“No one in this house will give us away. They can also land here and search. They’ll find nothing and leave. We’ll be free to return when we need to.”
Twister stood and stretched his back, looking at Easy. "It’s not just the Reavers. Tex said Langley and the brass are leaning on him for a location on Lechuza, hard. The Eyrie will buy us three days and your estate a few more on the paper mission by telling command we're running her to ground through her family contacts. After that, he's out of room to lie."
Flash took the center of the room the way he was built to, and the team turned toward him. "So, we've got some breathing room, but more pressing, we have a font that knows her and still won't open." He looked at Fly. "What’s the directive, sir?"
“The artifacts. Now that I have some clarity, and after a quick talk with Lechuza’s father, he told me where the quipu is," he said, his voice even.
"It’s a knotted record. My father kept a register of what the family hid and where, in his own hand, in the library safe. I’ll get it.”
“It’s two hours north of here, in a crumbling chapel. They put it there for the energy it gives off." She looked up at the team, then at him. "We can go now.”
Fly said, "It means we're right about your lineage, and we're still missing a piece. The font recognized you in the glade. Last night the two of you broke open a conduit that may have been closed for five hundred years." He leaned forward. "Quri Killa Inti. The artifacts tie to her, and maybe when Killa touches them, they’ll recognize her, a record, an effigy, and her bones."
"A scavenger hunt across the Andes," Easy said, "while two Reavers who will never stop hunting her close in and command wants her in a cell."
"A scavenger hunt that will hopefully get us into the Veil," Fly said.
"Slip corridor gets us there without a trace," Flash said, and the plan clicked into the forward motion he loved, the relief of a clear vector after the disorientation of the last twelve hours. "Let’s do this." He found her eyes and held them. "This is how we finish it."
She held his gaze without any effort. His chest tightened as tenderness settled in those fierce eyes, along with a sheen of something that made his heart skip a beat.
She gave him a single nod, then scanned each face. “Together,” she whispered.
“Hoo-yah,” Flash and the team said in unison.
16
North foundthe housekeeper in the long gallery off the kitchen, polishing silver that looked older than time.
"Sorry to bother you. I'm trying to find Llika."
The housekeeper set the cloth down and gave him a polite, puzzled look. "Llika?"
"Dark hair, about so tall. She works the guest wing."
"Sir, I've kept this house for thirty-one years, and I hired most of the staff myself. There's no one here by that name," she said gently. "There never has been."
North kept his face even. He'd held it steady through worse than this. "You're sure."
"I'm sure of my own people." She studied him for a moment, then her expression softened into something almost amused. "It's a lovely name, though. Old. My grandmother used it. She'd say it for the kind of sign you don't go looking for, the kind that comes looking for you." She picked the cloth back up. "A portent. An omen. The way the unseen world talks when it wants you listening."
He thanked her and walked back out into the corridor, and his pulse had gone slow and heavy in his chest. The woman he'dheld the night before, the heat of her, the weight of her, the words she’d said to him as the light dissolved, had never been a woman at all. The Veil was speaking through his dream, and he wasn’t crazy about what it was saying.
Protecting Fly was a given. Her omen had been about the cost. His life.
* * *
Fly had been readingthe residual charge in the library for the better part of an hour, and it still wasn't fading the way the math said it should.
The detonation from the night before had left something behind, a low hum threaded through the old stone that he felt in his teeth and the small bones of his hands. He'd cataloged it the way he cataloged everything, watching for the falloff curve, the rate at which a thing that powerful ought to bleed back into the ordinary. It wasn't bleeding off. It pooled in the corners and clung to the shelves and settled into the six of them like it had decided they were where it belonged. That tracked with what he'd started to suspect. The energy was lingering, and Fly was only guessing, but it was all about Flash and Lechuza, their bond.
He could feel his own form close to the surface for the first time, the kite riding just under his skin, patient, waiting for the air. Accessible now the way it must have always been meant to be. Something inside him ached to let it free, but only entering the Veil allowed them to fully form or a shock of power from the font. What would this energy do?
Easy prowled like a caged cat, Twister kept elongating his neck, and Flash and Lechuza’s chakanas were lit. The charge in the room tilted toward them, two poles a compass couldn't ignore. North stood at the window with the registerLechuza's father had pulled from the safe, reading the old man's handwriting, working Fly’s job for him. What was he hiding? Fly could see it in every line of his body. He wanted the time to talk to Than, the quiet, stoic guy who took burdens and carried them as easily as he carried those broad shoulders.
Then Aurelion's voice came into all of them at once, solemn, vast, and threaded with something Fly hadn't heard from the Guardian before, dread.
The last outer ward has fallen. Chaos draws on more strength than he has commanded in five hundred years, and he is spending it. He is letting his reckless?—
