outside Luchas’s patient room. When things got blurry—on his end, not the security feed’s—he wiped his face. Then he pressed play with a sinking sensation in the center of his chest.
Nothing moved. Duh, because the camera was static.
No, wait, that wasn’t true; there was a counter in the lower right-hand corner with the date and time: The seconds flipped by quickly, the minutes moved slow, the hours were frozen solid. But he didn’t have to wait long. V had been efficient about editing the security camera’s recording, and in the back of Qhuinn’s mind, he had a thought that the brother had deliberately given him a little time to collect himself—
Before his brother walked out of his room.
The sight of that slight frame in the long black robe was a shock even though he’d thought he’d been prepared for it. Putting his hand over his mouth, he tucked an arm across his aching chest and just watched.
God, that rough gait. The cane.
“Oh, Luchas,” he whispered.
Reaching out, he ran his forefinger over the figure—except doing that stopped the footage. It was okay, though. For a while, he just stared at his brother’s contours. It had to be among the last moments of the male’s life.
Qhuinn thought of pulling back that hood and exposing . . . what had frozen beneath it.
To clear that memory, he continued with the file. When Luchas left the camera’s field, there was a cut to another feed. And another. And another, as his brother went down the corridor of the training center. And then the file ended.
The next attachment was from the subterranean tunnel, and Qhuinn witnessed his brother limp along to the right, heading for the hatch. When Luchas came up to it, he hesitated.
And glanced back over his shoulder.
That was when Qhuinn finally got to see his brother’s face from under the hood. He froze the feed. There was no fear. No anxiety. Luchas’s expression was simply . . . grave. “Resolved” was maybe the better word for it.
With a pounding heart, Qhuinn tried to memorize exactly what it all looked like, the turn of that ruined body, the angle of the cane, the line of the mouth, the cast of the eyes. But that was stupid, right? He could play this file anytime—and if he lost it or deleted it by mistake, not that he would, he could always ask V for another copy.
“I miss you,” he whispered. “I wish you were here . . .”
Yet the file had reminded him of how much pain Luchas had been in. How pervasive the agony and untenable the hours must have been. When he considered his brother’s suffering, he supposed . . . that it was a blessing of some kind that he could at least understand why his brother might have reached the end of his journey. But that was a sad tally of fortune, wasn’t it.
As a groundswell of regret made Qhuinn’s heart skip beats, he didn’t know how he was going to make it to the end of the files.
He hit play again. It was nearly impossible to watch Luchas turn away, and there might have been some more rubbing of the eyes. And then after Luchas entered the code to the hatch and stepped through, the feed ended. So Qhuinn teed up the next one. This recording was of the parking area in the cave, and it showed his brother walking past the Tahoe and the snowmobiles. Luchas paused again, but he didn’t look back once more. He just pulled the camo drape to the side . . . and then with a swirl of snow from the storm, he stepped out of sight.
At that point, the feed switched to an exterior camera mounted somewhere on the lip of the cave. It showed Luchas struggling through the freezing cold onslaught, the winds lashing at him, his body weaving. And then there was nothing but white, the black robes eaten up by the blizzard.
V left no extra time on that one. He just cut it where it was.
One last file. But wasn’t this the end of the story?
In danger of losing it, Qhuinn fired up the final attachment, and it took a moment for his eyes to resume proper functioning—at which point, he frowned. The footage was from a camera inside the subterranean tunnel again. There was about thirty seconds of lead time . . . and then someone entered the frame.