iThe Bureau vehicle stopped at the side entrance, and Team Zero got out into a grey morning two weeks older than the last time they’d been here.

James stepped down first and pressed a thumb against the new plate riveted over his left side, testing the seam, before he let his arm drop.

Finn came out after him and turned his whole upper body to look back at the building instead of twisting at the waist.

Maeve’s eyes went to the glass doors, then the reflections in them, then the dark space above the lintel, before she stepped onto the path.

Ronan’s coat sat wrong over one shoulder, the strap under it pulled a notch tighter than it used to be. Cillian flexed his right hand twice, the one that had dropped a glowing shield on Floor 19 when the metal got too hot to hold.

Nobody said anything about any of it. They walked to the doors like that and went in.

Two weeks. Three floors.

[Floor 17 — The Twin Quarry] had given them the Crusher and the Stalker at once, and James still saw the heavy one’s stone club coming down through the wall behind Ronan, the whole quarry face cracking apart in dust.

Floor 18 had wrapped its Cyclops in stone, two of them dragging pillars up out of the ground to cut the team in half, the floor itself coming apart underfoot.

Floor 19 had set the things on fire. Molten rock for skin, heat that punished anyone who stood still, cracks opening orange under Cillian’s boots while Maeve screamed at them to move before the ground split.

He remembered Finn coming forward through a wall of steam with blood down his jaw and not slowing.

They had cleared all three in the window. That was what the public saw. The rest of it stayed in their bodies, and nobody outside the team knew the price of any of those clears.

The lobby screens told a thinner story.

TEAM ZERO REACHES FLOOR 19 AHEAD OF RAID CONFERENCE ran across one. FAST CLEARERS, OR BUREAU GAMBLE? sat under it on the next.

A staff member took James’s ID at the desk, looked at the Floor 19 line on his record, then looked up at his face for half a second longer than the job needed before she waved him through.

Two guild aides by the lift stopped talking when Finn passed them. They started again once he’d gone by, lower than before.

The country had decided plenty about Team Zero off a handful of clear dates and one bad night in a car park. None of it had the inside of those floors in it.

Security was tighter than the last time. Floor 20 had stopped being a guild matter the morning the advance team didn’t come back.

They went through it in layers. Badge scans, a second desk, silent guards at the corners, doors that only opened after someone upstairs signed off on the corridor beyond them.

James, Finn, and Maeve cleared the second gate. When Ronan and Cillian stepped up behind them, the guard lifted one flat hand and tilted his head toward a side door marked for observers.

Cillian stopped with one boot already over the threshold. He looked through the open gate at the corridor the others were taking, then drew the foot back without a word.

Ronan straightened his sleeve and gave the guard a single nod, but his jaw stayed set.

James caught it. He didn’t make a speech of it. He held Ronan’s eye for a second, then Cillian’s, and the look did what a speech would only have spoiled.

The observer corridor had a bench and a screen and not much else.

Cillian turned the observer badge over in his hand and looked at it like it weighed more than his gauntlet did.

Ronan stood beside him and let him have the quiet for a moment before he said anything.

"We fought the same floors," Cillian said. It came out flat. "Seventeen. Eighteen. Nineteen. I was there for all of it."

"We did," Ronan said. "And that’s why those three are walking in there standing up." He looked at the screen, not at Cillian. "We got them to the door. That counts, whether the badge says it or not."

Cillian didn’t answer that. He clipped the badge to his collar and sat down, and that was as far as either of them let it go.

The conference room was a different kind of room.

Repaired combat gear sat next to suits worth more than a flat. Guild pins caught the light on cuffs and collars. Aides stood behind chairs rather than taking them. Old scars showed at wrists and throats and the backs of hands, the kind a person collected over a career of walking into places like Floor 20 and coming back.

Some of the people at the table did not look up when Team Zero came in.

Marcus Hale was already seated near the head, still and unreadable, a closed file square in front of him. His eyes went to Finn for less than a second when the three of them entered, then went back to the dark screen on the wall.

James, Finn, and Maeve found the seats left for them, lower down the table, and the room let them feel exactly how far down it was without anyone having to say it.

The major figures made themselves known without introductions.

When Declan Roe of Ironwall leaned forward to say something to his neighbor, the aide behind him stopped writing mid-word and waited, because everyone at that table expected Roe to be the one who challenged things.

Saoirse Doyle had refused a chair. She stood against the side wall with her arms folded, no aide, no file, and when a guild master misstated which floor the advance team had cleared to, she corrected him without checking the room first to see if she was allowed to.

Another master, broad and grey at the temples, asked a quiet question about how casualty replacement would work mid-raid, and two people stopped whispering to hear the answer.

Every time one of them spoke, something in the room moved. A file closed. A posture shifted. A side conversation died. Nobody needed a name tag.

The room read Team Zero the same way, in small cuts.

One guild master opened James’s file, stopped on the Ashford Grand note long enough to be noticed, then scrolled down to the Floor 19 clear date and left it there.

Another looked at Finn, then at Marcus, then back at Finn, and went back to his tablet with the matter apparently settled in his head.

Maeve got the cleanest look of the three. A master glanced at her field-reading record, gave a small nod, and moved on, the way you sign off on the one name that doesn’t need arguing. He went straight back to James’s file after, and then to Finn’s.

James kept his face flat. Finn kept his blanker. Maeve had already finished reading every person at the table before either of them looked up.

O’Shea sat at the head and opened the meeting by taking the air out of it.

"Before anyone speculates, here is what we know." He did not raise his voice. "Floor 20 wiped the Emerald Spire advance team. Six Challengers, no survivor. The System named the main story quest the Angel of Lust — The First Disciple. The entry requirement is exactly twenty Challengers."

He let the next part sit.

"We do not know the interior layout. We do not know the enemy type, the terrain, or the failure condition. We do not know what killed those six people. There is no report, because no one came back to give one."

A guild master who had been tapping a pen against the table set it down.

Marcus kept his eyes on the closed file in front of him when the advance team was named, and did not lift them.

One aide lowered her tablet a few inches when O’Shea said there was no survivor.

"This is not a prestige raid," O’Shea said. "It is an unknown floor that has already killed everyone who entered it. I want the room to hold that for the next hour."