CHAPTER 453: 453: THE HOODS WITH NO NAME PART THREE

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Twice the hum under the ground got in the way of the drink the stones were trying to take. Twice the leader adjusted his tongue against the bead and got most of the swallow anyway. Professionals make compromises and call them plans.

They closed. Thea opened. She split her remaining people into four groups and made each four a problem that could not be solved by the same answer. Two went high and cut branches to fall behind them in patterns that looked like storms had been bored in exactly the wrong places. Two went low and laid scent ropes braided with sap; predators would love them. Men who didn’t know better would hate them. Assassins who did know better would waste two breaths hating themselves for almost loving them. The old woman second kept three nettle-balls in her fist and spent them like coins on noses that needed to stop knowing the truth.

Half of Mia’s and Thea’s people are dead now. That is a sentence you can write once. You cannot write it again to make it truer. Serit lived. Om lived on one leg and will, pointed like a spear. Kiva lived and made other people live by being where she needed to be before anyone asked. Three others whose names would matter very much to someone else did not.

The trees thinned. The earth underfoot changed its mind and decided to be older. Rock pretended to be dirt and got away with it because everyone was busy. The hum underfoot —the one the assassins’ beads hated— grew from a suggestion to a pressure that made your teeth feel like old coins.

Mia’s step changed. Not faster. Not slower. Less wasted thinking between footfalls. Pointing at the empty desert.

"Here," she said.

"You are pointing at nothing," Thea said, breathing even only because she would have died before letting it be uneven where Mia could hear.

"It is not nothing," Mia said. "It is a door pretending to be a conversation."

"Doors you can’t open are not doors," Thea said. "They are walls."

"Not to me," Mia said, and put her palm out again, in the exact place where last night she had listened instead of pushed.

The air was the same air as before. The seam was the same seam. The Ward hummed the same hum. And yet — something under Mia’s skin recognized something under the mountain’s skin the way animals recognize weather thirty breaths before men do.

Behind them the assassins slowed. Not because they were kind. Because the beads behind their jaws had gone from warm to nothing, like a tongue pressed to iron in winter. The leader tasted salt and stone and then a blank that did not belong to the forest. He lifted a hand. The line stopped because they could stop at any part of a step; that is what seven-stars buy with the parts of themselves they spend on being this good.

"Do we go in?" one signed, two fingers crooked under his jaw.

"We do not have an ’in,’" the leader signed back. "We have a seam that does not agree to be a seam. We have a story about a cat beast. Cats do not walk through stone. They play at the edges and make other people think the middle is safe."

"We lose her," another signed, bitterness the only waste they allowed themselves.

"We lose nothing," the leader answered. "We trade today for later. We write the sand the way we were told. We leave tracks that argue with the truth until the truth is bored. We plant questions. Questions last longer than bodies."

They fell back three body-lengths and began to work the ground as if the ground were a ledger. Pads made prints that would fool an ant ranger and entertain a novice. A ribbed rake pulled a croc-drake drag across a low place where water sometimes remembered to be water. A smear of panther musk went on a branch point where wind would carry it wrong on purpose.

They did not touch the seam. They did not speak to it. They were professional killers. Professionals do not put their names on anything they have not been paid to sign.

Mia stood with her hand in the air. The Ward did not open. It hummed the way a throat hums when it does not want to sing and someone is about to ask it anyway. She did not push. She did not beg. She did not speak Kai’s name into the stone because the stone did not belong to her and names have weight.

Thea stared at nothing until nothing looked back. Her shoulders dropped the smallest measurable fraction, which on Thea meant a confession. "There is something here," she said, unwilling and accurate. "I hate that I cannot see it."

"Then you know what I feel when you read a book and do not move your lips," Mia said, which was as close to a joke as she could get with blood in her boot. She swayed once. Thea caught her elbow like she had been waiting exactly there for exactly that.

"We cannot get in," Thea said. "Your someone cannot get out. We are between a promise and a problem."

"Between is safer than under," Mia said. "Between is where you breathe."

They crouched in the seam’s pretend shade. Serit set two posts of nothing — just hands held the same way they had been taught to hold them when there were posts. Om laid an injured one carefully, because carelessness is what makes noise. Kiva’s hands did the small, stubborn things —binding, tightening, checking pupils with a knuckle tap— because small stubborn things keep people from falling off the edge of larger ones.

Far back in the trees, the assassins finished creating their lie proof and left. Not fast. Not slow. Exactly as if they had never been there. They will hunt the sisters.

No one saw the mountain. That was the point. The Ward had made a conversation out of stone and empty air and the desert had been nodding along all day.

Mia rested her forehead against the seam and let herself have one thin, private thing: "He will save me," she whispered, and did not measure the word me too closely. It was larger than a single body. It was a house on a hill and a child sleeping and hands that had always been gentle when they held a small head.

Thea pretended she had not heard and, in the same gesture, set two watches in shifts that would not break with pride. She mocked under her breath because that is where she keeps her worry. "If your invisible doorman eats us in the night, I am going to haunt you so hard your grandchildren will be sorry."

"Good," Mia murmured. "It will mean you lived long enough to meet them."

They did not light fires. They ate the same cold biscuit, the same dried fruit. They let the forest write the part of the song that belongs to wind. The Ward hummed its low, tireless note, and if it kept a count of the hearts sheltering against it, it did not show that number to anyone whose name was not carved into the mountain from the inside.

The day slid off the trees like a shawl. The seam looked like nothing.

Mia and Thea and the few they had kept alive pressed into the space between a mountain door and a wall; with seven-star killers ghosting away across a forest that would tell a story about a panther or a cat, because it had been taught to; with the sun burned down to an ember and tucked under the desert’s lip; and with a mountain that would not be seen by anyone who was not meant to see it, humming quietly around a chrysalis that did not know the word mercy and did not need to — only the word become.