Chapter 21 #2
I do not know. The Guardian, ancient, depleted, and honest, had no answer. We hold one tenet. It does not break.
"What is it?"
Love never dies.
Fly turned it over. "So it just restarts the cycle. Round and round."
Perhaps. A pause, the line thinning. But when I went looking for a way to reach her, in my desperation, I found him. He was a lifeline to her.
"What does that mean?"
I think that may be your answer, if you can decipher it. Something like warmth, or apology, came down the thread. That is the work, Visionary. It was always going to be yours.
Fly opened his mouth to push, and the line went wrong.
Something insidious slid into the space where the Guardian had been, cold and infinite and pleased with itself.
Aurelion was gone between one breath and the next.
Fly didn't have to guess who'd cut him off.
He sat there with the cold draining out of the thread and the certainty settling in its place that time was dwindling down.
He entered the library, pulled every register her father kept, every inventory, every brittle page that so much as mentioned the line's relics, and he hunted the blade through all of it until the window started to gray, until he was frustrated out of his mind, desperation fracturing his logic.
The quipu was there. The owl effigy was there.
The bundle, the burial, the bones, all of it named and placed and footnoted across five centuries of careful keeping.
The Tumi wasn't anywhere.
He folded his upper body down onto the table, exhausted. Not one note of its existence, as if the blade that ended Cisco’s life had never existed at all. But he knew it was real. Quri had used it, so where had it gone?
Fly woke up face-down on a pile of registers with a crick in his neck and a page stuck to his cheek.
For one disorienting second, he didn’t know where he was.
Then he looked at the clock. Six hours. “Fuck.” He pushed himself upright.
He was no closer to finding the Tumi. The font was still closed, and he’d fallen asleep in the library.
He stomped to his room, jerked off his clothes, threw them everywhere, showered, scrubbing hard.
Once out, he rubbed himself just as hard and changed into a pair of black compression shorts.
Barefoot and vibrating, he walked toward the gym.
When he entered, Shark was at the pull-up bar, his back muscles flexing, that perfect V, sweat coating his skin, slipping down his lean waist into the band of his shorts.
When in doubt, work out. That should be on a Navy SEAL T-shirt.
"Where is everybody?" Fly snarled. Shark didn't even stop hauling his body weight on his heavy shoulders. "O-voo."
Fly blinked. "What?"
Shark let go of the bar and dropped to his feet. He turned around, reaching for a towel, and mopped his face. Fly was used to seeing the great white swimming around him, and it barely registered now. Just what made up the calm, calculating warrior?
"Someone got up on the wrong side of the library table.” He sent the towel over his chest. “They left."
"When?" he growled.
"You just missed them. You probably felt the corridor opening."
Fly stared at him. "I fall asleep for six fucking hours, and shit happens."
Shark shrugged.
Fly rubbed both hands over his face. "Christ. I need a vacation."
"No time for that, brother," Shark said.
"You're right. I need a different life."
Shark looked at him, his expression not even sympathetic. "That's not happening either."
“What’s going on with O-voo that, apparently, everyone decided to continue the apocalypse without me?”
Shark chuckled. “You were in la la land, and they didn’t need your big brain for that op. Bagh and O-voo hit paydirt, but when they did, Eva outwitted them, wounded Bagh, and took O-voo. She demanded Lechuza show up, or Eva was going to off him.”
Fly sighed. “So, who’s gone?”
“Lechuza and Flash. The Reavers, Bondo, Twister, and Easy.”
“And the rest of the team?”
“Sleeping. You and that pair have drained the energy out of all of us. I’ve never been this tired in my life, not even after Hell Week. Those visions were brutal. It’s hard to wrap my mind around this stuff. But I will do anything, fight anything to protect my family and my sweet Maddy.”
Fly nodded, some of his foul mood dissipating after Shark framed why they were here, and there was the envy again, the kind he’d felt on the balcony. “Tell me something I don’t know.”
“So, what’s up? You deduced anything or are you down here to just simply work out?”
“I’m frustrated as hell. So, no, smart ass, no deductions. Keep poking.”
Shark laughed softly, deep water in the sound. “Instead of swinging at me, punching a bag might help you loosen up those stuck mind muscles.”
“It’s called Default Mode Network.”
Shark just stared at him.
“The mindless act unlocks your brain and helps with creative incubation, allowing your subconscious to piece together problems without the stress of actively thinking.”
“Yeah, I know what it is, brainiac, but I just call it letting-my-mind-wander.” He crossed to a rack, grabbing at supplies. “Let’s get you taped and gloved. I’ll spot you.”
Moments later, Fly punched the bag. A sharp left hook.
Fact One: She had the Tumi.
“Your bio-electric field is spiking like a dying battery. You're thinking too hard. Stop hunting the fish and just let it swim into your mouth.”
Fly reset his stance, breathing through his nose.
His mind was a hyper-threaded processor running too hot.
He forced himself to stop hunting for the answer, letting his gaze go soft on the black vinyl.
He released a flurry of rapid-fire punches until he was breathing hard.
The heavy leather absorbed each strike, but the shockwaves traveled straight into Shark’s braced chest.
“Ooh, baby Lieutenant, I felt those,” Shark said, his eyes gleaming with that unsettling, predatory focus. “You said you need a sounding board, and man, I know turbulence when I feel it. My skin is practically buzzing. You’re thrashing enough water to get my lateral lines tingling.”
“Shut up.”
“You didn’t bring me down here for me to shut my toothy mouth.
” Shark grinned, leaning into the bag to steady it.
“Your heart is hammering, Fly. I can hear the valves snapping from here.
But there's no blood in the water yet. Stop teasing me. Fucking let go of your brain, work the bag, and let your body find the rhythm.”
He stopped trying to think about the Tumi.
Instead, he let his mind drift to the smell of old paper from the books he’d fallen asleep on.
He thought about the phantom blood of Cisco’s scar, red and ancient.
Thud. Thud. He thought about the primordial, humid air of the Andes and how magnificent that white owl encased in silver had looked while dropping the effigy into Lechuza’s waiting hand.
Fly glared at Shark, then decided he was the one being a dick. He hit the bag like his life depended on it, combinations, jabs, cross punches. Crack. Crack. Thud. The shockwave rippled through the heavy vinyl, and Shark rolled his shoulders as if shaking off a wake.
“Better,” Shark murmured, his eyes tracking the micro-movements of Fly’s muscles.
Fly ignored the banter, letting his focus dissolve entirely.
The room blurred. The trapdoor to his deeper consciousness swung wide, and his endemic pattern-recognition began operating in the dark.
Behind his shoulder blades, the air grew heavy, static-charged.
A faint, ghostly rustle of feathers echoed in the small room as incorporeal wings unfurled, their ethereal down catching an invisible updraft.
Fly threw a brutal body blow. The physical exertion was a chisel, scraping away the useless historical noise. The Veil. The lost metal still called to the mortal wound.
“Oh, yeah, the bird’s waking up,” Shark taunted playfully, his head tilting as if listening to the rustle of the lucent wings. “I can feel the air pressure dropping in the room. You’re building a storm, Lieutenant. Work it out.”
Another combination. Left, right, slip, hook.
The rhythm was pure geometry now. Fly’s Visionary mind mapped the ancient font of power, the one Lechuza described to him when it had opened.
He saw the basin. He saw the pedestal. The whirling chakana glyphs, the blue light, the portal opening.
He saw the font as it was now, solid, impenetrable rock to lock the conquistadors out forever.