35. Gideon
GIDEON
I get up off the table because the alternative is letting one of them face Varen for me, and that I won't do.
It costs me. The wound's a live coal in my side and the fever's turned the edges of the world soft and bright, and when I swing my legs down and stand the room tilts and I have to hold the table until it steadies. Ember's on me in a second, her hand flat on my chest, not pushing, just there.
"You can't," she says. "Gideon. You can barely stand. Whatever Varen is to you, you are in no shape to?—"
"That's exactly why it has to be now." My voice comes out steadier than I feel.
"Listen to me. There's a Bramwell product out there.
Knox smelled it. Six of them and one of them's made the way I was made, and I'd put everything I own on it being Varen, because Augustus Easton would send his best and Varen was always the best." I get my hand over hers on my chest. "If it's Varen, then he's mine.
Not because I want him. Because I'm the only one who can.
The rest of you fight a stranger who happens to be very good.
I fight the boy from the next cot, and I know how he moves, and he knows how I move, and that knowing is the only edge anyone on this mountain has against him.
You send Knox or Rhys at Varen, you're sending them at the best killer the program ever made with no edge at all.
You send me, wounded and feverish and half-dead, and at least I bring the one thing that might matter. "
She doesn't answer right away. She's doing the math, the cold clear math her father gave her, the same kind I'm doing, and I watch her arrive where I arrived because there's only one place to arrive.
"He'll know you're hurt," she says. "He'll smell it."
"Yes."
"And he'll use it."
"Yes." I manage something that's almost a smile. "Which is why I'm not going to fight him fair. I gave up fair the day I walked out of that place. Fair is for people who weren't built in a lab."
Cass has been listening from the door. He doesn't tell me I can't. He's the only one who wouldn't, because he understands a thing about debts that have to be paid by the person who owes them, and he just looks at me a long moment and then nods, once.
"Knox goes with you," Cass says. "He takes the others.
You take Varen. That's the only way I let you up that ridge.
" He looks at Ember. "You're on the rifle again.
High ground, the west side this time, where you can see the whole east ridge.
You cover them." A beat. "And Rhys holds the cabin with me, because Gideon's not the only one who can't be everywhere, and someone keeps the center. "
"Same day," Rhys says, quiet, the tracker doing the arithmetic none of us wants done. "Marlowe at dawn, Easton by afternoon. That's not bad luck."
"No," Cass says. "It's bookkeeping. They've had scouts on this mountain for a week. They watched Malek's people go up the draw this morning and they waited to count who'd be left standing." His mouth goes flat. "Easton math. Why pay full price for a thing you can collect bleeding at a discount."
Nobody argues with that either. The plan sets, fast, the way plans set when there's no time to make a better one.
Knox comes down off the roof and looks at me, at the gray of me, the way I'm holding my side, and he doesn't say anything about whether I should be doing this.
He just hands me a knife to go with the one in my boot, because Knox understands that the question was already answered and the only thing left is the work.
We'll do this in skin, Varen and I. He'll come with a blade because the program built blade-work into us before we could spell our own names, and whatever wolf they woke in him is as installed as mine. Some fights you have with the weapon they made you.
"East ridge," he says. "They'll come up it because it's the blind approach, the one the south draw fight tells them we're not watching. They're wrong. We're watching." His eyes are yellow at the edges. "Stay behind me till I put the first ones down. Save yourself for yours."
We go out into the snow. It's coming harder now, the first real snow of the year, and the world's gone white and quiet, every sound swallowed.
We climb the east ridge slow, me slower than I want to be, the coal in my side flaring with every step, and Knox moves ahead of me like the ghost he is, reading the white ground, the wolf all the way up.
They come up out of the timber below just like Knox said they would.
Five of them now, spread, climbing the blind side, and even through the fever I can pick out the threads of them, and one of those threads stops my heart for half a beat because I know it the way you know a voice in the dark, the made-not-born sharpness of it, the program-smell that no clove in the world ever fully buried.
Varen. Here. After twenty-two years.
Knox doesn't break stride. His arm comes back and snaps forward and a knife leaves his hand and crosses the white air and takes the lead Easton man in the throat before the man knows the ridge is held, and he drops into the snow without a sound, and the others scatter for cover, and the fight is on.
But I'm not watching the fight. I'm watching one figure that doesn't scatter with the others, one man who comes on up the ridge through the falling snow at a walk, unhurried, because he's already seen me, because he knew I'd be here the way I knew he would, two products of the same room drawn up the same mountain to the same ending.
Varen stops thirty feet from me across the white.
He looks at me. I look at him. The snow comes down between us.
And he smiles, the old smile, the one from the cot in the dark, and says my name like no time has passed at all.