The Thief

“I like that better, too.” Sola nodded. “That works for me. Fewer people.”

“I no care when we go as long as we do.”

Sola glanced in the rearview mirror again. Her grandmother was sitting back with satisfaction, that smile on her face the kind of thing that she would have hidden if she had known anyone was seeing it.

Taking a hand from the wheel, Sola reached across the seat. When she clasped Assail’s palm, he glanced over.

I love you, she mouthed.

Assail lifted his free hand and pressed his fingertips to his lips. Then he extended his arm and put them to her mouth.

“I love you, too,” he said out loud.

As Sola blushed, she could have sworn she heard her grandmother laugh softly. But maybe she imagined it.

Then again, her vovó had always wanted a good Catholic boy for a grandson-in-law, and if Assail kept this no-more-drug-dealing, going-to-church thing up? She might just get what she had prayed for.

Abruptly, Sola lost her levity.

Yeah, that might happen…if Assail lived long enough. But what were the chances of that, she thought sadly.

THIRTY

Up in the Sanctuary, Jane had no idea how much time had passed, was passing, whatever. It could have been ten minutes or a thousand years, and she had the sense she would feel the same. In this respect, minutes in this sacred place seemed to be like its horizon, having no beginning and no ending: No matter how far she walked, she never seemed to be able to get to the forest ring that encompassed the landscape. Every time she thought she was finally going to go into it, everything double-backed on itself and spit her out at the opposite side with the trees to her back. It was enough to make her crazy.

Well, that and the fact that there was no one around.

And the other irritating thing? She had been wandering for how long, and yet her feet weren’t tired, she wasn’t thirsty or hungry, and she didn’t have to pee.

Yes, okay, fine, she realized it was insane to bitch about the fact that she wasn’t uncomfortable—or having to squat in one of the Scribe Virgin’s flower beds like a camper in the woods, for godsakes. But it seemed further confirmation that she didn’t exist, and that made her feel lost and alone more than her lack of company.

To that point, she kept herself fully corporeal. Kind of like she was middle-fingering the whole I’m-not-really-alive thing.

Oh, God, she prayed Vishous wasn’t doing anything to hurt himself.

To keep from losing her mind with worry, she set a route out for herself, her need to make order of her situation and her surroundings asserting itself even though it was hardly necessary. What, like somebody from the afterlife was going to show up here with a clipboard and be all, Wait, you missed the Baths, and your speed of ambulation past the Temple of the Sequestered Scribes was .2 mph slower on your third lap.

When had she gotten to be so tightly wound?

Discipline, always her friend, had morphed into a brittle hold attaching itself indiscriminately to everything, and its invasion had clearly been incremental, the sort of thing she hadn’t noticed as it had taken over.

Until what should have been a virtue had strangled her.

She’d always had a healthy confidence in herself and her skills. And she’d earned that self-esteem, damn it. But now that she thought about the focus she’d been bringing to her work, she saw, thanks to this involuntary, but kind of critical, time of reflection, that she’d equated her obsessive-compulsive efforts with her patients’ salvation.

Hell, with the security and safety for all the Brothers and fighters in the war.

As if she were the only thing that stood between them and death.

Rhage had been right to challenge her on how long it had been since she’d attended a First or a Last Meal, and now she knew why she hadn’t been going to them: That long dining room table with all of its males and females, families and children, were no longer friends to enjoy.

They were disasters waiting to happen.

She didn’t see Z smiling with his family. Instead, she pictured him getting shot in the gut on the field and bleeding out, with her going there to treat him and having to open him up. But what if, instead of finding both of the bleeders—which in that case, she had—she fucked up, missed the secondary nick in the inferior vena cava, and he died right there?

Well, then, he wasn’t at that table anymore, was he. And Bella and Nalla? Their lives were over. Because Jane hadn’t done her job well enough. Nalla literally had no father for the rest of her nights and days and Bella was brokenhearted forever. Family ruined.

Or hey, how about when Beth went into labor. Placenta previa. Came to the clinic on a stretcher, and instead of Jane getting L.W. out and doing that emergency hysterectomy successfully, she botched the removal of the uterus so the patient bled to death.

In that case, Wrath’s life is over, he fucks off the throne, and the entire species loses its leader. The Brotherhood is never the same, and courtesy of the trauma, they go out the next evening and several of them are killed in the field because they’re suffering and in mourning.

There were too many examples to count. Layla with her babies. Peyton, the trainee, shot in the head. Xcor. Rhage.

Every one of them had ended up in her care in the last year. Or had it been two years?

The problem was, she wasn’t working on arm’s-length patients, ones who had no relationship whatsoever to her own family: Fucking up under normal clinical circumstances was horrible enough—hell, she knew doctors who made honest mistakes on the job and never, ever got over it. But to have that happen to someone you loved? Saw every night? Laughed and cried with, lived your life with?

There was a reason people did not treat their nearest and dearest. And yet for her it was the very definition of her job.

No wonder she was going nuts.

She stopped, looked around—and decided maybe all that was just a moot point now. Did she even have a future? Or was she going to be stuck in this dimension forever?

And what about Vishous? He was going to blame himself. Somehow, he would find a way to feel responsible for her choice to shield Phury, and that was going to lead to disaster.

As Jane’s heart began to pound with all the things she didn’t know and couldn’t control, she focused on what was in front of her so she didn’t lose her damn mind.

It was a while before the temple’s contours and dimensions properly registered. The white marble structure was the smallest on the campus that she had seen, taller than it was wide with, unusually, no open windows. Actually, it looked like a vault…or a tomb—

Without a sound, the one side of the panels that served as a door opened outward.

“Hello?” she said. “Amalya?”

As she went over and mounted the steps, she was so ready for some help, some answers…some relief—and in the back of her mind, she recognized that this was what her patients had to feel like as she came to them.

“Hello?” She pulled the heavy panel wider and peered in. “Oh…my God.”

It was Ali Baba’s cave, she thought with wonder as she entered the thirty-by-thirty square. Everywhere she looked there were gemstones—and not in a Jared Jewelers or a Shane Co. kind of way, the sparklers one-offs with plenty of space around them. No, this was The Goonies…this was some straight-up One-Eyed Willy right here, with dozens of bins filled with what certainly appeared to be gem-quality sapphires, rubies, emeralds…diamonds. There were also amethysts, opals, citrines, and aquamarines—pearls as well. And all of them were the size of thumbnails or larger.

The wealth represented was incalculable, and so incomprehensible, she just went from bin to bin, staring down at the largesse with marvel. She didn’t dare touch any of it, although she wondered how the stones would feel, sliding cool and smooth, through her hot hands.

And there were other things in the vault, too—although it was a while before she paid them any attention. In a series of marble and glass display cases and shelves, there was a strange assortment of non sequiturs, from revolvers that looked as if they were from the Revolutionary War period to fossils to—was that a meteorite? There was also a bowl that was encrusted with gems. A scepter—

Jane stopped in front of one of the last cases she came to and frowned. Whatever object had been there was gone now, although the glass wasn’t broken. But you could definitely tell there had been something in there because the outline of a large square had been singed into the red velvet underneath.