"This mission's been hard on hearts and dicks," Twister said, and there was a wet rasp under it, the man still hollowed out from North’s sacrifice, but he was reaching for the joke because that was how they all kept upright.
Fly had gone quiet and a little awed, his eyes still wide from the thread. "That was really beautiful," he said. "Whatever tragedy came after it, whatever it cost them. What they had was cosmic."
Then he frowned, and Flash watched the Visionary push up through the grief, the part of Fly that couldn't stop working on a problem even on the worst day of his life.
"The quipu opened to you," Fly said slowly. "Not her."
"So?"
"So, her ancestor knotted it. If she's the keyholder's line, it should have answered her blood, or nobody's. It answered yours." Fly shook his head, reaching for the shape of it. "There's something else. I've been through the register. Quri Killa Inti and the conquistador, Lieutenant Francisco del Castillo…Quri’s Cisco." He looked up. "Neither of them left children. Quri died at the font. He died the same night. The line everybody keeps calling a bloodline—" He stopped, like the words ran out under him. "You couldn’t be their descendants, so if that’s the case, then what are you?"
Nobody answered. The question sat in the middle of the room, and nobody would touch it.
But for Flash, it twisted in his gut, low and certain and terrifying, the same wrongness he'd felt standing in the trees above the water knowing a woman he'd never met. He didn't have the word for it. He just knew the answer was bigger than anything Fly had said out loud, and that some part of him had already known it for five hundred years.
* * *
North openedhis eyes on a place that had no sky.
It took him a second to sort it. The light came from everywhere and nowhere, soft and silver, and the ground under him wasn't ground so much as the idea of it, and the air tasted like the inside of a held breath. He looked down and found he was still himself, more or less, a shape made of something that wasn't quite flesh, lit faintly from the inside.
The Veil. He was in the Veil. Which meant the thing in the chapel had worked, and his body was lying back there with his soul cut out of it, and that should have scared the hell out of him.
He'd find his way back. He always knew where he was.
The first thing he did was reach for Fly.
He sent it down the thread before he'd even gotten to his feet, hard and clear, the same way he'd called the herd.I'm here. I'm not gone. You hear me, you stubborn genius, I am never out of this fight.The thread was thin from this side, stretched long across whatever distance the Veil put between the living and wherever he was now, and he couldn't tell if it got through. But he felt Fly at the far end of it, a small grieving warmth, and North set his jaw and started building on that. He'd been the anchor on the other side. He could learn to be the anchor from here. Give him a little time.
"Well, hi there," He turned. A woman stood a few feet off, and she was made of the same inside-lit not-quite-flesh he was, but easy in it, like she'd worn it a long time. "You're a long way from your body," she said, and the words arrived without sound, threaded straight into the place where his bond used to be.
She wasn't there the way the dead were there. The lost souls drifting past him were smudges, echoes wearing the shape of who they'd been. She was something else. Where she stood, the gray of the Veil gathered into a woman, light running through her in fine gold lines, the suggestion of braids, of a face, of eyes, woven rather than born. He couldn't have said where her edges were. Look too long and she came apart into thread. Look away and he felt her watching, patient in a way that said she'd waited a long time and would wait longer if she had to.
"You look a bit lost," she said. "I’m Thera. Can I help?"
North considered the offer. He was newly dead, or near enough, standing in a dimension that ran on rules he didn't have yet, talking to a stranger who glowed.
"Yeah," he said. "I'm looking for Chaos. Can you point me in the right direction?"
18
Flash triedto keep his breathing even after that unbelievable experience, his hand resting across the back of Lechuza’s chair, needing to be close to her.
Fly leaned into the leather club chair, the scent of old paper and wood polish thick in the estate's library. Beyond the tall windows, the Peruvian late afternoon light went gold, the manicured gardens disappearing into shadow. They'd lost the light, and they'd lost North.
"It’s getting dark," Fly said, his voice rough with exhaustion. "Finding the owl effigy will be hampered until morning." He gestured toward the maps spread across the mahogany table, imagery of the cloud forest, her father's notes, the coordinates they'd pulled from the quipu. "From what I can gather from the register, Quri had a sanctuary deep in the montane forest. We can corridor in, but we've still got a trek through mountainous terrain. Everyone rest." His eyes found Flash, then Lechuza, sitting apart from the others, her fingers tracing patterns on her knee that might have been glyphs. "We've expended a lot of energy today."
He didn't sayand we lost our anchor. The absence of North's steady presence pulsed through the room like a missing beating heart.
"Especially you two." Fly's voice softened, losing its operational edge. "Being bombarded with ancestral memory...the quipu, the vision." He paused, his jaw tightening. "It rewires something. The mental capacity required just to process what you experienced, what Quri experienced, takes time."
Lechuza's hand stilled. She didn't look up, but Flash saw the way her shoulders curved inward, protective and private. The kiss they'd shared in the aftermath still hung between them, unspoken and terrifying in its certainty.
"We're trying to find your connection to her," Fly continued, his gaze distant, the Visionary pushing through his own grief. "The resonance that will let you open the font without it consuming you. But that requires you functional, not fractured."
"Experiencing those flashbacks," Easy said, his voice unusually thin. He stretched his arms overhead, vertebrae popping like firecrackers, but the movement lacked his usual loose energy. He looked over at Twister, attempting his familiar grin but managing only a grimace. "They're draining in a way I didn't understand until I was inside one." The silence that followed was heavy with what none of them would say.Like watching North fall. Like feeling him go quiet on the bond."Run?"
Twister arched a brow from where he sat by the window, the fading light catching the dark circles beneath his eyes. He'd been bruised since the swan, since he'd killed Null and sealed North's empty body in the same breath. "That constitutes rest?"
