"You ready to get this thing?" Fly asked.
They nodded. Lechuza looked toward the chapel doors, then down at her own hands. "I don't want to touch it yet. Fly, can you?—"
"Yeah." He understood without making her finish. "I'll get it."
The lower chamber was cool, dry, and smelled of dust and old stone. The quipu sat where her father's register said it would be, tucked and protected within an earthen container withTocapu,the geometric symbols used in Inca textiles. He opened it, stared at a fall of knotted cord the color of dried blood, the knots gone stiff with five centuries of waiting. Fly lifted it like it might come apart in his hands. Nothing happened to him when he touched it. He wasn't the one it was waiting for. He closed the container, carried it back up into the light, and folded it away.
When he came out, the team had gathered, and Flash raised his hand to open the corridor. Twister bent to lift North's body.
"I'll take him," Fly said.
Twister looked at him for a second, then stepped back and let him. Fly got his arms under North and lifted, and the weight of him was the weight of a friendship he never expected and cherished so very much, heavy and warm and wrong. He settled his friend across his shoulders and took his weight like a mantle of honor.
* * *
Flash opened the corridor,soft and patient the way it came now, and one by one they stepped through and took their brother home.
They laid him in a cool room off the lower basement of the estate, and Flash stood over his friend and made himself look. His chest still rose and fell. The face was slack and blank in a way North's face had never been, because North had always beenthere, behind his eyes, the most present man Flash had ever served with.
He had to call Tex.
With heavy feet, he climbed to the main floor, then stepped out onto the stone balcony to do it. He didn't want to make this call where Fly could hear it, and he kept his voice flat and operational the whole way through. Man down. North. Soul severed, body in stasis, Twister keeping him alive. No, they weren't aborting. Yes, he understood what he was asking.
"We keep it under wraps," Flash said. "Command doesn't hear it. The Reavers don't hear it. Nobody hears North's down until this is finished."
Tex was quiet a moment. "You sure, brother?"
"If we lose, it won't matter who knows what. If we win—" Flash's throat closed, and he forced through it. "If we win, there's a chance we get him back. I'm not burying a man who might still be in there. We finish the mission. That's the road home for him."
He ended the call and stood there a second with his hand braced on the chilly iron rail, and he let himself feel it for exactly that long, the weight of being the one who had to make that call instead of the one who got to fall apart. Then he compartmentalized it, down deep where the team couldn't see it, and he went back inside to do his job.
They gathered in the library around the quipu.
Lechuza wouldn't touch it. She stood over the knotted cord with her arms locked at her sides, and Flash watched the war go on behind her eyes. She reached out, clasping his forearm in a bruising grip. “I can’t bear it if this leads us nowhere, and he gave up everything for it.” She stepped closer to him. “What will it show us?” she whispered.
There was a soft murmur through the team. Flash prayed they hadn’t traded North for a length of dead string, and he ached that she'd be the one who had to live with it.
"I've got it," Flash said.
She looked at him, and he saw the gratitude and the shame. He picked up the quipu before she had to decide.
The knots were warm.
He had half a breath to register that a thing five hundred years old shouldn't be warm under his hand, and then the room vanished.
He was somewhere green and loud with falling water. Heat on his shoulders, the smell of crushed leaves and river-stone, and he was standing in the cover of the trees like he had a right to be there, and he knew with his whole body that he didn't. Below him, where the falls poured into a clear pool, a woman was bathing.
He should have looked away. Every decent thing in him said turn around, give her the privacy of it, and he couldn’t make himself move. She rose out of the water with her hair streaming black ink and water down her back and her skin burnished gold in the late light. She was the most beautiful thing he had ever seen or would ever see. He barely registered her body. He was too caught up in the sudden, overwhelming, aching knowledge that heknewher. He looked at a woman he had never met, his soul clenching with a relieved tenderness that said,there she is, like he had been waiting his whole life to find her and had finally turned the right corner. He loved her already. It made no sense, and it was the truest thing he'd ever felt. She was everything his people were destroying, and he would have laid the whole world at her feet and counted it a bargain.
She went still in the water.
She felt him. He saw it move through her, the awareness of being watched, and he braced for her fear, ready to step backand let her go. But she didn't reach for fear. She turned her head slowly and found him in the trees. She didn't cover herself or cry out, as if he had every right to covet her, want her. She looked at him the way he was looking at her, like something forbidden and certain and already decided, two people on the wrong sides of a war that was going to take everything, recognizing each other across the water and unable to stop.
For one held breath, the falls were the only sound in the world, and neither of them looked away.
Flash came back into the library on a hard inhale, and Lechuza came back with him, both of them surfacing out of the same water, and he understood she'd been inside it, too, the other half of it, the watched instead of the watcher. They reached for each other without deciding to. He cupped her face and she fisted her hand in his shirt, and he kissed her, slow and soft, not taking anything, just answering the thing they'd both just felt, the ache of a love five centuries old still warm enough to burn. A man who had found the woman of his deepest heart’s desire.
"Jesus." Easy dragged a hand down his face. "I need a cold shower."
