I Was Experimented On By The Government. Enter Last Light. Finale

“I want it on the record that I called this a bad matchup.”

Out loud, in the road, with the white flare dying over the town and the mountain still coming apart behind Azeral and the serpent's second roar still bouncing around inside my skull, to the three people least likely to care.

Here is what the road looked like from where I stood, for the record, because Kane always kept the record and somebody has to now. Sariveth's body twenty feet to my left with the tendrils on her wings gone still. The valley emptying behind us, engines and boots and Willow's voice on the low-band running the withdrawal west in the same tone she used to order coffee. The Horsemen gone toward the mountain with Merlin. Lucifer standing at the road's edge by the stone wall with his hands folded in front of him, watching, exactly as he'd stood through the seraph and the rift and everything since, and the look on his face said he intended to keep standing that way. And above the four of us, a hundred feet up with the black wing spread and the white one spread and the star-blade held down along his leg, the reason my knees had opinions.

"Quick question. Just a small one. I'm not nearly as strong as you evolved jerks. Shepherd ate a change and came out able to punch a Wendigo into a mist. Kane came out of a tube looking like a recruitment poster. Alaric has a literal magic sword that can alter the environment. What exactly am I supposed to do here besides die in an interesting way."

Kane kept his eyes on the thing hanging over the town and answered me that way, without turning.

"You're the sniper."

"I don't own a rifle."

"You own two." He tapped the side of his helmet, next to the eye. "You stay out of the direct fight. You find a vantage. Every time he commits to one of us, you put a beam in the side of his head and make him choose again. Alaric and Shepherd help me keep him busy. The goal is to keep him turning, Abel. He's weakened. Lucifer's mist is still in him and it's not leaving. We don't have to overpower him. We have to keep him from ever setting his feet."

"That's a lot of trust to put in my eyes."

"It's a lot of eyes."

Azeral came down.

He came off the sky like a decision, both wings back, the black one and the wrong one, the star-blade held low along his leg, and he hit the road between us at a speed that took the cobbles up in a ring. Alaric met him first because Alaric was Alaric. Excalibur came up gold and the star-blade came down black and the sound of them meeting went through my teeth, and then Azeral turned his whole body through the contact and Alaric left the road.

He went a long way. Over the low stone wall at the road's edge, over the bank, and into the Opo, the river that ran down through the town to the fjord, and he hit the water in a white burst and the water closed.

Shepherd was already on Azeral's blind side.

He got a hand on the black wing and pulled, and for one second Azeral came off his line. Then Azeral's elbow came back and found Shepherd's chest and Shepherd went into the road. Into it. The cobbles bowled up around him and he lay in a crater the size of a hot tub with dust coming off him, and Azeral put both feet on the ground and set them.

The one thing Kane had said he couldn't be allowed to do.

Kane raised the silver blade.

He held it straight up, point to the sky, in the middle of the road, and I had time to think that it was a strange thing to do with a sword in a fight, and then the sword lit.

Purple.

It came out of the steel in a single pulse, a ring of purple electric fire that left the blade in every direction at once, and it went out through Kane and through the road and through me sixty feet away, and every hair on my body stood up inside the armor. I knew the color. I had watched Reyes hold a taser to a sixteen-year-old's forearm in a Division lab and watched the charge go into him and vanish, and I had watched the same color come up through the skin of his hands in the corridors of HQ every time something startled him, more than once, until the cuffs learned to hold it. Jay's color. Jay's exact purple.

It was coming out of Kane's sword and I had no idea how.

The pulse hit Azeral in the chest as he rose.

He'd gone up. Fifteen feet, twenty, wings opening to take him higher, and the purple ring caught him mid-climb and tore him out of the air like a hand closing on a moth. He came down in the road on his back and the cobbles went up again and the star-blade skittered out of his grip and rang against the wall.

Alaric was next to Kane.

He was soaked to the hair and he had arrived without walking there, the air just giving him up beside Kane's shoulder the way it had been doing for weeks now, and he wrung out one sleeve with great dignity and looked at Azeral in the road.

"Abel is incredibly lucky he did not undergo the Revenant evolution. I want that noted."

"That's what I said."

"You said it as a complaint. I am saying it as an observation. There is a difference."

Shepherd came up out of his crater in stages, one hand on the lip of it, then a knee, then the whole of him, and he rolled his neck once each direction until it cracked, and sighed, and looked at Alaric.

"Yeah. The runt's lucky." He dusted the front of his shirt off with the flat of his hand. "But we get to have all the fun. Breaking the freak that's been tormenting us for the last few years. I'll take that over lucky."

"Don't tempt me to switch sides."

It was a joke, mostly, and then I put a beam into the back of Azeral's head as he got to his hands and knees, tight aperture, the way Kane had asked, and his head snapped forward into the cobbles and the three of them looked at me.

"Focus." Kane, to all of us, flat. "All of you. He's not down."

He wasn't.

The road shook.

Not from him. From the mountain. It came up through the cobbles into my boots and kept coming, a rumble with no top end to it, and all four of us turned toward the fjord because you could not have stopped a person from turning toward it. Jörmungandr had cleared the mountain's shoulder. The head hung over the water with the whole town in its shadow, and against it, so small that the eye kept losing them, the Horsemen went in.

All four at once.

I saw the hammer first, a white flash at the serpent's jaw that turned the fjord into a mirror for one instant. Then a line of red and gold along the scales that was Amaterasu moving faster than I could hold in my head. Apollo burning. Set dark. Four points of light on a thing the size of a mountain range, and then the four points went into one point and the one point became a light with no color in it at all, and the sky over Odda turned to noon.

I shut my eyes. When I opened them the road was purple with afterimage and the serpent's roar was coming back off the far valley wall and Kane had the Aegis in his hand.

He hadn't been holding it a second ago. He held it now, the worn surface catching the last of the white, and he held it out to Alaric.

"Cover Abel."

Alaric looked at the shield. He looked at Kane. Something passed between them that I was not part of and did not ask to be, and Alaric took the Aegis and slid his arm through the straps and the thing settled on him exactly as Kane had always described it settling, like it had been expecting him.

"I will."

Azeral stepped out into the street.

He'd gotten up while we were looking at the sky. He stood in the middle of the road with the star-blade back in his hand and blood running out of the chest wound Kane had opened in the town and the shoulder wound and the side wound and the one across his back where Alaric's fire had gone in, and I saw the wings.

The black one hung at a bad angle and it stayed a wing. The white one was going.

It was coming apart from the tips inward. Feathers, or whatever the thing had for feathers, lifting off it one at a time and burning to nothing before they'd fallen a foot, a slow steady disintegration, and his eyes stayed on the road in front of him while it happened, and nothing in him was stopping it. The old shape returning, Lucifer had called it, in Kane's recovery room, with his hand on the armor. The angelic body healing its way back. It was unhealing in front of me. Whatever the mist had started, Kane's blade and Alaric's fire had finished, and the second wing that was supposed to turn white was never going to, and the first was leaving.

Azeral looked at me while it happened.

Not at Kane. At me, sixty feet up the road with my eyes still cycling, and there was nothing in the look but assessment. A man deciding which of four problems to solve first, and settling on the one who'd put a beam in the back of his skull.

Then he moved, and he moved at Shepherd.

Shepherd had a half-step on him and it wasn't enough. Azeral's hand closed on his throat and lifted him off the road one-handed, and Shepherd got both hands on the wrist and couldn't shift it, and Azeral's other hand came up and took Shepherd's left arm at the shoulder and pulled.

The arm came off.

I have watched a lot of things in the last two years. I have watched a Skinwalker's legs come apart under my own beams, and a bar explode with people in it, and a woman with a blue blade die of biting me. I had not watched anyone pull an arm off a person like a wing off a roasted bird, and I watched it now, and the sound went somewhere in me that I'm going to be dealing with later. Azeral tossed the arm to one side. Tossed Shepherd to the other. Shepherd hit the road and slid and stopped against the stone wall in a heap with the stump pouring.

Kane hit Azeral in the side at full speed.

He came from behind Alaric and I never saw him accelerate, only arrive, and Azeral left the ground sideways and went through the front of a building forty yards down the road, a bakery, the glass and the counter and the whole front wall going in around him, and Kane went through the hole after him and the building swallowed both of them.

I ran to Shepherd.

He was on his back against the wall with his eyes open and the stump of his shoulder pumping, and the blood coming out of it was already slowing, which was either the best sign I'd ever seen or the worst. Alaric came up behind me with the Aegis on his arm and stood over the both of us.

Shepherd looked up at me.

I looked down at him.

"So are you going to lay there like a loser, or are you going to get up and fight."

My voice came out mostly steady, which surprised me more than the arm had.

He blinked at me once.

Then he got up.

He did it with one arm, which is harder than it sounds, and he got his feet under him and stood against the wall and looked down at the place where his left arm was supposed to start. He looked at it for a while. The blood had stopped entirely. The stump had a wrong, sealed look to it, and under the seal something was moving.

"Where'd the prick drop it."

I looked at the road.

The arm was lying about twenty feet away in the gutter, palm up, fingers slightly curled.

I walked over. I bent down. I picked up Shepherd's arm by the wrist, and it was heavy and still warm and I held it like a thing I'd been asked to hold and had no procedure for, out from my body, with the fingers hanging, and I walked it back to him and held it out.

He took it.

He looked at it. He sighed, a long one, through his nose, and then he raised his own severed arm to his mouth and bit into the meat of the forearm.

Alaric made a sound.

Shepherd chewed. He swallowed. He took a second bite, and as he did the stump of his shoulder pushed outward, and what came out of it was black. Obsidian black, the same glassy black the hollow legion had turned to on the sand of the Sahara, and it came out in the shape of an arm. Shoulder first. Then the upper arm, edged, faceted, a plate-covered thing that I knew the second I saw it because I had seen it every day for two years before the change took it away from him. Then the forearm, and the forearm was a blade. The old blade arm. Shepherd's, reforming from the meat of his own severed limb, black and sharp and steaming faintly in the cold.

Alaric turned away and put one hand on the stone wall and tried, very hard, with his whole body, not to throw up.

He lost.

It went on for a while. Shepherd ate around it with the patience of a man finishing a sandwich. I stood between the two of them holding nothing, because the arm was in Shepherd's other hand now, and I found that I had absolutely nothing to say for the first time in my adult life.

When Alaric was finished he wiped his mouth on the back of his glove and straightened up with the Aegis and looked at Shepherd, and at me, and at the half-eaten forearm.

"You Revenants are some genuinely twisted individuals."

There was a crack down the middle of his voice that I could hear from where I stood.

He was gone.

The air took him and gave him back forty yards down the road, in front of the bakery's ruin, with Excalibur in his hand and the Aegis on his arm, and I understood he'd gone to Kane. I looked. Through the hole in the building's front I could see them, in the smoke and plaster dust, and what I could see was Azeral with one hand fisted in the chest plate of Kane's armor, holding him against the bakery's side wall, and punching him. Center mass. Once, twice, again, and every blow went through Kane and into the wall behind him and the wall bowed outward into the alley on the far side with each hit. Kane was fighting back. Kane was losing.

Alaric pointed Excalibur at Azeral's back.

He said something. I couldn't hear it from where I stood. Then he slashed, a single gold arc at Azeral's spine, and Azeral let go of Kane and turned and caught the blade.

It wasn't the Sahara. It wasn't clean. He caught Excalibur in his bare hand and the gold burned and he held it and his arm shook with the holding and blood ran out between his fingers, and he looked at Alaric down the length of the blade.

"Did you truly think that would work?"

"No." Alaric's voice, carrying now, bright. "But I was counting on that."

I put both beams into the side of Azeral's face.

Full aperture. Wide burn. It took him across the cheek and the temple and the black wing and he turned toward me because a face on fire will turn toward the fire's source whether the mind attached to it wants to or not, and in the second his eyes were on me and not on anything else, Shepherd came through the bakery's ruin from the side and drove the obsidian blade of his new arm into the place where the white wing had been.

Into the stump of it. To the elbow.

Azeral's scream shook plaster off the ceiling.

He threw Shepherd off him with a convulsion of his whole body, and Shepherd went through the bakery's back wall and out into the alley, and Azeral turned back to Alaric with the blade still in his hand and something new in his posture. He was straighter. The wounds were still there and the wing was still dying but the thing standing in the ruin had found a floor somewhere under itself and was standing on it.

A second wind.

He let go of Excalibur and put both hands on Alaric and threw him. Alaric went out through the bakery's front into the road, rolled, came up with the Aegis raised, and Azeral walked out after him and turned to the road's edge where a delivery truck sat on flat tires against the wall, and put his hands under the truck's frame, and lifted it.

A whole truck. Over his head. With one wing burning.

He walked it four steps to where Alaric was getting his feet under him, and Shepherd came around the corner of the building at a run, and Azeral dropped the truck on both of them.

The sound of it filled the street.

Then nothing under the truck moved.

I stood in the road with my eyes still running hot from the burn and my hands shaking and the sniper's whole job in front of me. Keep him turning. Find a vantage. Kane was somewhere inside the bakery's ruin and not coming out. Alaric and Shepherd were under a truck. And Azeral stood in the road with his back to me and his black wing folded and looked up at the mountain.

I needed height.

I turned to look for a stairwell and I looked at the mountain instead, because everyone was looking at the mountain, because you could not stop.

Jörmungandr was looking at the town.

The head had come down. It hung over the fjord's edge, the eye the size of Odda focused down on Odda, on the road, on us, and I felt it decide something, and my legs went to water.

Then the hammer hit it.

Thor came in from the left with the whole white weight of the thing and Amaterasu came in from the right in a line of red and gold, and they hit the serpent's jaw on the same instant from opposite sides, and the head went back. Back into the mountain. Rock came down over the fjord in a curtain and the roar that came out of the split was pain this time, and the eye went up and away from us and the two Horsemen went after it.

My body was shaking harder than it ever had.

Fear, and under the fear a tremor in the muscle itself, in the hands and the chest and the eyes, the whole frame of me vibrating like a struck wire. I stood in the road and I let it happen for three full seconds, because there was no stopping it, and then I put my teeth together and picked a building and went.

Second floor. A stairwell with the door blown off. A window over the road with the glass gone.

I got down on one knee behind the sill and looked out.

Azeral stood in the road below me, twenty feet away and thirty feet down, with his back to the building, watching the Horsemen fight the serpent. He'd forgotten me. Or filed me. The truck sat where he'd dropped it. The bakery's ruin sat where Kane had gone in.

The ruin moved.

Kane came up out of it in a spray of plaster and broken shelving with the silver blade already swinging, and Azeral turned and met him with a blade of his own.

Not the star-blade. Or the star-blade, but changed. The stars were still in it, drifting in the black, but the shape had gone to something I knew, because I'd looked at it every day for two years hanging cold and silver from Kane's hand. The same length. The same line. The dark twin of the silver blade, the pattern the silver had been cut from, and the two swords met in the road and the road cracked under both of them.

They fought.

I don't have the words for how they fought, and I've spent most of the last two years finding words for things that didn't want them. Every contact between the blades put a wave through the street. Windows I could see from mine came apart one after another down the block. The cobbles under them went to gravel, then to dust, and the dust hung in the air around them in a cloud that the strikes lit from inside, silver and black and silver, and neither of them gave a foot of ground for a very long time.

Kane fought the way I'd watched him fight for two years, except faster than my eyes could agree to. He worked angles. He gave a half-step to buy a full one, took a strike on the armor to put the silver blade somewhere it hadn't been a second before, and twice I watched the edge go in, once at Azeral's hip and once across the back of the hand that held the dark blade, and twice Azeral gave nothing for it. Azeral fought like the fight was beneath him and the fact that it wasn't was making him angry. Every one of his strikes carried enough behind it to put Kane through a wall, and every one of them was a fraction slow, a fraction late, the mist still working in him, the wounds still open, and the fraction was the only reason Kane was still standing.

The street shook with every contact. Not a figure of speech. The building I was kneeling in moved under my knee, a shudder that came up through the floor and into the sill and out through my hands, and plaster came off the ceiling behind me in a slow fall, and somewhere below a support let go with a crack. I put both hands on the stone and held on.

Once, the dark blade came down on the silver in an overhand that put Kane onto one knee, and I had both beams up and ready and Azeral's shoulder was in the way of his head. Once, Kane drove Azeral three steps back toward my building and the angle was mine and I fired, and Azeral moved, and the beam went into the cobbles behind where he'd been and lit the gravel white. Once, they locked, blade against blade at the guard, faces a foot apart, and stayed that way for three seconds with the street groaning around them, and I couldn't fire because I couldn't tell where Kane's head ended and Azeral's began in the dust.

I couldn't keep up.

My eyes tracked and lost them and tracked again. Every time I brought the beams up one of them was in the way, or the angle was wrong, or the window I wanted had already been given up, and I knelt behind the sill with my whole face burning and my hands on the stone and I looked for the one thing Kane had asked me for.

An opening.

It came when Azeral's back wing caught on a fallen sign.

The black one. It dragged across a heap of the bakery's wreckage and snagged for a half-second, and the half-second pulled his shoulder a degree out of line, and his head turned a degree toward the drag.

I put everything I had into the side of his skull.

Both beams. Full aperture and full strength, tighter than I'd ever pushed them, a line of white heat that I felt come out of my eyes like a physical thing leaving, and it hit Azeral behind the ear and his head went sideways and his guard went with it.

Kane put the silver blade into his chest.

To the hilt. Through the wound he'd already opened in the town, through the armor and the plate and whatever was under it, and the silver came out the back, and Kane held it there with both hands and his face inches from the void of Azeral's, and Azeral stood on the point of it.

Then he stumbled.

One step back, then another, and the blade slid out of him as he went, and he went down. Onto his knees in the road. Breathing. Heavy, wet, ragged breathing that I could hear from the second floor, and the black wing folded down over his back like a blanket and the last of the white one went to ash and blew away.

I came down the stairs.

The truck had moved.

It sat two feet from where Azeral had dropped it, on its side now, and beside it Alaric stood with the Aegis on one arm and Shepherd's weight on the other. Shepherd's new arm hung at his side. It had lost most of the black already, the obsidian going grey and then pink from the shoulder down, the edges of the blade rounding into fingers, and by the time I reached them it looked like an arm that had been through something and was healing from it. His face looked like a man who'd been under a truck.

"You're alive."

"The shield held." Alaric lifted the Aegis an inch. "It held a truck. I have decided to stop being surprised by anything it does and simply carry it."

We walked up the road together to where Kane stood over Azeral.

Kane stood as he'd been standing when I came out the stairwell door, silver blade down at his side, dripping, looking at the kneeling shape in the road. Azeral had not moved. He knelt with his hands on his thighs and the black wing over his back and he breathed, and the sound of the breathing was terrible and wet and laboring, and something in it snagged a memory I could not stop.

"He sounds like my vacuum."

Alaric looked at me.

"Back at base. The one in the rec room. When it picks up a penny." I made the sound. It was close. "That exact noise. I've been trying to place it since the second floor."

Nobody laughed, and I hadn't expected anybody to, and I'd said it anyway, because the road was very quiet and something needed to be in it.

Alaric slid the Aegis off his arm and held it out to Kane, and Kane took it without looking away from Azeral, and the shield went onto his arm and settled.

"For the record." Alaric, to Kane, but for me. "This dick dropped a truck on us. A whole truck. And Abel just watched."

"I was finding a vantage."

"You were watching."

"I'll buy everyone drinks. And dinner. Drinks and dinner. As a sorry."

"Drinks and dinner." Shepherd, from Alaric's shoulder, hoarse. "I'm holding you to the dinner."

Kane let all of it pass over him. He stood over Azeral with the blade in one hand and the shield on the other and his head slightly tilted, the tilt that meant the ring was talking to him, and I watched his lips move once, a short word to nobody in the road, and then he looked down at the fallen angel at his feet and his face was very calm.

The sky cracked.

Lightning. Or the sound of it, one enormous split of noise from the direction of the fjord, and all three of us turned toward it, Alaric and Shepherd and me, because you turned. A light came off the mountain.

Brighter than the Horsemen's light. Brighter than the seraph's beam had been over the north road. A white so complete that it had no edges, and it came down the split in the cliff face and out over the water and it held, and inside it, as my eyes fought to make anything at all out of it, I saw the serpent.

Jörmungandr was going home.

The head had turned. It was moving back into the mountain, back down into the split it had come out of, slow and vast, the whole endless length of it flowing past the shoulder of the cliff and down, and the mouth was closing, and I understood without anyone telling me that the tail was going back into the jaws. And on top of the head, on the ridge between the eyes, small enough that I nearly missed him, stood a man with a staff.

Merlin.

He had one hand up. The light came off the hand. The Horsemen stood around him on the serpent's brow in a ring, four points on the white, and the serpent went down into the mountain with all five of them riding it, and the light went with them, and the split in the cliff face sealed over as the last of the tail passed through, rock closing on rock, and the fjord was black water again and the mountain was a mountain.

Quiet.

Real quiet, this time. The roar was gone. The serpent was gone. The sky over Odda was just sky, low and grey and beginning, very faintly, to lighten at the eastern edge.

I turned back to the road.

The road was empty.

Kane was gone. Azeral was gone. The place where they had stood, where a fallen angel had knelt on the cobbles with the last of his wing blowing off him and the man who'd beaten him had stood over him with a shield and a sword, was a circle of scorched stone. Black, a ring of it the width of a car, and inside the ring nothing, and on the cobbles at the ring's edge, a small box.

Metal. The size of a lunch tin. On the lid, in marker, in a hand I knew from two years of it correcting my after-action reports in the margins, three words.

IF I'M GONE.

I looked at Alaric.

Alaric looked at Shepherd.

Shepherd looked at me, and none of us said anything, and the look went around the three of us twice.

The sky was lightening. Behind me the valley was starting to sound like a valley again, the low-band crackling with sector reports, engines turning over on the north road, the first of the withdrawal coming back to see what the strike team had held. Lucifer was nowhere. He'd been standing at Shepherd's shoulder when the flare went up, and he'd stood at the edge of it all through the fight with his hands folded and not lifted one of them, and he was gone now too.

I picked up the box.

It was heavier than it looked. Things inside it shifted when I lifted it. I stood in the road holding it against my chest plate with both arms, and the lid stayed shut, because I had already read the three words on it and everything worse than those three words was underneath.

The low-band crackled at my ear.

"Strike team, this is Willow. Strike team, status. Kane, report."

I listened to her say it three times. On the fourth she said my name instead of his, and I keyed the channel and told her the ritual was down and the serpent was under the mountain and Azeral was gone, and she asked me the question she had to ask, and I looked at the ring of black stone and told her the truth, which was that I didn't know, and there was a long stretch of open static before she told me to hold position and come home.

The first exo suit came back down the north road ten minutes later with its floodlights on, and the pilot got out and walked up to the three of us and the ring on the cobbles and looked at it and looked at Shepherd's arm and looked at me holding the box, and took his helmet off, and stood there. Elias came out of the treeline with the first of his people behind him and did the same. By the time the sun had cleared the eastern ridge there were two hundred agents standing in the road in a rough circle around a patch of scorched stone, and nobody had said anything, and the birds had started up on the fjord like it was any morning.

Alaric put his hand on my shoulder.

"He would want us moving."

"He would want us moving."

We moved.

Nine months.

That's the gap. Nine months since a mountain opened in Norway and closed again, since a serpent went back to sleep with a wizard on its head, since I stood in a road holding a box. I'm writing this down because he told me to. You'll understand what I mean by that in a minute.

Everything's back to normal. For the most part. I say for the most part because the Division's version of normal has always had an asterisk on it, and the asterisk has gotten bigger.

Alex and the Progenitor are out in the field this week. They've been out in the field for most of the last month, with Merlin and Alaric, tracking down the escaped Apex and Omega class cryptids, because three weeks ago a guard on the Apex containment wing's night shift decided the best way to get through a twelve-hour rotation behind two feet of titanium was a tab of LSD, and forgot to turn on the electrified layer that keeps everything behind the titanium from testing it. The Skinwalker from Japan was through the wall by the time anyone noticed. Eleven others followed it. Alex says it's a good bonding exercise for him and the Dogman. Merlin says he did not survive Camelot to spend whatever century this is chasing a Skinwalker through Idaho. Alaric says, and I'm quoting the text message, that he has found his purpose.

I'm nervous for the guard. Director Willow was given a green light, in writing, from four governments, to prosecute any insubordination in the Division exactly as she sees fit, and she has seen fit to have him sitting in a room without a window for the last three weeks while she decides what she sees. I'd feel worse for him if I hadn't spent an hour in the rubber room with the Japan Skinwalker's file last year. I don't feel worse for him.

The budget's a different story. Near limitless is the phrase the memo used, and I've read the memo four times looking for the catch. A few of the world governments watched a serpent the size of a mountain range come out of Norway and go back in, and they watched the Division be the thing standing in the road when it happened, and they decided, in the specific way governments decide things once they've stopped being able to pretend, that the next problem was going to be funded before it arrived. There's a wing under construction that I'm not cleared to know the purpose of. I'm the last Revenant and I'm not cleared. That's the new normal.

Jay and Marcus know.

I told them. Merlin took me through the door to Pinefall in the second week, and the door opens onto a hillside above a town that looks like Wyoming if Wyoming had been built by people who'd only heard it described, and Penelope's house sits at the top of the hill with a porch that faces a sky that's a shade too green at the edges. She had the two of them on the porch before I'd finished walking up the path. Marcus stood. Jay stayed sitting, on the step, with his hands between his knees and the bandages long gone and the discoloration faded to something you'd only see if you were looking.

I sat down on the step below him and I told them.

All of it. The cave and the sin with four sins in it and what it had said about a lightning rod. The mountain opening. The road. I told the road the way it happened, with the three of us looking at the light and looking back and the ring of black stone, and I put the box on the porch between us while I talked, and Marcus looked at the box and then at the floor and Jay looked at me the whole time.

When I stopped, he asked the question I'd been dreading.

"Could I have helped."

He asked it flat, a question he'd already answered for himself and wanted to be told he'd gotten wrong.

"You'd have been in the road with the rest of us, and Threxiel would have walked out of that cave with a lot more than an arm missing, and he'd have taken you on the way. That's the honest answer. Kane knew it. It's the reason you were behind a door."

He held that for a while. Then he nodded, once, the small nod I'd watched him give Kane in the motor pool the first day, and he looked out at the wrong sky and left it there, and I let him.

They're staying. A few years, at least. Until we find Threxiel and kill him, because Threxiel is still out there with one arm and four sins in his stomach and a very specific appetite, and Merlin's door is the only thing on any earth that he can't eat his way through. Marcus took it better than Jay. Marcus takes everything better than Jay, and then goes off somewhere by himself for an hour, and comes back having taken it. Penelope made me a sandwich for the walk back and told me to come more often, and I've been twice since, and I'm going to keep going.

That's the normal.

Here's the rest.

Kane left messages.

The box had eight drives in it. Seven of them were labeled with a name each, one for every member of the Last Light Protocol, which is what Willow ended up calling the list of seven people that the Division would be if everything else it was got burned to the ground. Kane wrote the list. He wrote it in the nine hours before we flew, in the apartment, on the tablet, along with the rest of it, and he put all of it in the satchel next to the bottle with my handwriting on it and carried it into the fight.

Seven drives with a name on each.

And one drive with no name at all. Just, in the same marker, EVERYONE.

I've had the box for nine months. I've handed out the seven.

Willow took hers into her office and closed the door and came out two hours later and signed a requisition that tripled the medical wing's staffing, and never mentioned the drive again, and I never asked. Shepherd took his to the crate outside the east wing door with a mug of coffee and sat there with the tablet in his lap for the length of the message and then for a long time after it, and when he came back in he said "okay" to nobody in the corridor, and that was all. Alaric watched his in a field in Idaho at two in the morning between Skinwalkers, according to Alex, and afterward stood up and got back to work and was quiet for a day, which for Alaric is a diagnosable condition. Merlin took his and didn't play it for a month, and then did, and came to find me and put a hand on my shoulder and said Kane had been right about him, and walked away before I could ask right about what. Elias watched his standing up, in the briefing room, alone, with the crimson blade on his back, and came out and told me the covenant would be at the Division's disposal for a hundred years, and put it in writing, and I've seen the writing.

I watched people take them from me and go somewhere alone and come back different, and I have not asked a single one of them what was on theirs, and none of them have told me, except one, and she told me because she needed help with something the drive had asked her to do.

Lily came to find me in the rec room in the fourth month, when she was showing and everyone had stopped pretending not to notice. She sat down on the other end of the couch and told me what the drive had said. Not all of it. The part that involved me. Kane had asked her, on the recording, to let me be the one who told the kid who his father was, when the kid was old enough to ask, because I was the only person he knew who could tell it in a way that wouldn't make it a shrine. Her word. Shrine. She wanted to know if I'd do it.

I told her I'd been given worse assignments by the same man and I'd taken all of them.

She laughed. First time I'd heard it since Norway. Then she put her hand on the part of her that was showing and looked at the dark TV, and we sat there a while, and neither of us turned it on.

The eighth one, I haven't played.

He asked me to be the one who played it. It's in the note that was on top of the drives, one line, and the line was: Abel plays the last one, when everyone's in the room, and not before. So I've waited. For everyone to be in the room. For the room to exist. For nine months.

Everyone's in the room today.

The briefing room, HQ, the one that held sixty the night before Norway and holds eight this afternoon with a lot of empty chairs pushed back against the walls. Lily is at the far end of the table. She has Idris on her lap, seven weeks old, asleep against her shoulder with his whole face slack and one fist up by his ear, and his name came from the drive with her name on it. She told me that much. Kane had left three suggestions, and Idris was the second, and she'd known which one she was going to use before he'd finished saying the first.

Shepherd sits to her left, both arms where they belong.

Alaric, across from him, back from Idaho this morning, still in the field jacket, Excalibur leaning against the wall behind his chair like an umbrella.

Merlin beside him, with his staff and his centuries.

Director Willow at the head of the table, because it's her table.

Elias Harrow, First Son of what the paperwork now calls the Unified Vampire Covenant, in a chair by the door with the crimson blade across his back, because he still doesn't sit with his back to a door and I don't think two centuries more would change it.

And me.

I sat down at the table. I put the drive in the reader at the center. I looked at every face in the room one time, and none of them looked away, and Idris moved once against Lily's shoulder and went still.

I pressed play.

*Hey.*

*If you're watching this, then I'm assuming it worked.*

*Azeral's gone.*

*Or contained. Destroyed. Sent back to whatever hole he crawled out of. I don't know what word you people are going to put in the report, and for once, I don't particularly care.*

*What matters is that you're still here.*

*That's enough for me.*

*I recorded this because there's a pretty good chance I won't be there when it's over. And before anybody starts getting angry about that, especially Abel, I know. Believe me. I've already heard the argument you're about to make.*

*Probably several times.*

*There just wasn't another way.*

*I've spent a lot of time thinking about what I was when all of this started.*

*Back in Oregon, I thought I was just a guy doing a job. Then the Division told me I was something else. Then Carter did. Then Azeral did. Revenant. Vessel. Weapon. Replacement. Every few months somebody handed me another word and expected it to explain who I was.*

*For a while, I think I believed them.*

*Then I met all of you.*

*And somewhere between Oregon and Wyoming and Camelot and all the other places we probably should've died, those words stopped mattering.*

*I made memories that belonged to me.*

*Abel making some stupid joke when nobody else in the room wanted to breathe.*

*Shepherd learning how to be human again.*

*Jay and Marcus somehow surviving long enough to become people I was proud of.*

*Merlin acting like he knew everything even when I could tell he was making half of it up as he went.*

*Lily reminding me there were things worth coming home for.*

*Isaac talking in my head when I desperately wanted five minutes of silence.*

*All of you.*

*That's who I became.*

*Not because Azeral made me, or because the Division made me.*

*Because you did.*

*Because I did.*

*And that's why I need you to understand what I'm doing.*

*Azeral spent this entire war believing everything belonged to him eventually. My body. My power. My choices. The future.*

*He was wrong.*

*This last choice is mine.*

*Maybe that's the only way this could've ended.*

*I used to think surviving was the same thing as winning. Keep breathing. Get everybody home. Live long enough to fight the next thing.*

*Turns out there are some fights where you don't get all three.*

*I wish I could tell you I'm completely okay with that.*

*I'm not.*

*I wanted to see what came after this and I wanted to see my son.*

*I wanted to see the Division become something better than what Carter left behind. I wanted to see what kind of men Jay and Marcus became. I wanted another argument with Abel that neither of us was willing to admit I'd won.*

*I wanted ordinary things again.*

*Coffee that didn't come out of a government machine.*

*A morning where nobody called me because something impossible had crawled out of the woods.*

*Maybe even a week where nobody tried to end the world.*

*I wanted to see what all of you did when there wasn't a war left to fight.*

*That's the part that hurts.*

*There's this idea people have about sacrifice. Somebody stays behind. Somebody makes the impossible choice. Everybody else gets out. The music swells, the hero dies, and that's the end of their part of the story.*

*But nobody ever talks about what that person actually knows when they make the choice.*

*Nothing.*

*I don't know if this works.*

*I don't know if Azeral stays gone.*

*I don't know if what I'm doing buys you ten years, a hundred years, or just enough time to figure out something better.*

*I don't know if the world I'm giving everything for actually gets its happy ending.*

*And I hate that.*

*After everything we've seen, after everything I've learned, you'd think I'd have something better than that.*

*Some calculation.*

*Some prophecy.*

*Some piece of information hidden in the ring that tells me exactly how this ends.*

*I don't.*

*For once, I have absolutely no idea what happens next.*

*I just have you.*

*And I believe that's enough.*

*So if you're hearing this, don't waste whatever comes next trying to make my decision mean something.*

*It already did.*

*Go live.*

*Make stupid decisions. Make good ones occasionally. Build something better than what we inherited. Tell people what actually happened here, or don't. I don't care anymore.*

*Just make sure there's a world afterward worth all the trouble we went through to keep it here.*

*And Abel...*

*Memory is key so you are in charge of remembering me buddy.*

*And you are absolutely not allowed to name anything after me.*

*I'm serious.*

*I'll find a way back just to haunt you.*

*Take care of each other.*

*That's all I've got.*

*Funny.*

*I spent this entire war demanding proof before I trusted anything.*

*And at the very end, the only thing I can do is believe.*

*I guess that's faith.*

*Ain't that a bitch.*