Like a continent, the mass of the Shield moved to kneel beside Tara.

  Through her gasps, she couldn’t help but utter the word. “Who?”

  Of course, she knew it wasn’t Chowwick. She had seen him die. The Griid held many wonders, but death was final. She knew that. As much as the suit was clearly the Shield of Boston, it was also just as clearly not Chowwick’s. The suit changed in time, adapting to the wearer. I could feel my own already shifting, becoming less nondescript. Sharp ridges were slowly forming on my chest and shoulders. I didn’t know the meaning of the adornments, but I could feel them growing every day, like the torturous emergence of a new tooth.

  The Shield who knelt by Tara wore a suit that was pristine and blank. It was new to its wearer. She could see that.

  The helm of the suit melted away, the broad face and tangled hair of the wearer suddenly there to be bitten by the frozen air.

  “I can help,” Olaf said.

  “Olaf…” I didn’t know how to tell him it was hopeless. Of course, he would want to, of course, he would believe he could. There was nothing Olaf seemed to be that we all shouldn’t aspire to. He humbled me. Worse, he shamed me.

  As Olaf’s hands reached toward the wound, I saw Tara withdrawing hers. It confused me. Why would she let him take her place? She was a friend to Magneblade, he was a nothing. He was a child, the rawest of rookies. But there was something in the way she pulled her hands back, giving the wound over to Olaf, that struck me deeply. Was it belief? Was it desperation? I couldn’t tell. But a strange and pointless hope sprang within me.

  As his hands settled on the wound, he looked up at me. His eyes were glassy, dazed, and confused. His voice cracked as he spoke, “I don’t know exactly how… I… I have a skill… it’s right there on my HUD…”

  A tear gathered in the corner of his eye. He said, “Help me, Ti, I don’t know how. It’s too new. I can do it, but dammit, I don’t know how.”

  “A skill? But you only just put on the suit…” I said.

  Tara’s voice was wild and urgent. “Shut up, Ti! Tell us, what’s the skill called?”

  Olaf said, “It’s called Healing Hands. I got it as soon as I put the suit on. It’s there, I just don’t know how…”

  His voice was strained by uncertainty, by sadness. It struck me suddenly that Olaf was weeping and I was standing there, perturbed, but without tears. Was there something wrong with me? Or something very right with him?

  Tara knelt by him and spoke quietly. I couldn’t hear them over the rush of blood in my ears. I felt a waterfall of sensations coursing through me. My mind was barraged by confusion. How could he have a skill? A skill meant he had to have reached level 10. But it couldn’t be. I was supposed to be the prodigy of progression, all had remarked on my development as something legendary. I felt the shameful bite of envy, of pride, nipping at me. Could I have brought him into the fold only to have found one who would eclipse me? I hated myself for the thought, but it came nonetheless, and it wasn’t so easily banished.

  As Tara spoke to him, her own helm folded away, her lips close to his ear, her arm around his mountainous shoulders, I could see him listening. For all the stress and anguish of the moment, he was intent upon her words. The life that hung in the balance was enough to focus his mind like a laser. His pupils dilated, as though he was relinquishing control of his own eyes, putting all his focus into her words.

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  The blood flowed around his hands now. They were pressed to the wound. It was a mark all four of us shared, our gauntlets painted with the last beats of Magneblade’s heart. But it was clear the moment was drawing to an end. The blood oozed around Olaf’s hands now, not in the pulses that had come before. The oozes still came in waning waves, the spaces between each wave longer, the heart that drove them rolling to a halt.

  Then there was light. I blinked rapidly, startled. A golden aura flared around Olaf’s hands. It began like a yellow fire, clean and bright. It grew brighter and brighter until it was like the sun, and I found I couldn’t look directly at it. I turned my head, my own heart racing, watching the edges of the light as it consumed the wound, blazing.

  Tara spoke, a half-sobbing croak, “Yes, just keep your hands on him. Don’t lose focus.”

  I watched, suspending belief that this could be happening. The green demon of jealousy only grew louder as Olaf seemed to work his miracle, but it was drowned out for now by the elation of the moment.

  In another moment, he pulled his hands away and there was no wound. The bare flesh beneath the shattered suit was whole, pristine. It was still streaked and wet with the blood it had spewed forth only moments before. But the wound was gone.

  Magneblade’s chest continued to rise. Weakly and uncertainly, but it rose and fell. He was still with us.

  As though synchronized, we all slumped back. I fell into the snow and half-lay, half-sat there. There was a strange silent moment, a long surreal break. A spectator would have seen four godlike supersoldiers lying or sitting in the snow as though they had nothing better to do with their time than shoot the shit and make snow angels.

  The silence stretched. Olaf was shell-shocked. He hadn’t been ready for action of any kind, let alone the madness I had thrust him into. I could see the drama of Magneblade’s wound, the urgency with which we had walked to the edge of the chasm of his life or death, had affected him. He sat, staring into nothing. Maybe he was wondering if becoming a Griidlord had been what he wanted after all.

  Tara too was preoccupied. Her stare wasn’t as distant as Olaf’s—she remained aware of her surroundings. But I could see her pupils dancing as she thought, and I could only imagine the notions that flowed in and out of her consciousness.

  I just looked to Magneblade with satisfaction. It made me bitter to think that there had been no miracle of the kind to save Chowwick. In the mad dash that had brought me scrambling up to this moment, I had still not found the proper time to process his passing. I could tell there were more tears in my future. My father had died so recently, but I had moved on from it with such ease. I could tell already that it would be a far harder mountain to climb to overcome the sadness that Chowwick’s death had left me with.

  I spoke, “Tara… They spoke like they’d come for you…”

  She was startled by my voice, by my words. She looked up and said, “I know… I thought that too. They seemed weirdly focused on me.”

  I said, “No idea why?”

  She shook her head, more in an effort to dislodge mental cobwebs than to signal a negative. “I… I’m trying to think of something. Maybe… I’ve been doing this a long enough time, Ti, I can’t remember every enemy I’ve killed, every insult I’ve delivered. You know…”

  Her face grew softer, her lip quivered. “Chowwick would remember… He was great at that kind of thing. He collected our deeds in his head like a history… he never forgot a name…”

  She couldn’t continue. As she spoke of our departed friend, the emotions of the last hours, the last days, boiled up inside of her. Her eyes shut tight, tears suddenly erupting from them. I was taken aback. I was unprepared for the outburst and suddenly found myself unsure of what to do, what to say.

  I was drowning in my own sadness for Chowwick, but this was something I was unprepared for. I felt my breath catch in my own throat, a glassiness clinging to my own eyes. My body urged me to empathize, to share her grief, to take comfort in the shared sadness. But I had not been raised in a house where one learns such things. I had been raised to be a tool to satisfy the ambitions of a psychopath. Long-trained instincts took hold of me. Men didn’t cry. Soldiers didn’t cry.

  But where I sat speechless and lost, Olaf surprised me. He shifted his massive bulk from where he sat beside her and his massive arms enveloped her. He humbled me again as he did that. Olaf, the Shield of Boston, as imposing and intimidating a sight as any man could ever hope to be, became a shelter in the storm of her sadness.

  Tara let herself be held, pressed herself against him.