5 Reed
Steel met ice, and the sound of it went through the loading bay like a rifle shot in a canyon.
Avaline caught Mia’s strike. The blade horizontal above her head, her whole starved frame thrown into a block that never should have held—and it didn’t.
Her arms buckled. I watched her elbows fold under a strength no living muscle could answer, the parasite driving Mia’s body down through her guard, and the edge of that black ice dropped an inch toward her upturned face.
An inch. From her eye. From the mouth I’d kissed on a solstice night and ruined the world doing it.
She screamed the one thing I had no answer for. You do not get to take him from me twice.
Something detonated in me that grief had buried under twenty years of ash.
The martyr went out like a lamp. I’d been so ready to die, so sure the dying was owed—and it turned out there was one thing left in the world I refused to spend, and she was on her knees under a god’s blade, and my body was moving before the man in me had a vote.
NOT HER. MOVE. MOVE—
I got a fist in the back of Avaline’s collar and I threw her behind me. Threw the woman I’d waited two decades to touch like she weighed nothing, sent her sprawling into the other dormants, out of the line, out of the dark—and I put the only thing I had left in the gap where she’d been.
Myself.
The ice-blade took me through the shoulder.
I have burned. Season after season, I have felt fire find the gaps in my gear and lay its tongue on skin that was supposed to be protected.
This was the opposite of that and worse.
Cold drove into the meat of my shoulder and kept driving, a cold that had a will in it, that reached past muscle and bone to hunt for the warm animal underneath and freeze it in its den.
My whole left side went white. The breaching tool fell out of a hand I could no longer feel.
I did not step back.
I got both of my hands up and I caught her wrists.
Mia’s wrists. Thin. Goddess, so thin, birdbones under my palms, the wrists of a girl the Verdant Order had starved to keep the thing inside her from burning her out too fast.
The entity snarled—a sound with no lungs behind it, layered and ancient—and twisted the black ice in my shoulder.
Frost screamed along my collarbone, crunching through muscle, searching for the carotid.
Her knees drove up into my ribs with the force of hydraulic rams. The breath blasted out of my lungs, and my boots skidded back two inches across the concrete dust.
Hold her! my wolf roared through the blinding haze of pain. Do not strike! The ice will shatter her soul if we hit back! Hold!
I locked my elbows, anchoring my weight into the earth, Founding blood fighting the creeping paralysis in my chest.
“Mia,” I choked out, blood coating my teeth. “Little one, stop—”
The parasite hissed, bearing down with impossible leverage, grinding the frost deeper. I was losing my footing on the slick tile.
Then steps hit the deck behind her.
Avaline hadn’t stayed down. She came off the floor like a wolf loosed from a snare, knife gone, bruised and furious, and launched herself directly onto Mia’s back.
Her left arm hooked hard beneath Mia’s chin in a sleeper hold, while her right hand seized Mia’s right forearm, using her entire body weight as a counter-lever to wrench the ice-blade’s angle away from my throat.
“I’ve got the leverage!” Avaline shouted into the roar of the bay, her teeth bared against Mia’s temple, muscles corded in her neck as she fought the entity’s inhuman strength. “Reed, hold her hands—don’t let her turn that wrist!”
The parasite shrieked, thrashing violently, its neck whipping back to crack against Avaline’s cheekbone. Avaline took the blow without letting go, her grip tightening, her boots digging into the tile to anchor us both.
The parasite looked at me out of Mia’s eyes. Dead flat, unblinking, that necrotic wrongness laid over my sister’s features like oil on water—and underneath it, her fighting. The single tear tracking down her cheek was not the Saint’s.
The Saints didn’t weep. That was Mia, screaming up from the bottom of her own skull.
And under the rot—under the graveyard reek of the thing riding her—I caught it.
Crushed pine needles. The cheap green apple shampoo our mother used to buy in the gallon jug. Sun-warmed cotton off a clothesline. Three years old and howling and reaching for me over a Warden’s shoulder, and here it was, the scent of her, buried alive, but there, still there, still hers.
My throat closed.
“I’ve got you,” I told her. Not the parasite.
Her. I leaned close, my forehead almost touching hers while Avaline held her shoulders locked from behind.
“Mia. Little one. I’ve got you and I’m sorry.
I’m so sorry. I stopped looking and I should never have stopped, and I am here now, and I am not letting go. ”
That’s when the furnace found us.
The heat had been climbing the whole time, at the edge of everything, and now it crested.
The Second Saint.
The ambient temperature slammed through the ceiling, and my next breath came in like a fistful of hot sand. Behind us, the flock of dormants dropped flat, and the heavy steel shipping crates along the wall shrieked as the metal warped and sagged.
The security gate at the far end of the bay blew inward with a deafening crash.
Del came through it first with Kenji at his shoulder and Bowie behind them, ushering the remaining dormants into the bay. They hit the Second Saint’s wall of heat and staggered, every one of my hotshots throwing an arm up to shield their faces.
“Boss!” Del’s roar cut through the static. “We’ve got them—the air’s gone, we can’t breathe in here!”
I saw the entire fireground in a single glance.
That’s command. It isn’t always courage.
It’s that the picture assembles itself whether you want it to or not, every variable snapping into place cold and complete, and it hands you a bill and makes you pay it in the people you love.
I saw it all: dozens of drug-slow dormants trapped in a concrete box, the furnace cooking the oxygen out of the room, my crew choking, Avaline straining with every ounce of her starved strength against a god on Mia’s back—
—and Mia, in my grip. My baby sister.
We cannot have both, my wolf growled, frantic and tearing at my ribs. The Second Saint will burn the room to ash. We pull our sister or we pull our mate.
No.
The word rang through my bones like an iron spike driven into bedrock.
I had failed them both because I was an arrogant boy who didn’t respect the fire. But I was not that boy tonight. I was a Superintendent who knew how to build a line where nothing crossed. I wasn’t leaving Mia to burn, and I wasn’t letting Avaline go back into the dark.
I was saving both of them.
The math didn’t balance? Then I’d break the equation over my knee.
I threw my voice into the pack link, slamming the connection wide open across the miles between this mountain and the stealth transport idling in the wash:
Patch me straight to Maren on the bird!
Linked, boss! My packmate’s voice cracked in my head, sharp and immediate from the transport’s cockpit. Ready to relay to Maren.
Maren! I drove the thought down the silver line. We have a living mega-fire in the sublevel bay. We’re dropping the structural columns. I need your circle on the plane to drop a Lodestone vacuum seal on this grid the second the det cord blows! Starve it of oxygen!
Kenji has the targeting spike, Maren’s dry, ancient voice echoed through my packmate’s link. Plant it in the deck, Superintendent. My circle is weaving the seal now.
I snapped back to the room, looking past Mia’s thrashing head to my crew.
“It’s a crown fire!” My voice filled the bay, dropping down into the bedrock, cutting through the shriek of melting steel.
“You don’t fight the heat—you starve it!
Kenji, plant the beacon in the center deck!
Mac, Judd—breaching charges on the sublevel columns, north and east, drop the roof on it!
LCES holds—Del, escape route is the east wash, get every dormant moving toward the daylight the second the charges blow! ”
“Beacon going down!” Kenji sprinted into the blistering center of the room, driving a heavy iron spike directly into a fissure in the concrete, setting the rune alight with green witch-fire.
“Charges moving!” Judd was already at a dead run, grinning that feral smokejumper grin. “Mac, north column is yours, I’ve got east!”
“Copy, copy—” Mac slung his pack off at a full sprint. “Everybody who likes their eardrums, get against the wall!”
The crew moved with flawless discipline. Mac and Judd hit the reinforced concrete pillars with the breaching packs, wrapping det cord around the rebar even as the radiant heat blistered the turnout gear on their shoulders.
The Second Saint felt the beacon strike the earth.
The faceless wall of heat swung toward Kenji, the temperature spiking so violently that the chalk on the beacon began to smoke.
Bowie threw himself directly into the path of the heat wave, planting his broad shoulders between Kenji and the entity, teeth bared and fangs dropping as his skin scorched.
“North set!” Mac bellowed.
“East set!” Judd shouted from the far pillar, leaping clear. “Fire in the hole on your call, boss!”
I had one move left to keep every promise I’d ever made.
Avaline was still locked onto Mia’s shoulders, her breath coming in ragged gasps against the back of my sister’s neck.
“Avaline,” I ground out. “Let go. Clear the blast zone.”
She met my eyes over Mia’s shoulder. She saw the iron in my jaw—not surrender, not defeat, but the cold calculation of a hotshot finding an escape corridor in a blowup—and released her grip, dropping back.
I looked into my sister’s face—the parasite glaring out of it, the girl weeping beneath it—and locked my will around the vow:
You don’t die here, Mia. Neither does she.
Then I threw her.