Page 79 of Property of Prophet

Hollywood strolls west with his hands in his pockets. No shift, no claws, no visible weapon, because apparently being a walking pharmaceutical event is enough. No shift, no fire, no fangs. He ambles toward the western approach the way a man ambles toward a bar he owns. Even from the roof and upwind, the edge of what he carries brushes past me. Warmth with no source, with the sudden conviction the night could still be talked out of itself. I shake it off the way I shook off pharmaceutical reps and hospital politics, and downrange, forty-two believers are about to receive the full dose.

Through the scope, the wheel of them contracts out of the wilderness. Then they come in from every direction at once, dark figures against blue snow, moving with the wrong kind of calm. No cover discipline. No hesitation at the sight of a burning forest or a bear the size of a vehicle. They walk into all of it the way the faithful walk into rivers, and the sight puts a cold in me the temperature cannot match.

The first rifle rises three hundred yards out, tracking Scout’s light against the stars.

Mine speaks first.

The shot takes the weapon from his hands, and tears it apart before he can settle his cheek against the stock. He drops, scrambling through the snow for pieces that will never make a rifle again.

“One disarmed,” I say.

“Disarmed?” Rooster squawks.

I look up at him hovering near me. “He still has both arms.”

“Your bedside manner is terrifying.”

“Watch your sector.”

“Yes, Doctor Death.”

Work the bolt. Breathe out. Twenty-four rounds remain.

They are armed the way a doomsday church arms itself. Hunting rifles and shotguns mostly, with two semiautomatics on the east and a machete catching firelight in the south. Ordinary weapons carried by ordinary bodies, and scattered among them, the gifted ones. Those are easy to find. They move a beat too fast for their own joints, run through drifts without breaking stride, and my scope loses them if I blink.

One of them reaches Ranger’s flank while the wolf is occupied, pinning a shotgun into the snow.

The knee is a hinge. Hinges fail predictably.

My shot arrives before the machete does. The gifted man goes down mid-stride at forty miles an hour. The sound he makes carries all the way to my roof, high and human, a sound out of every emergency department I ever staffed. Tomorrow, if we are all alive, I will set what I broke tonight. My hands stay steady on the rifle. They can fall apart at a later appointment.

The ranger’s head swings toward my position once, eyes catching green, then he goes back to his work.

Between engagements, the scope drifts north on its own and finds the clearing.

Prophet stands at its center exactly where the plan placed him, alone in the starlight, coat open at the throat as though cold is someone else’s problem. He is bait and priest at once, the whole reason forty-two people walked into a burning perimeter tonight. Watching him stand there unarmed does something no trauma rotation prepared me for. The scope moves off him before the feeling can set in, back to the work, because the best thing my eyes can do for him is guard everyone else’s back.

My hands should be failing by now. Thirty-five below turns fine motor control into a rumor within the hour, and the hour fast approaches. Instead, my fingers run warm inside the cut-away mitt, warm from the inside out. His grace seeped into me across a winter of sutures and shared air. Tonight, it keeps my trigger finger alive. Heaven’s last warmth on this mountain is being spent holding a rifle, and the irony is not lost on me.

The battle below refuses to stay on one thing.

On the east, Flint and Ranger hold the physical line the way the plan drew it. Dragon fire lies across the approach in careful stripes, herding rather than burning. The wolf takes weapons out of hands with a mouth engineered for exactly this.

The Devoted keep coming. Not bravely. Bravery has reckoning in it, some assessment of odds, and none of that shows in these faces. Fourteen of them press the eastern approach in loose ranks, stepping over their own disarmed friends without looking down.

To the west, Hollywood has turned a war party into a lost tour group.

Eleven figures stand scattered across the open snow, weapons drooping, faces turned toward him as though he were about to make an announcement they have waited years to hear. He moves through them unhurried, plucking rifles from unresisting hands, stacking them out of reach the way a teacher confiscates phones. One woman follows him for three steps, arms out. Whatever hollow Calix found in her, Hollywood’s presence pours into it, gently, falsely, and harmlessly. She stands in the killing cold, smiling at nothing.

Vex handles the leaks.

Every time somebody breaks through, that pale streak appears and a body hits the snow before I can move the scope. He doesn’t kill them. I realize that on the fourth one, when he crouches long enough to roll a fallen man onto his side before vanishing again. He’s managing their airways, making sure they can breathe, and the observation lodges somewhere inside me and stays.

Two more shots from the roof. A scoped deer rifle out of the hands of a sniper setting up on the northern rise, aimed down at Blade’s broad back. Then the trigger hand of a man pressing a pistol toward Rooster’s diving shape. Small bones and ugly rehabilitation, a wound I hate on sight. Twenty-one rounds left. My cheek is losing feeling where it welds to the stock. The cold works into the rifle, too, stiffening the action, dropping my velocities. Adjust half a minute. Nothing about physics cares whose side anyone is on.

Training takes me over before thought catches up. A woman comes across the roofline with her teeth bared, one of the gifted, burning amber through skin split almost to the bone. The rifle is useless this close. I drive it crosswise into her collarbone and feel something give. She screams but keeps coming.

“Lily!” Prophet’s voice reaches me.