38. Knox
KNOX
I find the blood before I find the man, which is how it usually goes.
Gideon said three and Gideon doesn't get the count wrong on his own kind, so once I've got him bandaged enough to last and handed off to Rhys, I go up the east ridge past where Varen fell and I cast for the third one the way I cast for anything that doesn't want to be found.
The snow helps. Snow always helps. A man can hide his scent on a good day with the wind right, but a man can't hide what he leaves in fresh snow, and this one's leaving a lot.
Blood. A thin steady track of it, dark against the white, spaced the way a wounded man spaces it when he's still upright and still moving but losing the argument with his own body.
He's hit. Hit bad. And the trail doesn't run downhill toward escape the way a sane man's would.
It runs along the ridge, toward the cabin, toward her, because this one's still working the job with a hole in him, because the program built him not to quit and the program did its work well.
I think about where the hit came from. The angle of the trail, the way he's bleeding from the right side, and I put it together standing there in the snow.
Ember. From the west rise, covering the ridge, before she came down to deal with Ardric.
She fired into the timber at threads she couldn't see clearly, suppressing, the way you do, and one of those rounds found this man and she never knew it.
She wounded the last killer on this mountain by accident, from four hundred yards, and bought me the blood trail I'm following now.
Even when she doesn't know what she's hitting, she hits.
I follow it half a mile. The snow comes down harder. The trail gets heavier, the spacing closer, the man slowing, and then I come around a stand of pine and there he is.
He's sitting against a tree. Big man, made the way Gideon's made, the program-sharpness coming off him even now, even dying.
He's got both hands pressed to his right side and the snow around him has gone red in a wide dark fan, and he's not going anywhere, his body's finally won the argument, but his eyes are open and they come up to me clear and unafraid as I step into the open.
He knows me. I see it land. Somebody told him about me, the feral one, the one Cass pulled out of the wild, because the Eastons did their homework before they came up this mountain.
"Knox," he says. His voice is wet. He doesn't have long. "They told me about you. Said you came back wrong. Said you were the one to watch." A breath that bubbles. "Guess they had the count right."
I don't say anything. I come closer, slow, and crouch down in front of him, out of reach of the hands if he's got anything left in them, because the program builds tricks into a man that outlast his blood.
"Where's Varen," he says.
"Dead. On the ridge. Gideon did it."
Something moves across his face. Not grief, exactly.
Recognition. The of course of one made thing learning another made thing has ended.
"Then it's just me," he says. "And I'm not getting up.
" He almost laughs. "Doesn't matter, though.
You know that. Whatever you do here." His eyes hold mine, and there's something almost like peace in them, the peace of a man who believes in the thing that made him.
"He'll send more. Augustus is dead but the house isn't, and the protocol isn't, and the records aren't. They'll make more of us.
They'll always make more." He coughs red into the snow, and keeps going, because the program built men who finish their reports.
"You killed their heir today. You're sheltering their deserter and every page he ever copied.
A house that sells obedience can't let either one stand, because the day a product walks off and an owner dies for it and nothing answers, the whole business is over.
So it won't be rage that comes for you. It'll be the warranty.
You can kill every one they send up your mountain and the program never stops.
It just builds the next one and points him at you. There's no end of us."
I look at him a long moment. The snow falls between us, the way it fell between Gideon and Varen, the way it's been falling on this whole red morning.
"The program ended this morning," I tell him.
He frowns, not following.
"Gideon kept records. Twenty-two years of them.
Everything they did to the two of you, copied down, names and dates and protocols, the whole of it.
" I watch it land. "He took it to the government once and they sat on it.
He's not going to the government this time.
We've got a tracker who knows how to make a thing impossible to bury and a pack alpha with reach you wouldn't credit and a woman whose father ran half the dirty business in this state and knows exactly where the bodies and the ledgers are.
The Bramwell program's been a quiet thing that survived because nobody who knew about it could touch it.
That stops today. By the time we're done it won't be quiet, and it won't be survivable, and there won't be a next one to point at anybody.
" I hold his eyes. "So no. He won't always send more.
You're the last one. You just don't know it yet. "
He looks at me. And whatever he believed in, the thing that let him climb a mountain with a hole in him to finish a job, I watch it go out of him, replaced by something I don't have a name for, a man at the very end learning the thing he was built around was already over.
"Huh," he says. Just that.
Then I do the last thing this morning asks of me.
I do it clean and fast, the way you do a thing that has to be done and shouldn't be drawn out, because even this one, even the last killer they sent for her, was a child on a table once, same as Gideon, and the mercy I've got left to give is to make it quick.
I close his eyes after. Same as Gideon did for Varen. Somebody should.
Then I walk back down the mountain through the snow, and I come into the cabin where they're all waiting, where Gideon's gray on the table and Ember's got his hand and Cass and Rhys look up at me, and I say the thing they need to hear.
"All three. It's done." I let the snow melt off me into the warm, and I look at Gideon, gray on the table with Ember's hand in his.
"They sent three killers up this mountain and the mountain kept them.
So here's the count that matters now. The only thing the Bramwells ever built that's still breathing is the man who's going to bury them. "