Yes. It has always been her.
"Then Flash." This was the piece that didn’t make sense. "How does he play out in this? Where does he fit?"
I do not know.The Guardian, ancient, depleted, and honest, had no answer.We hold one tenet. It does not break.
"What is it?"
Love never dies.
Fly turned it over. "So it just restarts the cycle. Round and round."
Perhaps.A pause, the line thinning.But when I went looking for a way to reach her, in my desperation, I found him. He was a lifeline to her.
"What does that mean?"
I think that may be your answer, if you can decipher it.Something like warmth, or apology, came down the thread.That is the work, Visionary. It was always going to be yours.
Fly opened his mouth to push, and the line went wrong. Something insidious slid into the space where the Guardian had been, cold and infinite and pleased with itself. Aurelion was gone between one breath and the next. Fly didn't have to guess who'd cut him off. He sat there with the cold draining out of the thread and the certainty settling in its place that time was dwindling down.
He entered the library, pulled every register her father kept, every inventory, every brittle page that so much as mentioned the line's relics, and he hunted the blade through all of it until the window started to gray, until he was frustrated out of his mind, desperation fracturing his logic. The quipu was there. The owl effigy was there. The bundle, the burial, the bones, all of it named and placed and footnoted across five centuries of careful keeping.
The Tumi wasn't anywhere.
He folded his upper body down onto the table, exhausted. Not one note of its existence, as if the blade that ended Cisco’s life had never existed at all. But he knew it was real. Quri had used it, so where had it gone?
Fly woke up face-down on a pile of registers with a crick in his neck and a page stuck to his cheek. For one disorienting second, he didn’t know where he was. Then he looked at the clock.Six hours.“Fuck.” He pushed himself upright. He was no closer to finding the Tumi. The font was still closed, and he’d fallen asleep in the library.
He stomped to his room, jerked off his clothes, threw them everywhere, showered, scrubbing hard. Once out, he rubbed himself just as hard and changed into a pair of black compression shorts. Barefoot and vibrating, he walked toward the gym. When he entered, Shark was at the pull-up bar, his back muscles flexing, that perfect V, sweat coating his skin, slipping down his lean waist into the band of his shorts.
When in doubt, work out.That should be on a Navy SEAL T-shirt.
"Where is everybody?" Fly snarled. Shark didn't even stop hauling his body weight on his heavy shoulders. "O-voo."
Fly blinked. "What?"
Shark let go of the bar and dropped to his feet. He turned around, reaching for a towel, and mopped his face. Fly was used to seeing the great white swimming around him, and it barely registered now. Just what made up the calm, calculating warrior?
"Someone got up on the wrong side of the library table.” He sent the towel over his chest. “They left."
"When?" he growled.
"You just missed them. You probably felt the corridor opening."
Fly stared at him. "I fall asleep for six fucking hours, and shit happens."
Shark shrugged.
Fly rubbed both hands over his face. "Christ. I need a vacation."
"No time for that, brother," Shark said.
"You're right. I need a different life."
Shark looked at him, his expression not even sympathetic. "That's not happening either."
“What’s going on with O-voo that, apparently, everyone decided to continue the apocalypse without me?”
Shark chuckled. “You were in la la land, and they didn’t need your big brain for that op. Bagh and O-voo hit paydirt, but when they did, Eva outwitted them, wounded Bagh, and took O-voo. She demanded Lechuza show up, or Eva was going to off him.”
