The cougar broke cover and ran for the rise where Flash and Lechuza had driven it low. North held Rupture alone while it happened. Flash and Lechuza pinned the thing against the broken air, and Easy went up its body in a single tawny surge, taking its throat out. The scream cut off mid-note. Something vast and wrong came apart in the sky and fell in pieces that were dust before they hit the ground.
One down. North had time to feel it land in his chest as something close to hope.
Then two shapes walked out of the chapel's broken doorway, and the hope went cold.
Severance and Null. The bond-breaker moved like a wound in the air, trailing the sense of every connection it had ever poisoned. Null came forward as an absence, a place where meaning stopped, and North's mind slid off it the way a hand slides off wet glass. They didn't look at him. They looked past him, at the cracked flagging where Fly lay struggling to his talons, his wings fluttering wildly.
Rupture pinned him in place, the air support was gone, Easy was a hundred yards up the slope, and between the soul-takers and Fly, there was nothing at all.
He let his massive, shaggy head drop, steam hissing from his wide nostrils in a heavy white plume. He reached past his mind’s illusion that he’d given everything he had, past the raw, tearing heat in his immense lungs and the leaden failure of his hooves, delving deep into that sixty percent left waiting when the forty had been utterly expended. The physical agony went cold, numbing out as his human consciousness detached from the flesh, surrendering entirely to the great beast he had become.
The fire he’d built in BUD/S surged here, the hardened mental armor of Hell Week colliding with the heavy, hollow ache of the man who had weathered Mei’s death. He burned his grief as fuel, feeling it expand inside a ribcage wide enough to hold the plains.
The chant rose deep from inside, more powerful in the silence. It was his grandfather's song, and his grandfather's grandfather's.
T?at?á?ka,the earth itself groaned.
Cha?tét’i?s.The word was a jolt of power inside him, the enduring Lakota command tohave courage.
The rhythmic cadence inside his head narrowed his universe, shaving away the pain until there was only the next breath,the next vocal surge. The individual boundaries of his mind dissolved completely into thePte Oyáte, the Buffalo Nation. He was part of a great collective belonging, a herd-mind that had no edges, no end, and no capacity for defeat.
Mitákuye Oyás’i?.We are all related. All things are connected.
The silent chant rolled out across the valley, a sovereign call that demanded an answer. The frozen gravel beneath his front hooves danced, sending a subtle, tectonic tremor up his legs, the thunder of thousands of rhythmic, responding hooves. The herd was coming. He had anchored his failing body to something primeval, immovable, and infinite.
17
Fly woketo the taste of blood and the sound of his hollow bones ringing. Stone pressed against his feathered cheek, hard and unforgiving, and the sharp, metallic scent of it filled his nose. His wings were spread, one of them bent at an angle that jolted pain through him with every shallow breath. He'd fallen. The flying assassin had taken him down.
Something was in his head, a bitter thing in a sacred space.
A voice uncoiled where the bond should be. Vertigo did its job. Now it’s time to do ours.
Fly pushed himself up, the world tilting around him. The golden thread that tied him to his team, the one as much a part of him as his own thoughts, was corrupted. Frayed wire sparking against his mind. Where Flash's steady presence should have been, there was only static. Where North's grounding strength should have been, an icy whisper slithered in.They left you. The connection was a chain, and they let it break. They're already gone.
He knew it was a lie. He could see the mechanism of it with the freezing clarity that was his gift, a precise and venomous logic built to dismantle him. But seeing the trap didn't stop itfrom sinking in. Severance didn't need him to believe the lie. It only needed him to feel it long enough to hollow him out. Behind the assassin, Null waited. The end of meaning. A patient, absolute nothing, waiting for Severance to drain him of all purpose, all will, so Null could take his soul.
He reached for a pattern, a reason to stand, and it drained out of him into the cold. The void leaned in, and the world began to gray at the edges.
Then the mountain groaned.
This came from everywhere at once, a deep roll that shook dust from the chapel walls and went through the stone into his marrow. A sound older than the ruins. Older than the sky. Through the static and the despair, Fly turned his head.
They came over the rise in a brown juggernaut of living muscle and rolling thunder. Thousands of them, a wall of horns and shaggy shoulders that swallowed the hillside, the ground gone under hooves that hit like a thousand hammers on the same beat. At the center of it, or maybe as all of it, was North. The buffalo hadn't called the herd. He had become it.
The flood hit Rupture. The assassin wrenched the mountain up into a fused wall of stone, a last stand, and it didn't matter. The herd went through it. The breaker of foundations found it had no ground to stand on, and it came apart the way it had made everything else come apart, crushed to gravel and then to dust under the passage. One moment it was there. The next, there was only thunder rolling on past the place it had been.
The herd swung toward Fly. Through the poisonous static and the draining chill, he felt the vast collective mind turn as a thousand eyes locked onto his broken shape on the stone, and at the head of it North charged, bruised and battered and bellowing his defiance. Fly never loved him more than in that moment. His friend. His brother. A bond built on blood, pain and years.
North reached him in three strides ahead of the soul-takers and put himself in the gap.
There was no time to argue, no time for Fly to get his damaged wings under him and move, no time for anything but North's great dark bulk swinging around to stand over him, between him and the double-teaming bastards. Fly felt it through the bond before his eyes caught up. North wasn't getting him clear. North was making himself the wall. The same wall he'd always been, the steadfast thing that had stood through every loss and every failure, and now, at the end, the same unflinching love.
Null struck with the killing intent that cut a soul loose from its body. It had been meant for Fly. North took it.
Fly felt all of it, because they were connected on the same gold thread and what hit one of them rang through the rest. He felt North's soul tear loose from the great body the way a root rips out of the ground, the whole of him, the anchor, the immovable one.
In the half-second of the tearing, the bond came clean.
