5 Finn #2
“—And you didn’t even have to knock. You just walked up and now—now everything will be different.”
The lift ground down through the dark. I stood in my corner and gripped the gate rail until the old iron bit my palm, and I anchored myself in the cold stone of everything I was supposed to be—Treaty Court, the Stone Forfeit, the law that says her life is sacred and my hands are the shield—and it was ash.
It was all ash. I’d burned it down without lifting a finger, the way she’d said, and the only law I had left was the one buried in the marrow, and it had exactly one article.
Get her out. Get her out. Get her out.
The overwhelming relief of finding her warred with the absolute horror of where we were. I wanted to laugh. I wanted to tear the steel walls of the lift apart with my bare hands. I wanted to pull her into my chest and let the world burn down around us.
But I couldn’t. I had to be the weapon that carved a path through the dark.
“When we clear the dock,” I said, and my voice came out wrong, low. “There’s a truck. Northeast, past the fuel tanks. Can you make thirty yards flat out?”
“I can make thirty yards on fire.” A crack of something that in a better hour might have been a laugh. “Appropriate, apparently.”
The lift hit the bottom of the shaft and shuddered still.
I blew the dock doors open and we came out into the night, and the night was wrong.
The cold hit before anything else—not the clean high cold of the ridge I’d hoped to smell, but a plunging absence of heat that came down over the loading dock like a lid slammed shut.
Frost bloomed across the concrete in fans, racing outward from nothing, from the dark past the fuel tanks, spreading toward my boots faster than a spilled thing has any right to move.
Frost in the middle of a California summer?
My breath went to fog. The blood cooling on my forearm crackled and stiffened.
Behind us, inside, the klaxons dropped in pitch—all of them at once, a hundred alarms sliding down the scale like a choir with its throats cut—and then they simply stopped.
The silence that replaced them was worse than any sound the building had made all night.
Sloane froze three steps out onto the dock. Not from the cold. Her whole body had gone rigid, her gold eyes fixed on the dark beyond the tanks, and her ruined hand came up to press flat against her sternum where the drive rode inside her collar.
“Finn.” Barely a breath.
Something pressed against the inside of my skull. A weight. Rolling off the frozen dark ahead of us in slow waves, and every wave that broke over me made the animal in my chest do the one thing it had never done in the worst fire of my life.
It wanted to lie down.
It wanted to show its throat to the dark and stop.
“Don’t look at it,” I said. My own voice sounded like it came from the bottom of the shaft we’d just climbed out of. “Whatever comes—don’t look directly at it. Eyes on me.”
“That’s not a man.” Her voice climbed, thin, the first true fear I’d heard in her all night, and somehow that frightened me more than the cold. “Finn, that pressure, it’s not—it isn’t looking for the breach. It swung when I came through the door. I felt it turn.”
She was right. Of course she was right. She’d been undercover with the Verdant Order and the Conclave maybe longer than I’d been a hotshot. She read the air the way I read a fire, and she’d read this one true.
The thing in the dark wasn’t tracking the smoke or the corpses we’d left behind.
It was tracking her. The blazing unshielded broadcast of a dormant’s Heat with no suppressant left to hide it, lit up across the whole mountain like a beacon, screaming here, here, here to every horror the Conclave kept on a leash.
“It’s the Third Saint,” she said.
“Fuck,” I said.
The frost reached the toes of my boots. Beyond the fuel tanks, in the killing dark, the truck sat exactly where I’d left it—our one clean line out, thirty yards away—directly in the path of the thing.
“Truck’s gone,” I said.
“The truck is right—”
“Truck’s gone, Sloane. It’s standing in front of it.”
I turned from the dark and put myself between it and her, my back to the god and my face to my burning, bleeding, gold-eyed mate.
Past the dock the industrial fence gave way to a black wall of backcountry, dry timber and dead grass and the far red glow of a wildland burn somewhere over the next ridge.
The oldest arithmetic there was—run at the thing that only wants to kill you, away from the thing that wants something worse.
Into the trees, then.
Into the fire, away from the ice.
“The trees. We go into the trees. Can you run?”
She looked past my shoulder. Then those gold eyes came back to me, and her spine straightened, and her jaw set.
“Watch me.”
I hit the fence and tore the cut wide with both hands and got her through into the dark—not touching, never touching, my palms flat on the chain-link on either side of her so the whole frame of me made a doorway her body passed through without brushing an inch of skin—and behind us, on the dock we’d just left, the frost kept spreading.
I didn’t look back.
I put my eyes on the black timber and the far red glow and my burning mate plunging into it ahead of me, and I ran.
The last thing I heard before the trees swallowed us was the sound the cold makes when it opens its mouth.