The departure grounds lay open beyond the inner wall, a broad apron of packed earth kept clear of everything that might catch fire or fall, and the seven of them had gathered at the center of it in the thin gold of an early sun that had not yet put any real heat into the day. Frost still held in the shadowed grass along the wall's foot. The cold came up off the ground through boot leather and the smell of it was the clean mineral smell of earth that had given its warmth back to the night and had not gotten it returned yet. Sleipnir stood among the seven with his great head low and his eight legs set easy under him, steaming gently into the still air, the breath rolling off him in slow plumes that the light caught and turned briefly to something near smoke before the air took it. Thor stood at the horse's shoulder with one hand resting flat on the broad neck. Sif was near him, and Magni, and Thrud a half-step off her brother's side. Tyr held himself a little apart the way Tyr held himself most places, the set of him squared and quiet. Freya was the stillest of all of them, her attention somewhere past the wall, somewhere none of the rest could follow. And Shane stood at the front of the seven with the cold coming up through his soles and the hum he carried bending low and steady under his sternum, and he let the morning be what it was for as long as it had left to be it.
The send-off came across the open ground toward them in twos and threes, and then in a loose crowd, the boots of them carrying a low scuffing rhythm over the packed earth that built as the numbers built. Gary came with Mike at his shoulder, the two of them in the unhurried gait of men who had decided to be unbothered about a thing that bothered them. Clint walked beside Dave, and Dave had a hand resting on the head of one of the hounds pacing at his hip. Lenny drifted in off to one side in the manner Lenny had of arriving at a place without ever seeming to have aimed for it, and Dylan came in near him with the easy roll of an old Geneseo hand who'd known Shane back when none of this had a name. Jason and Edna came together, her arm tucked through his. Emma walked with Saul, and Saul carried himself the way he carried himself everywhere now, taking the count of the grounds without seeming to move his eyes, the network's whole picture running quiet behind a plain face. They came up and they slowed and they made the loose ring a crowd makes around the thing it has come to see off, and the morning held them all there in the cold gold light — the seven and the horse at the center, and the people of Sanctuary gathered close around the edge of the leaving.
Shane stepped out of the seven and crossed the short stretch of packed earth to where Saul stood at the inner edge of the crowd. His fingers found the carved bone in his jacket by feel — the face of it gone smooth at the edges from the years his thumb had ridden it, the weight small and familiar in the cup of his hand, a pale unremarkable thing that wore nothing of what it carried. He took Saul's wrist, turned the hand over, and set the bone into the open palm, and brought Saul's fingers down over it with his own. The morning's cold had got into the bone and into both their hands, and the only sound between them for that moment was the slow scuff of the crowd behind and Sleipnir's breath rolling out warm somewhere off to the side.
He had carried this against his own skin since Heimdall first pressed it there, and the letting go of it now had a weight he passed through himself without putting on his face.
"This is Heimdall's. He gave it to me when the gate came back." Shane kept his hand closed over Saul's, the bone held warm between the two palms. "It's yours while I'm north. You set your thumb flat to the carved face — there." He moved Saul's thumb into the worn hollow with the edge of his own. "You press, and you say his name, and then you say what's wrong, no more words than the wrong needs. He hears everything, everywhere, all at once — but he'll have a part of his attention keyed to this piece in your hand, because I've already told him whose hand it's going into."
Saul's fingers closed the rest of the way around it. He brought it in against his chest a fraction, the small protective draw of a man who had just been handed a thing he understood the size of.
"It crosses what your relay net can't." Shane's voice came lower, the weight under it surfacing just enough for Saul and no further. "Asgard's not a place a signal reaches, no matter how clean Ben keeps the channel. This reaches it. So hear me on the when of it. Not the first hard night. Not a bad raid, not a node gone loud, not a thing you and the men and the hounds can stand in front of and hold. You'll have a stretch of holding ahead of you, and most of it is yours to hold. This is for the bottom. The true bottom — the place where what's standing in this corridor cannot stand any longer. You get there, you press it, you tell him, and the path opens, and we come." He took his hand off Saul's. "And not one moment before."
Saul held his eyes, and gave the single nod he gave to things he had already begun carrying before they were named, and folded the bone away into the inner pocket over his heart.
The single crowd came apart the way a crowd comes apart once the formal part of a leaving is done and only the personal part is left — the loose ring loosening further, breaking into the smaller knots of people who had each come to say a thing to one of the seven and needed a little air around them to say it. Boots shifted on the packed earth. Voices dropped. The cold held the whole apron close.
Off near the edge of it, a step out of the press, Hill had Thrud to himself.
He stood near enough that the cold rolled their breath together in the thin space between them, nearer than a man stood to a woman in a crowd unless the crowd had stopped mattering to him. His hand had found hers down low where the gathering couldn't see it, a tracker's calluses against the harder calluses of a hand that had carried a blade in two worlds, and his thumb moved once slow across her knuckles. The thing he had meant to give her he had been turning over since before the sun came up, and the turning hadn't made it any easier to set down, and so he gave her the plain shape of it because plain was the only shape that held.
"I read trails for a living." His voice came low, pitched for her and no one past her. "Every morning you're gone I'll run the whole corridor at first light. Every thread that moves over the line, I'll have it. And the one I'll be reading for is the one I can't reach — yours, gone up past where any track of mine goes." His jaw tightened against the next of it. "That's the part I don't have a way around. You'll be on ground I can't read."
Thrud brought her forehead down to his, the gesture of a warrior who gave her softness to one person and guarded it from all the rest, and her free hand came up flat against the side of his neck. Her breath crossed his mouth when she answered.
"Then set your mark and hold it." The steel under her tenderness was the steel that had carried her through a daughter-of-Thor's whole long life. "I've crossed worse distances than this one and found my way back across all of them. You're the mark I'm setting. Wherever Odin's business takes me, I track toward you the way you track toward a trail — and I do not lose a trail." Her thumb pressed once at his jaw. "You hold the corridor. I'll hold the way home. We've each got the half of it we're good at."
A few paces off, Jo and Ogun waited.
Jo stood with her arms loosely crossed against the cold and her gaze resting easy on her childhood friend — the bayou patience running under it, the read she'd carried since she was a girl, the read that had clocked this woman as a girl too before either of them had known the half of what Thrud was. She held what she'd come to say behind her teeth and let the two of them have their moment whole, because that was what you did, and she could wait. Ogun stood at her shoulder in his human shape, the forge-warmth banked low in him, a steady heat at her side that the cold morning couldn't reach past. He didn't hurry her. He read the same scene she read and waited the same way, and the two of them held their few paces of distance and let Hill have the last of his time before it came around to Jo's turn.
Carla came through the loosening crowd to Sif and took the moment as hers without asking anyone's leave of it — both arms going around the goddess, pulling her in close, holding on the way you hold on when the holding is the whole point. Sif's arms came up and closed around her in answer, and the two of them stood pressed together in the cold while the murmur of the gathering went on past them and Sleipnir's breath rolled out warm and slow somewhere off to the side. Carla pressed her face into the goddess's shoulder and breathed her in, and there was a girl inside the woman she was holding — a girl of eight and ten and twelve that only Carla had ever held quite this way — and all of those years folded down into the press of her arms without needing a single word laid over them.
She held on a beat past what the crowd would have called enough, and then she drew back only far enough to keep her hands at Sif's arms, her thumbs pressing into the warm cloth.
"You eat up there." The instruction came out of her ahead of anything grander, the way it always had. "Whatever a hall full of gods puts in front of you, you eat it, and you lie down when there's lying down to be had, and you don't run yourself down to the bone the way you do the second there's a fight on. I raised you better than to skip your meals over a war."
Something eased across Sif's face — the goddess giving way, for this one woman, to the girl underneath — and she brought a hand up over Carla's where it gripped her arm and held it there. The corner of her mouth pulled.
"I'll eat." Her voice came down soft, pitched for the woman in front of her. "I always did, when you were the one standing over me about it." Her thumb moved across Carla's knuckles. "Tell Sherry I'll be back before the cuffs on that dress wear through. She's hard on her hems."
Carla's breath caught and turned into something close to a laugh and not quite one, and she pulled the goddess in once more, quick and fierce, her hand flat between the broad shoulders, the cold morning held off entirely in the small warm space the two of them made. Then she let go, and stepped back, and kept her chin level the way a mother keeps it level when she has decided not to send anyone off with wet eyes to carry up the road.
Mike came up on Shane next, and there was nothing soft in the way he did it. He put his hand out flat and square, and when Shane took it the grip closed down hard — a hand that moved earth and stone for its living, the calluses of it like worn brick, the bones of Shane's fingers pressed together in the plain hard clasp of a man who would sooner put a thing into a handshake than go hunting for the words to carry it. He gave it one downward pump that meant everything he wasn't going to lay out loud. His jaw set. The cold sat between them and neither of them rushed to fill it.
"Go settle it." His voice came flat and low and entirely without ornament. "Then get yourself back down here. We'll hold the ground till you do." His hand tightened once more at the end of it, the grip saying the rest, and then he let go and stepped back to make room.
Gary slid in on the tail of it before the weight of Mike's grip had finished leaving Shane's hand, and the grin he was wearing was the one he reached for whenever a moment got too heavy to stand in head-on. He dropped a palm onto Shane's shoulder and gripped it.
"Alright. One favor. Whole hall full of gods up there waiting on you and I'm asking exactly the one." He squeezed. "Don't you let some nine-foot frost giant sit down on top of you. Amanda's got this entire corridor mapped to the inch, every soul accounted for, and I am not the man who has to walk in and tell her the map came up one Shane short on account of you standing under a giant's backside at the wrong moment." For half a breath the grin thinned and something real came up underneath it and showed, plain, before he reached down and pulled the levity back over it. "Get flattened up there and that's paperwork down here. I don't do paperwork. So don't."
His hand stayed on the shoulder a beat past the joke, the thumb pressing in once, and that was the part he meant, and they both let it be the part he meant without naming it.
The farewells thinned as the crowd gave its pieces up one by one, and into the space they left Edna came forward, and there was a finality to her step that marked her as the last of them. She stopped close in front of Shane and did not reach for him the way the others had reached. She stood square instead, her hands folded at her waist against the cold, and she lifted her face and met his eyes straight on and held them there, and the holding was its own kind of touch. The frost in the grass along the wall had begun to give under the climbing sun, and the smell of the wet ground came up between them, and for a moment she only steadied herself in his gaze and let what she had to say arrange itself behind her teeth.
When it came it came low and even, the whole weight of it carried in how plainly she set it down.
"I'm not going to dress this up." Her chin stayed level. "You made me a promise once, when I came to you scared out of my mind over what was sleeping in my boy. You told me you'd let him have his childhood. The whole of it. Not a borrowed stretch of one, not a childhood with a clock running under it — the real thing, start to finish." Her folded hands pressed tighter against her waist. "And you kept it. Every year of it, you kept it. He grew up easy. He grew up whole. He's out there right now answering babies' questions on a bench in the sun, grown and steady and not carrying one ounce of what you and I both know he's going to have to carry someday." Her voice held, though it cost her something to hold it. "There's no thanks the right size for that. I've tried to find one and there isn't. So I'm only going to stand here and tell you plain — I know what you spent to give him those years. And I will be grateful to you for them until the day I'm put in the ground, and after it, if there's an after." She drew a slow breath through the cold. "Go on up and do what Odin needs. But you come back. There's a mother down here who owes you more than she can pay, and I'd like the chance to keep working at it."
Shane held her eyes through the whole of it and let her finish, and then he let a slow breath go into the cold and gave her a nod — the sort that carried more inside it than agreement, a knowing folded down beneath it that he kept from climbing any higher than his eyes. He reached and took both her folded hands into one of his, the cold of her fingers pressed into the warm of his palm, and the wet-earth smell came up off the thawing grass between them.
"Hear me on this, because it's the truest thing I've got to give you before I go." His voice came low and sure. "Whatever wakes in him, whenever it wakes — and it'll wake in its own time, not on any clock your fear winds up for it — the man who opens his eyes on the far side of it is still the boy you carried up out of the dark. Modi doesn't come and shove your son out the door. He comes and finds your son already standing in the room, whole, and he settles down into him, and what's left after is both at once. He'll answer to whatever name gets called. Modi, when a hall full of gods needs Modi. Martin, when his mother calls him in to supper. Both of them true at the same time, and neither one crowding the other off the bench." He pressed her hands once. "You didn't raise a placeholder for a god to step into. You raised a man. The god's getting the better end of that bargain."
And there, running quiet underneath the plain warm thing he was setting in front of her, something moved at the edge of his reading. The Loom shifted the way still water shifts when something deep beneath the surface rolls over — a faint tug travelling the threads that ran toward the bench and the easy grown shape of the man on it, the smallest leaning of a pattern that had held level for years. He let it pass through him and kept it off his face entirely. Closer than it was, the tug told him. Closer than she knows. He folded it down into the place where he kept the things that were his alone, and held his eyes warm and steady on Edna's, and gave her cold hands one last press before he opened his and let them go.
Shane stepped back from Edna into the open center of the apron, and the last of the small farewells broke off as the people read the change in him and drew themselves out toward the edges, and he turned to Thor and gave him the signal — a single lift of the chin, nothing more, the wordless go between two men who had stood at the front of enough leavings to need no more than that. Thor took it. He put his hand flat once against Sleipnir's neck and stepped clear of the seven, and his other hand came up and Mjölnir came up with it, the head of the hammer catching the thin gold sun, and he set his feet wide on the packed earth and raised the weapon to the open sky and called out in a voice that rolled across the whole of the departure grounds and rattled in the chest of every soul standing on it.
"Heimdall! Open the bridge!"
For the space of a held breath the morning hung still — the frost-smell, the steam off the horse, the cold pressing down — and then the sky answered. Far up and far off, a watchman who heard everything everywhere turned a portion of his vast attention onto this one patch of New York ground, and the bridge came down to meet the hammer. It arrived as a roar before it arrived as light, a sound that came up through the soles of every boot on the apron and climbed the bones, and then the light broke over them — the full spectrum of it pouring down out of the empty air in a roaring column, every color the eye knew and a few it had no names for, churning and braided and impossibly bright, the cold morning swallowed whole in the blaze of it. The grass flattened in a ring. The air went thick with the smell of struck lightning. The seven stood gathered in the heart of the column with Sleipnir tall among them, and the brilliance closed over the whole of them at once — the gods, the eight-legged horse, the hammer still raised — and then with a final concussion that shoved the watching crowd back a step the light tore upward off the earth and was gone, taking everything it had gathered with it, and the sky overhead was only sky again.
The roar drained out of the air and left a ringing quiet behind it, and the light's afterimage hung swimming in everyone's eyes a moment before it faded and let the plain morning back in. Where the column had stood there was a wide black ring scorched into the packed earth, the grass at its rim curled and smoking in thin grey threads, and the smell of struck lightning lay heavy over the whole apron and only slowly began to thin off into the cold. The crowd stood where the concussion had shoved them, not yet moving, the way people stand in the space right after a thing too large to hold has happened in front of them.
Dave came forward to the edge of the scorch with one of the hounds pressed close at his knee, and he stopped at the burnt rim and stood over it, and the dog stopped with him and lowered its head to the cooked earth and drew the smell of it in. Dave's eyes stayed down on the black ground. When he spoke it was half to the men near him and half to no one at all, the flat working-through of a man turning a hard thing over out loud because turning it over in silence had stopped being enough.
"That's them gone, then." He toed the curled edge of the scorch with his boot, and a thread of smoke lifted and broke apart. "Up into whatever that mess is they're walking into." His hand dropped to the broad head at his knee and rested there. "How long, you figure. A fight with frost giants over a whole realm coming back — that's not a thing you settle by the weekend and ride home from. Could be they're up there a good long while." He lifted his gaze off the burnt ring at last and put it out past the wall, north, where the sky had closed back over and given nothing away. "Question I keep landing on is whether we'll have any kind of read on it down here at all, or whether they just go quiet behind that sky and we hold and wait and don't hear a thing till the day they come back through it." The dog leaned into his leg. He let his hand stay where it was. "Long while," he said again, lower, settling it for himself.
Gary had come up beside him at the edge of the scorch somewhere in the middle of all that, and he stood with his arms crossed against the cold and his eyes on the same black ring, and the grin he'd been wearing for the send-off was gone now, set down somewhere back in the crowd where it wasn't needed anymore. The smoke threads thinned off the burnt rim between his boots. He let Dave's question hang in the cold air a moment, turning it the way he turned a thing he already had the shape of and didn't much enjoy the shape of.
"I'll tell you how long." His voice came level, the ornament stripped off it, the man underneath the jokes standing plain in the cold. "He comes back one of two ways, and there's no third one. Either we get to a morning where this corridor's been run, top to bottom, by the people standing in it right now — held the wall, fed the nodes, met whatever comes over the line and put it down ourselves, clean, without a god's hand anywhere near it — and we've proved past any argument that we can carry the whole weight on our own backs." He uncrossed his arms and let them hang. "That's the good door. We earn him staying gone."
He nudged a curl of cooked grass with his boot and watched it crumble.
"Or it's the other one. We get to the bottom — the real bottom, the place where everything that's standing here can't stand anymore, where the ink and the hounds and every last one of us have given it the whole of what we've got and it still isn't enough, and the line's going under." He lifted his eyes off the scorch and put them on Dave, plain and flat. "Saul's carrying the means to call him on that day. Not before it. On it." His jaw set. "So that's your answer. He's back the morning we prove we never needed him — or the morning we can't survive without him. One or the other. And every day between now and whichever one it turns out to be, the holding's ours." He took a breath of the lightning-smelling cold and let it out slow. "Best we get used to the weight of it."
He turned from the black ring and started back toward the inner wall, and the crowd began to come apart and follow, and behind them all the scorched circle sat smoking faintly into a morning that had gone quiet and ordinary again, with the whole of the corridor's keeping resting now on the people walking away from it.