Chapter 116: THE LONG LOOK

When Aiden reached the shelter, the sentinel was a quarter-mile up the slope and closing.

A quarter-mile is a head start. I’m choosing to call it a head start.

The shelter was worse up close.

Half the roof had fallen in years ago. The remaining stone slabs leaned inward at bad angles.

But the shelter was dug deep into the rock. Stone on three sides. One entrance.

Aiden pushed Cinder inside. Miasma and Nyx came after her.

Nyx went straight to the walls.

It ran through the shelter first, then down the narrow path leading to the entrance, then came back and settled on his shoulder.

No second way in.

You would’ve found it.

Miasma went to the entrance.

She walked its width, turned, walked it back, and stopped at the narrowest part of the path. She sat down there and did not move again.

And you’ve already picked where you’re standing.

Then Aiden looked at what whoever had lived here had left behind.

A pile of stones sat beside the entrance, stacked carefully. You stack stones like that when time is the last thing you have left.

Inside, a cold hearth. Marks scratched into the rock above it. A count somebody had kept until one morning, there was no one left to add another mark.

A single boot lay where its owner had left it. Cracked. Long past wearing.

Same mountain. Same struggle.

Aiden set the boot upright against the wall. He left it there and turned to face the entrance.

The sentinel came down the slope. Its four feet struck the black glass one after another, slow and heavy. Each step came with a dull crack beneath its weight.

It filled the entrance to the rock fold. Not by moving fast. By being enormous.

The heat rolled from it in a wall. Even with Solar Plexus, it pressed on Aiden’s chest, his face, even the inside of his mouth.

That’s the big one from the pass, the one that went to carry word up.

The first thing on this mountain to notice us, sent back down to look properly.

Aiden reached for the knife in his boot. Then a glint from the beast’s dark scales caught his eye, and he stopped himself.

What can a knife do against that?

He breathed out. Hard.

It’s not attacking. It’s still looking. So I stand still and let it look.

And hope it likes what it finds.

The sentinel took its time looking at him.

I know this part. Marsh looked at me like that. So did the proctor. Every man who ever looked at me and wondered if I was really as worthless as everyone else had decided.

Nyx flattened itself against Aiden’s shoulder until it was barely noticeable.

Miasma dropped low against the stone, her spines pressed flat.

Cinder stood beside him and lifted her head.

She met the sentinel’s eye. She held it without flinching.

There she is. Won’t lower her eyes for something that sent the Frost Wolf limping down the mountain. I taught her a lot of things. I never taught her that.

But provoking it will make things worse.

Aiden took the vial out and held it up in the heat-glare for the sentinel to see.

"One." His voice came steadier than he felt. "There were a hundred trees. We took the sap from one."

He did not know if the beast understood a word.

But it’s guarded the place from a thousand robbers. A man who came to steal a hundred vials doesn’t stand in a doorway and show exactly what he took.

"We’re not carrying it away. We’re not selling it to anyone. We’re using it, and it only works up here. So whatever she evolves into, she evolves here. On your mountain. Where you can watch every second of it."

The sentinel looked at the vial.

Then at Cinder.

Then, longest, at Aiden.

Then it lay down.

It folded its molten weight onto the black glass twenty feet from the entrance, plates ticking as they settled, put its great head down on its forelegs, and watched.

It’s not letting us go.

It’s letting us finish. It wants to see if Cinder can evolve.

The cat jumped down from Cinder’s shoulder.

It crossed three feet toward the sentinel, sat down in the open, and started washing a paw.

"Don’t," Aiden said, low. "That is the oldest thing either of us has ever seen. Show a bit of—"

The cat did not show a bit of anything.

It had never shown a bit of anything, and it was not going to start now.

That animal has warmed a dying wolf, walked into a burning grove, and crossed a hundred miles knowing the Frost Wolf was hunting us.

And it’d wash its paw through the end of the world.

Miasma turned her head to watch the cat. Her spines came up once, then went back down.

Aiden decided that was disapproval and let it go.

He turned back to the vial.

I hate going into this blind, but there’s no way to know how many years Cinder’s evolution will cost until she starts it.

He reached for the cork.

Before he could remove it, Nyx went rigid on his shoulder.

Not for the sentinel. It had gone flat and polite for the sentinel ten minutes ago.

This was the other one. The rigid posture it took on the ridge and in the barn doorway.

Aiden followed its gaze, down the back trail, past the rocks, onto the lower slopes.

Lights.

A string of them, faint, climbing.

Men on the black glass at dusk, spread out in a careful line.

Harvesters don’t climb at dusk. Harvesters don’t climb in a line. Nyx doesn’t go rigid unless they’re... Vane’s men.

They’d chase us down even in this burning place.

Why?

The cold’s not killing Cinder anymore. Even if she dies, and I won’t let it happen, her corpse can’t expose Harken’s cold room or training methods now. They should have understood that during the chase.

He paused, clenching his jaw.

That’s not the whole of it. There is something else they understood.

A lamplighter who just became a tamer restored the bloodline of a dying wolf. Vane handlers said that should have been impossible.

That same dying wolf left the city bigger, brighter, a tier higher. Again, it should have been impossible.

And the man who made both possible is worth taking whole.

They’re not hunting Cinder anymore. They’re after me.

Aiden looked up the slope at the sentinel lying twenty feet away, watching.

Then down at the lamps climbing toward him.

Then at the vial in his hand.

Cinder pushed her nose into his chest, hard.

She did not care about the lamps. She did not care about the sentinel.

She wanted the vial, and she had been waiting all evening for him to stop talking about it.

"All right," Aiden said. His voice had gone flat. "We don’t get a day. We probably don’t get an hour."

He put his hand on her neck.

"So we start now."

He pulled the cork.

"Burn through it as fast as you can. Just evolve in one piece."

Nyx was already off his shoulder and moving down the narrow path toward the entrance.

Miasma had not moved from her position at the narrowest part of the path all evening.

"Retreat if you can’t hold the path," Aiden said. "I won’t let them pass."

Under the long, unhurried stare of something ancient, above the climbing lamps of a House, inside a dead man’s shelter, Aiden tipped the Magma Sap onto Cinder’s tongue.

It went into her, and it caught.