37. Gideon
GIDEON
"Gideon Bramwell," Varen says, like he's tasting it.
"They told me you'd be here. I didn't believe them.
I thought surely not, surely Gideon's been dead for years, a soft thing like that doesn't last in the world.
" The snow falls between us. "And here you are.
Holding your side. You're hurt. I can smell it on you, brother, you're hurt and feverish and you came up this ridge anyway. Why would you do that."
"Because you're mine," I say. "Same reason you came up it."
He laughs, and it's the laugh from the dark of the dormitory, twenty-two years gone, and it lands in me somewhere I'd walled off long ago.
"Listen to you. Yours. You still think in those terms. Possession, debt, who belongs to whom.
They really did build us out of the same parts.
" He starts to circle, slow, easy, a man who knows he's the better fighter and is in no hurry to prove it.
"I'll make you an offer, since we're family.
The only family either of us has, whatever we pretend.
Come back. Augustus is dead but the house remembers you, and a Bramwell product who went straight and learned medicine and survived in the wild for years, that's worth something.
They'll forgive the federal nonsense. They'll take you back.
You don't have to die on a mountain for a woman who isn't even yours and four men who'd replace you in a season. "
"She's not mine." I turn with him, keeping him in front of me, the coal in my side flaring with every shift of weight.
"That's the part you can't understand, because they took it out of you the same year they took it out of me, except you never went and got yours back.
She's not mine. She's hers. I'd die on this mountain for the difference. "
His face changes. The warmth goes out of it, fast, the way weather changes on a ridge.
"Then you'll die confused," he says, and he comes.
He's better. I knew he'd be better, I said so to Ember, and knowing it doesn't help.
He's better and I'm wounded and the fever's making the white world swim, and the fight is short and brutal and one-sided in the way fights between equals never are.
I get a cut across his forearm, a good one, and pay for it with three I don't see coming, and then his knife goes into my thigh, deep, and the leg folds and I go down into the snow with the cold biting up through me and Varen standing over me exactly the way I always somehow knew he would.
"There," he says, gently. Breathing hard, but gently, the old gentleness, the boy who used to keep me quiet when the wire got bad.
"There it is. Don't fight it, Gideon. It was always going to be one of us standing over the other.
We both knew that the day they put us in those cots.
I'd have let you make it me, if you'd wanted. I'd have understood."
He lifts the knife.
And I do the thing I told Ember I'd do, the thing I gave up fair for the day I walked out of that place.
While he's talking, while he's being gentle, while he's savoring the old terrible intimacy of it, my hand is already in the snow finding the second knife.
The one Knox gave me at the foot of the stairs.
The one Varen doesn't know about, because he's reading me as the boy from the next cot and the boy from the next cot only ever had the one blade.
"You always talked too much before you finished it," I say.
And my hand comes up out of the snow.
The knife goes in under his chin and up, the way the program taught both of us, the way he was a half-second from doing to me, and his eyes go wide and find mine and there's no fear in them, just a kind of recognition, a kind of of course, and then the light goes out of them and Varen drops into the snow beside me.
I get an arm under him before I know I'm doing it.
Lower him down instead of letting him fall.
Twenty-two years and the only thing I have left of the boy in the next cot is the weight of him going still against me in the snow, and I close his eyes with two fingers because someone should, because we kept each other quiet in the dark once, before the world made us into the things that had to end each other on a ridge.
I sit there. The snow comes down. My thigh's bleeding bad and my side's worse and the fever has the whole world ringing like a struck glass.
Knox finds me there. I don't hear him come, I never do. One moment I'm alone with Varen and the next Knox is crouched in front of me, hands fast on the thigh wound, swearing low.
"Done," Knox says, working. "It's done, Gideon.
Ardric came to the cabin instead of the fight, and he found out the hard way her cage broke this morning.
She met him on four legs. There wasn't much left of him to bury.
" A grim flick of something almost like pride through the worry.
"Her wolf came up, Gideon. Finally. The other Eastons broke when the leaders went down. We're done."
"We're not done." My voice comes from very far away.
Knox stops. Looks at me. "We are. They're dead or running."
"No." I get my hand on his wrist. Make him hear it through the fever, because this is the thing that matters, the thing only I would know to count.
"At the line. This morning. I was half-conscious on that table but I'm a Bramwell product, Knox, I know the smell of my own kind better than I know anything.
I counted three. Three made-not-born up that mountain.
Varen's one." I look at the body in the snow beside me.
"Whoever you put down with the throw makes two. "
Knox goes very still.
"That's two," I say. "There's a third one out there. And he's not dead, and he's not running, because a Bramwell product doesn't do either. He's doing the job. Find him."