Page 80 of Property of Prophet

“Occupied,” I yell back.

Her burning hand closes around the barrel. Heat punches through my glove. I wrench the rifle sideways, use her momentum against her, and slam the stock into the nerve bundle above her clavicle. Her arm dies instantly, hanging useless at her side, but she throws herself at me with the other one.

Bronze falls out of the sky hard enough to make the roof shudder.

Rooster takes her off my roof edge with a care I would not have believed from those talons, sweeps once over the clearing, then lowers her into a deep drift far from the fighting. On the climb out, he screams at me, a sound carrying a complete sentence. “Watch your ladder.”

My pulse is somewhere near one-forty, noted and filed. The sandbag takes the rifle’s weight again, and the crosshair settles.

Rooster’s shriek splits the dark again, closer this time. Below it, a low sound has begun rising off the Devoted everywhere, and it takes me three shots to identify it.

Singing.

Forty voices in the burning dark, thin and ragged in the cold, singing something with the shape of a hymn and none of a hymn’s mercy in it. The gifted ones sing. The disarmed ones sing louder. A man kneels in the snow beside his ruined rifle, singing up at the aurora with tears freezing on his face. My crosshair rests on his chest for one long breath while I recite the plan to myself.

Through the eighth power of magnification, they stop being a formation and become people.

The scope finds a woman on the southern approach walking straight at Fury’s firewall. She is my mother’s age. Her face has gone wrong in a way no cold explains, skin cracked in fine lines across both cheeks, and under the cracks, something glows the color of cooling embers. Grace burn. The word from Flint’s briefing arrives, now with a picture attached. The picture is a grandmother being cooked alive by proximity to her own god, still walking and singing. The heat turns her back where nothing else could. She stands at the boundary with her arms spread and screams devotion into the flames until two of her own pull her away.

Two hundred yards east of her, I find a woman with no hair beneath her fallen hood and a hospital bracelet frozen to her wrist. The plastic is the exact shade our oncology ward used, and for one ugly second I am not on a roof in Alaska anymore. I know that bracelet. I know what the skin beneath it feels like when the body has spent months being poisoned in the hope of living.

She carries no weapon. She walks toward Flint’s fire with her face lifted.

“Jesus Christ,” I whisper.

My crosshair follows her for another ten yards. “She’s sick.” I pull in a steadying breath. “They’re all sick.” I breathe out and shift my aim.

Every diagnosis I have ever delivered was easier than watching this.

They are not soldiers. Flint’s texts said it plainly, and the scope confirms it, one face at a time. They are ingredients walking themselves to the altar, forty-two willing deaths in a wheel around my home. Every knee I ruin tonight is one more piece of mortar denied to the thing wearing their faith. The math should comfort me. Surgeons live on math. It sits in me instead, the way a bad chart sits, correct and unbearable at once.

My hands stay steady. Eighteen rounds remain.

Then, between one breath and the next, the battle inhales—The Devoted stop.

Every fucking one of them. Every body freezes mid-step, mid-song, and every face turns north at exactly the same time.

The scope swings north with everyone else, and my body understands before my mind agrees to.

The clearing was empty sixty seconds ago. It isn’t now. A man stands between two spruce at the far edge, except man is a courtesy the eye gives him because it doesn’t have another word ready. He is too tall, built wrong in ways I can’t measure through the scope, silver-haired and beautiful enough that my brain tries to make him safe before every other instinct starts screaming.

Calix has stopped hiding inside other people’s bodies.

He is beautiful, the way pathology slides can be beautiful—intricate, luminous, and fatal to their owner. Light moves beneath his skin, pooling and draining as though something inside him is searching for a way out. Fine fractures cover his face and throat, and through every one of them stolen grace bleeds into the dark.

He shines brighter than Fury’s wall.

When he takes his first step, the mountain flinches.

Nothing so simple as sound comes off him. Pressure comes instead. I feel it in my sinuses and the fillings of my teeth. From inside the cabin below me, Bear produces a howl I have never heard my dog produce. Across the ridge, the Devoted answer their god by folding down into the snow, foreheads to the ground, and the wounded fold with them.

The cold deepens around him. I can’t measure it from here, but I feel the change in the air. The snow between him and the center of the clearing begins to glitter strangely, freezing beyond anything Alaska could manage on its own. Overhead, the aurora arrives in earnest, green banners unrolling across the whole northern sky.

The brothers move.

Blade wheels out of the eastern fight. Fury abandons the wall, cutting north through his own fire without slowing. Vex simply appears at the clearing’s rim. Scout and Rooster stack overhead in slow circles. Flint’s long neck swings around, flame amasses in his throat, the ritual’s sequence living behind his eyes. The circle from the plan begins assembling itself around the open ground, eight points finding their marks, exactly as the map on my table drew it.

Calix does not look at any of them.