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’thave 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."
9
Aurelion had giventhem just fifteen minutes to prepare. That’s how it worked. The Guardian folded space and time, and Flash navigated it.
The team had moved out to the hangar floor, where Flash had cleared a working space for the transit.
She stood at the edge of it in her tactical kit, her braid tight, her hands locked at her sides because if she let them loose, she was going to reach for him without permission.
