Chapter 17 #2
The courtyard went quiet except for his sobbing.
Rupture was dust. Severance was scattered on the wind.
Null had choked on a soul and ceased. The battle was over, and they'd won it.
Fly knelt with his brother's body in his arms and North's last unfinished word still ringing on a thread that strangely thrummed.
They'd won, and it was one of the worst days of his life, a sharp, heavy stone in his gut that he already knew was never going to leave.
Twister came to him on his knees, still shaking, and put his hands on Fly's ruined arm without asking. The healing poured in, cool and sure, and the bent bone straightened, the swelling going down under his palms. Twister’s face tightened, pain around his mouth.
Fly was reminded of the cost they all endured. Twister's throat worked.
"I couldn't save him." His voice cracked on it. "I had my hands right there, and there was nothing to—" He stopped. "I'm sorry."
Fly pulled him in. He got a fist in the back of Twister's shirt and held him hard, and he was so numb inside that it scared him, a cold that the healing couldn't touch.
"Nathaniel Locklear was my best friend." The words came out rough. "If anyone can survive his soul getting ripped out of him, it's him."
Twister nodded against his shoulder. He pulled back, scrubbed a hand down his face. "I've faced death. I've seen it more times than I can count. But I never experienced it. Not like that." His jaw set. "That fucker Null is one of the worst things I've ever seen."
"Thank you for what you did." Fly meant it down to the bone. "This is all beyond anything we've trained for. But we don't flinch. Ever."
"She was there." Twister said it quietly. Fly waited him out. "Sadie. My wife. When I went black and there was nothing left in me, she was there." His eyes came up, wet and steady. "Everything I do now is for her. I won't rest until we finish this. Hoo-yah."
Fly squeezed his shoulder. "Hoo-yah."
Lechuza came across the damaged courtyard, her face wrecked, and Fly gave her what comfort he had and got to his feet. She didn't say anything. She just wrapped her arms around him and held on, and he let her, and for a moment neither of them moved.
"We won't let his sacrifice be in vain," she whispered.
"No," Fly said. "We won't."
She let him go. Flash came up beside her, his eyes going to North's body on the stone and away again, like he couldn't hold it long.
"You ready to get this thing?" Fly asked.
They nodded. Lechuza looked toward the chapel doors, then down at her own hands. "I don't want to touch it yet. Fly, can you—"
"Yeah." He understood without making her finish. "I'll get it."
The lower chamber was cool, dry, and smelled of dust and old stone.
The quipu sat where her father's register said it would be, tucked and protected within an earthen container with Tocapu, the geometric symbols used in Inca textiles.
He opened it, stared at a fall of knotted cord the color of dried blood, the knots gone stiff with five centuries of waiting.
Fly lifted it like it might come apart in his hands.
Nothing happened to him when he touched it.
He wasn't the one it was waiting for. He closed the container, carried it back up into the light, and folded it away.
When he came out, the team had gathered, and Flash raised his hand to open the corridor. Twister bent to lift North's body.
"I'll take him," Fly said.
Twister looked at him for a second, then stepped back and let him.
Fly got his arms under North and lifted, and the weight of him was the weight of a friendship he never expected and cherished so very much, heavy and warm and wrong.
He settled his friend across his shoulders and took his weight like a mantle of honor.
* * *
Flash opened the corridor, soft and patient the way it came now, and one by one they stepped through and took their brother home.
They laid him in a cool room off the lower basement of the estate, and Flash stood over his friend and made himself look.
His chest still rose and fell. The face was slack and blank in a way North's face had never been, because North had always been there, behind his eyes, the most present man Flash had ever served with.
He had to call Tex.
With heavy feet, he climbed to the main floor, then stepped out onto the stone balcony to do it.
He didn't want to make this call where Fly could hear it, and he kept his voice flat and operational the whole way through.
Man down. North. Soul severed, body in stasis, Twister keeping him alive.
No, they weren't aborting. Yes, he understood what he was asking.
"We keep it under wraps," Flash said. "Command doesn't hear it. The Reavers don't hear it. Nobody hears North's down until this is finished."
Tex was quiet a moment. "You sure, brother?"
"If we lose, it won't matter who knows what. If we win—" Flash's throat closed, and he forced through it. "If we win, there's a chance we get him back. I'm not burying a man who might still be in there. We finish the mission. That's the road home for him."
He ended the call and stood there a second with his hand braced on the chilly iron rail, and he let himself feel it for exactly that long, the weight of being the one who had to make that call instead of the one who got to fall apart.
Then he compartmentalized it, down deep where the team couldn't see it, and he went back inside to do his job.
They gathered in the library around the quipu.
Lechuza wouldn't touch it. She stood over the knotted cord with her arms locked at her sides, and Flash watched the war go on behind her eyes. She reached out, clasping his forearm in a bruising grip. “I can’t bear it if this leads us nowhere, and he gave up everything for it.” She stepped closer to him. “What will it show us?” she whispered.
There was a soft murmur through the team. Flash prayed they hadn’t traded North for a length of dead string, and he ached that she'd be the one who had to live with it.
"I've got it," Flash said.
She looked at him, and he saw the gratitude and the shame. He picked up the quipu before she had to decide.
The knots were warm.
He had half a breath to register that a thing five hundred years old shouldn't be warm under his hand, and then the room vanished.
He was somewhere green and loud with falling water.
Heat on his shoulders, the smell of crushed leaves and river-stone, and he was standing in the cover of the trees like he had a right to be there, and he knew with his whole body that he didn't. Below him, where the falls poured into a clear pool, a woman was bathing.
He should have looked away. Every decent thing in him said turn around, give her the privacy of it, and he couldn’t make himself move.
She rose out of the water with her hair streaming black ink and water down her back and her skin burnished gold in the late light.
She was the most beautiful thing he had ever seen or would ever see.
He barely registered her body. He was too caught up in the sudden, overwhelming, aching knowledge that he knew her.
He looked at a woman he had never met, his soul clenching with a relieved tenderness that said, there she is, like he had been waiting his whole life to find her and had finally turned the right corner.
He loved her already. It made no sense, and it was the truest thing he'd ever felt.
She was everything his people were destroying, and he would have laid the whole world at her feet and counted it a bargain.
She went still in the water.
She felt him. He saw it move through her, the awareness of being watched, and he braced for her fear, ready to step back and let her go.
But she didn't reach for fear. She turned her head slowly and found him in the trees.
She didn't cover herself or cry out, as if he had every right to covet her, want her.
She looked at him the way he was looking at her, like something forbidden and certain and already decided, two people on the wrong sides of a war that was going to take everything, recognizing each other across the water and unable to stop.