James had slept nine hours and eaten two proper meals and was wearing a jumper with a hole in the cuff that had nothing to do with any Tower.
The tablet was propped against the milk jug because Nyra had put it there, and the international Tower coverage was running with the sound low while his mother made a second pot of tea and told Nyra, for the third time, that four hundred was not a reasonable answer to that particular sum.
James was only half watching it. Most of the coverage was still about him, which he had stopped finding interesting somewhere around the fourth replay of Vane's poleaxe catching him mid-jump.
Then the segment changed, and it was not about Ireland at all.
It was a frontier tracker — not a System thing, just the Challenger industry's own board, compiled from confirmed national clears and updated whenever a bureau published one.
**IRELAND — FLOOR 24 CLEARED — TEAM ZERO**
**SOUTH KOREA — FLOOR 23 CLEARED**
**UNITED STATES — FLOOR 23 CLEARED**
