropped into a chair and sat forward with his elbows on his knees.

"We’re clearing Floor 17," he said. "Soon."