One More
Chapter One
On her knees beside Cayde, her face pale in the failing light of his diodes, Rake summons her ghost.
"I'm sorry," he says even as Cayde lies there shuddering, coughing on his pain and still alive. He's still alive—fading fast, yes, but for the moment still alive.
And they could help him. She's sure a little light could fix him—it has never failed to do otherwise. At the very least, they could use it to ease his pain. But her traitor ghost only shakes from side to side and backs away."There's nothing I can do."
Rake trembles, fire in every vein.
A betrayal. Not the first. Not rebuilding her that first time from the gently sleeping dust within a burned out vehicle, wrenching her from her afterlife to put a gun in her hand, to resurrect her again and again even as she begged for death, saying only, "You are needed. You must."
His head in her lap, Cayde's eyes burn out and fall dark.
No, not the first. But unforgivable.
Hollow and hurting, Rake falls into her old patterns. She does what she knows.
She carries Cayde home.
Vaguely, she is aware of people reacting to her passing as she moves through the tower. She hears them gasping, feels their tugs on her coat, fingers brushing her shoulders. She walks through all of it, a ship cutting through the storm. There's something screaming in her head—a white hot siren of pain and fear and fury—and she cannot feel her arms past the weight she carries, cannot feel her feet hitting the stone pavement. She follows her old pattern blindly, returning to the Vanguard ready room as she has after every mission.
Once there, she lays Cayde so gently on the table, atop his many maps and amidst his trinkets. She busies herself arranging his limp form into something approaching comfortable. As gentle as she can be, she nudges his jaw back into its broken socket. She pulls the edge of his cape over the worst of the damage to his chest. Folds his hands over his stomach. Crosses his boots at the ankle.
She's caught him sleeping here before just like this, a book over his eyes to block out the light. It doesn't hurt so much to look at him now, when she can't see all the ways she's failed him written in oily red across a dozen gaping wounds.
For a moment—for a second—the noise in her head quiets.
And then the Vanguard arrive, Zavala carrying a shroud—he was prepared for this—and Rake stares him down, shaking, accusation in every line of her body. He cannot meet her eyes for long. He turns away, back to Ikora and her more gentle judgement.
The screaming part of Rake wants to burn the tower down.
Her ghost speaks for her. Zavala speaks for her. Ikora speaks for her. Rake cannot find the words to speak for herself. Her mouth is ash and broken glass and "how's my hair," whispered with gloved fingers tangling in her own. She cannot swallow for the rubble in her throat.
She pulls up Cayde's hood up, arranges it how he liked, hiding a little more of his shattered jaw. Thinking her distracted perhaps, Ikora takes the wretched sheet from Zavala's hands, creeps close to cover his legs with it. Rake rips it off again.
Cayde is not dead. She will not let him be dead.
The fabric singes where she clenches it in a bloodied fist, her light so poorly controlled since she reclaimed immortality from a broken shard of sleeping god. There is something wrong with it now, something new and oddly independent of the Traveler, made worse for her grieving.
Everything is made worse with this grieving.
Breathing takes every ounce of her concentration. Just swallowing past the wreckage in her throat is almost more than she can manage. Rake fixes her attention on Cayde, readjusts his folded hands while her stomach batters at her teeth and tries so hard to breathe. Just breathe—
Too close to her, Zavala slams a hand on the table. He refuses to fight. Refuses to care. It is one more betrayal, one of so many. Rake knows painfully well he has always disliked Cayde, however many poor attempts he made to conceal it, and the white hot siren screams ever louder in her ears.
Distantly, she hears Ikora speaking with a barely contained rage, feels a heat there that almost matches hers.
In the face of it, Zavala turns away. He says, "No. I cannot allow it. I refuse to bury any more friends."
The siren stops. The fire goes out. Rake stares at him, cold. Cold to her long dead bones.
"Lucky then that we are not friends."
She was made for war. This one is not particularly difficult. Tedious, perhaps. Certainly, she finds her ghost's frequent moralizing tedious.
Vengeance or justice, it wants to know. As if the answer matters. Rake cares little for the distinction. She kills every creature involved either directly or indirectly in Cayde's death. And when at last she finds herself side by side with Petra over Sov's trembling form, the white hot screaming fills her ears again and she hears nothing—
Not Sov, whatever threat or plea or insult he offers.
Not her ghost, once again flickering with pale, anxious insinuations.
Not Petra, the woman's one eyed gaze a question—what would Cayde do?
But it doesn't matter, does it, what Cayde would do? Cayde ran ahead, cut off her fastest means of following and got himself killed. If he had a complaint, he should have stayed alive to voice it.
Rake pulls the Ace of Spades from her belt and fires until the metal warms and it clicks empty in her hands.
She hears her ghost say her name, softly horrified. It matters little. She regrets only that she aimed for his head.
It would have been nice to bring the Reef a warning.
It is only back in her ship, blood debts paid and Petra left behind on other business, that Rake starts to shake. She curls in the corner of a bulkhead, forehead pressed to her knees. It is the first she has allowed herself to break.
"It's okay," her ghost whispers in the dim running lights beside her. "It's over now. It's all over."
A lie, as usual. Nothing is ever over. She is made for war and it is a burden she cannot put down. This is just one more battle, one more casualty, and Rake does not know—
Cayde is not her Vanguard, but he has long been her compass. She has never lived in a world without him in it.
She does not know where to begin.
But then, as with most things, the beginning is not hers to determine. It finds her with the unerring devastation of a bullet in the gut.
Sov's blood still staining her gloves, Rake makes her way to the war room, drawn inexorably by old habit. Whatever new hell the Vanguard sent her out to confront, Rake always returned first to Cayde. A terrible joke, a slap on the back, a whispered plan for some new mischief—it made the difference between leaving for a cold beer and burning the whole tower to the ground.
For a moment, spent adrenaline still spitting in her system, Rake almost forgets. She falls into step with her past self and it's just a second—just the shattered-glass edge of a moment where she expects to see him grinning at her over a pile of maps—but it's enough.
Rake finds Cayde smothering under that damned shroud, an empty shell sprawled across the table, and relives his death all over again.
Her whole body hurting, she rips free the sheet.
Cayde's cape is missing. The buttons on his sleeves are gone, the ties of his breastplate, the many clasps of his boots. Scraps of him carried off by vultures. Broken down for parts, for souvenirs, and the screaming fills her ears again.
Rake incinerates the shroud. With more luck than skill, she just barely keeps from setting the tapestries and books here aflame. On another day, she'd destroy it all, but Cayde—
He needs… He needs her. He is not dead. She will not let him be dead.
She is not too late to help him.
Unruly light careening down her arms, Rake pieces his boots back together with shaking hands and a bit of string she finds in a pocket. When that is gone, she tears strips from the hem of her coat, binds his armor, ties him back together as best she can. At last, gently, she lifts his body again into her arms.
She shouldn't have left him here, she thinks. She should have shown the Vanguard the result of their disloyalty and taken him away again, laid him somewhere they couldn't reach, couldn't desecrate—
Her ghost flickers at her shoulder. "Where are you taking him?"
Rake doesn't answer. Even if she cared to, she does not yet know. Turning, she strides from the room, makes her way carefully out of the building, slipping out between passersby so she might go unnoticed. As soon as she can, she ducks into a darkened alley and pauses to survey her options.
Far above her, the broken tooth edge of the original tower catches in the setting sun. Her battered heart clenches. Rake feels sick and lost, finds herself wishing desperately that the path before her now was as simple as killing gods. Gods made such a big target. But this…
She steps backwards as far into the shadows as she can. Pressing her heated back to the cool brick behind her, she slides down to the muddy ground. Cayde's boots hit the pavement beside her with a muffled thump. Carefully, she curls around him, pulling his head into her shoulder, her cheek to the edge of his horn.
"Oh, Rake," her ghost murmurs, bobbing outside the tight curl of her body. "I know what he meant to you but there's nothing more we can do. His light is gone. It's over."
Her own light burns so bright, seeping from the edges of her sleeves like a barely contained bonfire. Rake closes her eyes, hunches further in on herself to smother the glow.
"I don't accept that."
It's a constant now, this burning, so much more than she knows what to do with. It strikes her as a cruel joke that she cannot give it to Cayde, that she cannot press her light into what's broken and force him alive again.
"Accept it or not, it doesn't change the fact that Cayde is—"
"Stop."
"Rake. What could you possibly hope to achieve by—by, what? Smuggling a dead Exo out of the tower? To what end? Cayde isn't in there anymore."
"He is, though," she says and looks up, clenching teeth on the idea. "He's not a human. He's a machine. Machines can be fixed. His reactor is destroyed, sure, and a lot of wiring. But his memory banks, his personality—everything that makes him Cayde is still there."
"You say that like that's something you can fix. Rake, that's catastrophic damage. Even if you have the skill to fix it, you don't have the parts."
No, she doesn't have parts. But parts are so much less important than skill and she has had years of close acquaintance to acquire skill. How many times has she helped him fix or tinker with his systems? Hell, when he smuggled Vex tech into the tower against Ikora's specific instruction and spliced it into his own legs to try to get a better jump—
Rake chokes on the memory, her throat seized somewhere between laughter and tears.
"Rake, okay, listen," the transmission had gone. "I'm sending your ghost my coordinates. I um… I need a favor. Don't tell anyone. Especially Ikora. If she finds out what I may or may not have done—I admit to nothing!—I will never live it down. Also, don't you dare laugh."
She'd gone quickly. That he used her actual name rather than some ridiculous new one meant he needed her more than he'd ever admit to. And true enough, following the coordinates brought her to one of his secret hideaways in the back corner of the Cosmodrome, found him sitting on the floor with his legs off at the knees, a foot in one hand and a screwdriver in the other.
"What… exactly were you trying to do?" she'd asked, doing an exemplary job of not laughing, as requested.
Despite her painstaking candor, Cayde had not been impressed. He'd pointed the screwdriver at her, eyes squinted.
"You stop… all of that," he'd said, managing to gesture with both tool and gently flopping leg. "I know exactly what I'm doing—and it worked, thank you very much—I just… can't get them back on."
Letting her head fall back against the brick, Rake sucks in a shaking breath. She can fix this. At the end of the day, this is just one broken part. A new power source, some fresh wiring—she can fix this. It doesn't matter if she can't find the right Exo parts because honestly, how much of Cayde even is factory Exo anymore?
Any useful bit of tech either of them had come across, they'd scurried off into a hideout somewhere just as soon as they could without looking suspicious and tried to see where they could install it. The sheer number of times Ikora had confiscated some new doodad from them before they could get a proper feel for its potential applications…
Rake smiles. This time, it almost doesn't hurt.
"Take us to my ship," she tells her ghost. "We're going to Mars."