Chapter 8 #3
He met her eyes. She held his gaze for one count, and the dark gold in her irises had gone dull, the orange threads dimmed, and her face did nothing he could read.
“It’s in the Andes, near a cloud forest north of Vilcabamba, never recorded by the conquistadors because it was hidden, accessible only by a path her family knew. My ancestor was running back to her settlement, Inti Llaqta. City of Gold.”
Easy opened his mouth and Twister nudged him hard. “Don’t say it.”
Lechuza looked up at him, her brows raised, a wry look on her face. “El Dorado. Maybe.” Easy’s eyes widened. “I don’t know if it’s ever been found. My father would know. He’s very knowledgeable about our history. If he doesn’t, we have a library at my ancestral estate in Peru.”
“What happened up there?” Fly asked.
She swallowed hard. “I don’t really know.
My ancestor was running from conquistadors, and somehow I’ve tapped into that memory, probably through my bloodline.
” Her tone was soft, as if she were remembering instead of recounting.
“I killed one of them. I think he was important to her. His name was Cisco.”
Jealousy slid through him like a poisonous, green-coated blade and took him over. Even though that fucking Cisco was long dead and gone, her voice told him that there was more to the story than she was admitting.
* * *
He opened his mouth, but she desperately cut him off. “Flash suspects he’s being manipulated through me. It’s best if I keep my distance.”
“Let’s try the Guardian again,” Fly said, and what they discovered sat in her gut like a stone.
Flash was just too in tune with her, and he caught the lie in her omission, even though he couldn't name what she'd left out.
He kept silent, and she could only feel guilty relief.
He was too, too sweet, still trying to give her space she'd told him she needed.
He didn't push. The not-pushing hurt worse than the pushing would have.
She made herself breathe.
"Try him," she said.
Flash held her gaze for one count more, the gray of his eyes flat in a way she'd never seen before, the easy light in them banked down to something steady and wounded. He closed his eyes and opened the channel. He’d done it before in the moments when his attention pulled inward and the air around him changed pressure.
This time was different.
The air shifted around all of them.
She felt it in her chakana first. A low warmth, not the searing white of the bedroom, something gentler, the way warmth carried through a closed door. Her ribs answered without her permission. Her breath caught. She set her hand flat on the table to keep it steady.
A voice arrived.
It was in the chest of every person at the table. It moved through her sternum the way water moved through a riverbed, finding old channels she didn't know she had carved.
Killa.
She knew this voice.
The knowing was instant and total. She didn't have the name yet, but she had the voice, and she had been hearing it for as long as she had been alive.
The dreams she'd woken from at six years old, sobbing for a man she'd never met.
The visions she'd had on the edge of sleep at sixteen, the year her grandmother died, when the air in her bedroom had felt full of presence she couldn't see.
The whispers she'd written off as fatigue during the bad years in Caracas, the year of Eva, the year after.
The voice she'd told herself for thirty years did not exist.
He had been calling her for her whole life.
Her hand on the table was shaking. She pressed it harder against the wood.
You have been hard to reach, Killa. I am glad to find you. I see that you don’t remember my name. I am Aurelion.
The voice carried no reproach. It carried something worse.
Patience. The patience of an entity that had been waiting for her across decades and had not been frustrated by the wait, only quieted by it.
She wanted to be angry at him. She wanted to demand to know who he was to keep reaching for her without her consent.
The need to investigate was forming the question on her tongue.
She closed her mouth around it.
She didn’t say it. Not yet. Not in front of the team.
Not when the voice was so unmistakably the same voice that had whispered her name through fevers and grief and the long flat hours of three-day surveillance ops in places her body shouldn’t have survived.
Flashes of memory. A covered wagon, a world war, gathering intel.
The grief of that struck her ribs alongside the warmth, and she had to take a slow breath through her nose to keep her face composed. Flash was watching her. If she looked at him, she would crack, and there was no way she was breaking down again.
I know you, felt you calling me, and I looked away. I’m not looking away anymore. I’ve agreed to find the font and unseal it.
I am grateful. I have asked much of you, and I will ask more before this ends.
Aurelion's voice carried something close to relief.
Not exuberant. The relief of a man who had been holding a long breath and given permission to let it out by a small margin.
Tonight, only this. The third ward has fallen.
Chaos draws strength from the breach. He has made his servants corporeal.
Null and Rupture walk in flesh. They will hunt you.
His oldest minion, Severance has been in your world for a long, long time.
The team registered it as a unit. Easy stiffened beside her. Twister exhaled slowly. Fly's hands had gone flat on the table.
There’s a fourth. The concern in his voice made them all pause.
Something new has been built. For what purpose, I cannot see.
I do not know its shape. I do not know its method.
I know only that it was not there before, and that it is there now, and that Chaos shaped it deliberately.
Take nothing at face value. Trust nothing that looks like what you expect.
Be careful in your alignments. Be careful with each other.
That last sentence settled in her chakana the way a hand prodded a bruise. Be careful with each other. He felt the setback. He knew. Aurelion had been inside the network when she pulled away from Flash, and he had felt the fracture, and he was naming it without pushing on it.
She set her jaw against the thing trying to climb out of her throat.
Killa.
Yes. She thought it. She didn’t say it aloud.
You are not alone in this. You have not been alone in this since the day you were born. Be careful tonight. Be careful tomorrow. The work is in front of you. It is hard. It is not impossible.
The channel closed.
The warmth in her ribs faded slowly, the chakana dimming back to ink and stillness, and the room came back to her in pieces. The amber light. The coffee mug between Flash's hands. The team's faces turned toward her, all of them waiting for her to say what had happened on her end.
She didn’t know how to say it.
She had been called her whole life.
She hadn’t answered.
She lifted her head and looked at Flash.
The gray of his eyes met hers across the table and held her, and she saw in them that he had heard the same warning she had.
Be careful with each other. He knew Aurelion had named the fracture between them.
He knew the cosmos had spoken to the thing she was doing.
She held his gaze for the count of one breath, and then she looked away.
She turned to Fly. "We need to leave. Now."
Fly studied her face for a moment longer than was comfortable. He simply nodded.
"Flash. Slip corridor."
Flash didn't answer at first. He was still looking at her. She felt the weight of his attention across the table and she didn’t return it.
"Yeah," he said finally, quietly. "Let's go."