Page 102 of Deathless
"What? I'm helping."
The medic prodded the wound, and I hissed through my teeth. Jasper sat against the opposite wall with Mila asleep in his lap, her head on his chest, her hand curled into his shirt. My mother had fed her rice and chicken. The girl had eaten two plates before she dropped. Now Jasper rested his chin on her hair and tracked me through the stitching with that half-focused look that meant the concussion still ran the show.
"Aeacus and I are vetting replacements," Rhadamanthys said. His voice carried the same flat weight it always did, like the words cost him nothing and meant everything. "People who held their posts before Zeus gutted the structure. It'll take months."
"We don't have months," Luka said.
"Then it'll take less. But it won't be clean."
The medic threaded a needle. I gripped the edge of the crate.
"The Pantheon's not gone," Luka said, less like a report and more like a line drawn in the dirt. "Zeus lost his army, his son, his network. He's running. But he's dangerous as long as he's breathing, and every one of us in this room knows what he does when he's cornered."
The needle went in. I locked my jaw and breathed. Jasper tracked the medic's hands, reading every stitch. When the medic pulled the thread tight, he twitched his fingers against Mila's back like he wanted to do it himself.
The room went quiet.
"I'll find him," Rhadamanthys said.
Nobody answered. Nobody needed to. But the silence sat differently from the silence in the Cessna. That silence had been empty. This one was full of men deciding what they were willing to do next.
The medic finished the last stitch and taped a fresh bandage over the wound. I flexed my fingers and everything moved, so that was good enough.
Luka stepped into the hallway. He looked at me, then at Jasper, then at Mila asleep on Jasper's chest.
"You two did good in Kiev," he said.
"We got lucky in Kiev," I said.
"You got her back." His gaze stayed on Mila. "That's not luck. That's stubborn."
"Runs in the family," I muttered.
Luka grinned. “Good thing, too,” he said, and then went back inside.
I slid off the crate, crossed the hall, and sat down next to Jasper. He shifted Mila's weight to make room. I put my back against the wall and our shoulders pressed together. Theconcrete was cold through my shirt, and I was so tired the hallway swam.
Jasper found the back of my neck with his fingers. He pressed his thumb into the knot at the base of my skull, and the tension I'd been carrying since Kiev started to loosen.
"Hey," I said quietly. "You okay?"
He looked at Mila. Then at me.
"Yeah," he said. "I think I am."
I believed him. Zeus was still out there, and the rebuild would take months, more fights, and more blood, and more nights where the outcome sat on a knife's edge. But the running had stopped. For us, at least, the running had stopped.
Mila stirred. She reached out without opening her eyes and found my wrist, and held on. She kept her other hand on Jasper's shirt.
My shoulder throbbed under the fresh bandage. My head was cotton and static. The hallway smelled like antiseptic and coffee and, faintly, whatever my mother had baked that morning before the world tried to end.
I tipped my head back against the wall. Jasper's thumb moved in slow circles on my neck. Mila's pulse tapped steadily against the inside of my wrist.
Somewhere deeper in the building, a door opened and closed. Boots hit concrete. Someone gave orders in a voice too low to make out.
I closed my eyes. The people I loved breathed beside me, and the war breathed just past the door, but everything was going to be all right.
I needed a smokeso badly that my teeth hurt.
