Chapter 20: Two Fingers

Yui put both hands on the black line and called the light.

It came, as warm and gold as ever.

It slid off Brunhild's skin.

She tried again, gritting her teeth, and again.

Each time the light rose up and ran away and left the mark exactly as it was.

It had never worked on her.

It could not work on her now.

"Please," Yui said, to nobody, to the light, to the sky. "Please, please."

Behind her the gate was a roar of steel and shouting.

The hex-riders had seen the black wave go over the field, and the cursed men rise up clean.

They understood in one breath that the Shield was whole again.

Some of them wheeled their horses.

Some of them charged anyway.

Greta's voice carried over everything: "Hold the gap! Hold the gap! Spears forward!"

Yui did not turn her head.

She remembered what she was.

She was not a saint.

She had never been one.

She was a night-shift nurse from Saitama with a pocket notebook and a pencil.

When the machines gave out, the thing she knew how to do was stay.

"Kettle!" she screamed over her shoulder. "I need a kettle, and a clean cloth, and I need them now!"

A boy ran forward with a kettle in each hand.

It was the nineteen-year-old with the clean right hand, and he was weeping as he ran.

Yui poured the warm water into the cloth and laid it on the black line.

She began at the throat, where the mark was newest.

She worked her way down with slow firm strokes, exactly as she had done on the first night.

"Brunhild," she said. "Brunhild, I'm here. I've got you. I'm doing it the slow way."

The tall body lay unmoving in the mud.

The eyelids had a dark, bruised look.

Yui felt for the pulse in the neck, and found it, slow and heavy, but there.

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