The chamber under Dublin Tower smelled of cold steel and machine oil, and somewhere above the ceiling tiles an air handler was running with a faint rattle in it that nobody had fixed in three years.
James stood in the middle of all that with a broken scythe still in his hand and did the thing he always did at the end of a floor.
His left hand came up toward the corner of his vision, where the interface sat, where the Reanimated section lived — the small unconscious movement of a man tidying up after himself. Skeletons dismissed. Slots cleared. Done.
It got about halfway.
Then it stopped.
Alice was watching it. Not his face — his hand, entirely, the way you watch a knife somebody has picked up while still talking about something else. Her eyes had gone to it the moment it moved and stayed there, and her whole body had gone very still in the particular way she went still, which had nothing to do with relaxation.
Only when the hand stopped did she look up at his face.
