Page 102 of The Truths We Hold

“You look terrible.”

“Yes.”

—

The second team comes at eleven minutes past eleven, and by then I am running on the floor beneath the floor.

I don’t have a number for it anymore. Thirty percent was an hour ago. What I have now is the specific, granular, entirely mortal awareness of every individual thing my body is spending — the taste of hot metal, the tremor that has climbed from my hands to my forearms, the way my vision narrows at the edges each time I push and takes a little longer to come back. There is a bright line of pain under my sternum that arrived eight minutes ago and has not left, and I am choosing, with what remains of my professional judgment, not to examine it.

Eleven years in the field taught me exactly what this is. It’s the point at which a Hunter is supposed to disengage. There’s a protocol. I wrote part of the current version of it.

The fourteen are still behind me.

That’s the whole calculation. It isn’t brave and it isn’t a decision, not really — a decision requires alternatives, and there is no version of this hallway in which I step aside. There’s just a man of thirty-eight standing between a set of institutional weapons and a group of children, holding a fire that his body has told him twice now it cannot afford, and going on holding it because the fire has somewhere it needs to be.

They come. I burn.

Somewhere in the middle of it I stop thinking about Ashley, which is how I know how bad it is, because I have not stopped thinking about Ashley since March. The fire narrows down to the thing directly in front of it. A boot. A haft of consecrated silver coming through the sheet and going back out of it. Adler shouting a name. My own knee hitting tile and my own hand finding the wall and my own voice saying behind me to a group of children who are already behind me, because it is the only sentence I have left and it is still the correct one.

Twice the sheet goes thin enough to see through and twice I get it back, and the second time I get it back I understand that there will not be a third. Something in my chest has started making a decision without consulting me. My mouth tastes like a battery. The bond has gone strange and far away, and down at the other end of it a woman on a platform two hundred yards from here notices, and I feel her start to turn toward me, and I do the hardest thing I have done all morning, which is push her away and tell her no, stay, hold the room, I have this.

I don’t have it. But I have it for ninety more seconds, and ninety seconds is what the corridor requires.

And then it’s over, and the corridor is empty, and I am sitting against a locker with my legs out in front of me like a man on a beach.

The pilot light is still there.

That’s what I notice, in the long gray minute afterward — down at the very bottom of me, past the floor and the floor beneath the floor, there is still a small blue steady thing that has not gone out and, I am beginning to suspect, cannot. It has been lit since a woman with gray eyes chose me back. Everything above it can be spent. That will not.

Marisol Reyes crouches in front of me and puts a water bottle in my hands and folds my fingers around it, because my fingers are not doing that on their own.

“Is that all of them?” I ask.

“For now, Professor.”

“Devin?”

“Library. They took him in the shadow tunnel. The vampire’s tunnel.” Her face does something complicated. “It was warm. Everyone said it would be cold, and it was warm.”

I laugh, and it hurts under my sternum, and I do it anyway.

“Sir,” she says, “why did you stay? Everyone else who could fight went to the chamber. You could have gone to the chamber.”

I look at fourteen students in an alcove by a water fountain under a curling sign-up sheet for the winter recital.

“The fire is for them now,” I tell her. “Not for me. Not for Ashley. For the students who didn’t choose this war and who deserve a teacher who stands between them and the war’s cost.”

The mortal man stands in the corridor with his fire at thirty percent and his students behind him and the Hunter teams in front of him and the fire bond carrying Ashley’s Command through his flame and the flame carrying the Command’s direction to the students the flame protects. The fire is chosen. The fire is mortal. The fire is enough.

CHAPTER FORTY-EIGHT

raziel

I find Commander Harken in the academy’s central hall — the man whose final solution letter sits in the sanctuary’s granite floor and whose operational authority I helped legitimize for nine centuries standing in the building where I was sent to perform the assessment that the building’s destruction was designed to prevent the completion of.

He is alone.

That is the first thing I note, and it is not an accident and it is not carelessness. There are perhaps forty of his men within two hundred feet of this room. He has placed none of them in it. A commander who stands alone in a hall is a commander who has calculated that the presence of witnesses would constrain what he intends to say, and who has further calculated that he does not require protection from me.