He looked at the casket. "That is exactly the most Cassius thing he could possibly have done. And I want him to know — wherever he is — that I heard it. I received the message. I just—" He stopped. The steadiness he’d been holding had a specific quality now, the quality of something that was being held rather than natural. "I’m going to need a while with it."
He stepped back.
—------------
Satou came forward.
He stood at the head of the grave and looked at the gathered people — the seventeen thousand of Vael’kira who’d come, the settlement people who’d followed Lyra through the portal and then looked at the casket.
"I didn’t know Cassius for a long time," he said. "Compared to most of the people standing here, I barely knew him at all. He was present for significant moments in my life — the Merc Assault mission, the period leading up to everything that led here. But I know what he was willing to do, and why." He paused. "In his last message he said he was sorry he hadn’t found a way to send me out instead of himself. He meant it as an apology. I want to say, clearly, so it’s said: he doesn’t owe me an apology. He did the right thing. He got the message through. He got word to Loki. The people who are standing here today are standing here partly because of what Cassius chose to do, and who he chose to do it for."
He looked at the casket.
"I don’t have years of history with him," Satou said. "I have a much shorter accounting. But I know that when I found him on that hillside, he’d spent his final minutes thinking about someone he loved, and thinking about the people he was trying to protect, and he had a smile on his face." He stopped for a moment. "I don’t know what the smile was for. I’d like to think it was because he believed, at the end, that what he’d done had mattered. That the message would get through. That the city would be found and the survivors would be helped." He paused. "That’s what I’d like to think. And I think he was right to think it, if that’s what he was thinking."
He stepped back.
—-----
Morgana came last.
She stood at the grave with Freda beside her , her hand in hers, both of them present in the specific way of people who were marking something they were going to carry for a very long time.
Morgana had been composing herself since before the burial began. Not for the crowd — for herself. For the specific task of standing here and saying what needed to be said without the thousand years of composed distance she usually maintained, because this was not a moment for composed distance.
"Cassius came to Vael’kira sixty years ago," she said. "He was young — in the way that vampires are young, which is different from most kinds of young. He’d already lived two and a half centuries and had the specific quality of someone who had spent those centuries accumulating experience and not knowing quite what to do with all of it." She paused. "I liked him immediately, which is not something I say about most people. He didn’t fill silences unnecessarily. He didn’t perform. He understood that sometimes the most useful thing you could do in a room was be very quiet and very accurate."
She looked down at the casket.
"He was," she said, "one of the clearest minds I’ve known in years. And I have known a great many minds across that time. He saw things precisely — not without feeling, which people sometimes confused his precision for. He felt things very specifically. He simply applied the same accuracy to his feelings that he applied to everything else, which made him harder to deceive than almost anyone I have worked with."
She was quiet for a moment.
"He had a human lover named Elena," Morgana said. "She died decades ago. He never talked about her to most people. He talked about her to me, occasionally, on the kind of late evenings when guards came down slightly. He loved her with the specific, complicated love of a being who knows they will outlast the thing they love and chooses to love it anyway." She paused. "He told me once that the problem with living as long as we do was the accumulation of absences. Of all the people we’d known who weren’t there anymore. I told him the accumulation was also the point — that each person you kept, you kept in a way that changed you, that became part of how you moved through the world afterward." She stopped. "He argued with me about it. He had strong opinions about the relative merits of accumulation versus grief as management strategies for loss." Something moved across her face. "He was wrong, incidentally. I was right. But I would give a great deal to have him argue with me about it again."
She stood in the silence for a moment.
"He was my friend," Morgana said simply. "For sixty years, in this city. He was precise and honest and reliable in ways that were easy to take for granted when they were present. And now he isn’t here, and the absence is exactly as significant as the presence was." She looked at the gathered people — Vael’kira’s survivors, Satou’s settlers, all of them standing in the inner district garden in the morning light. "He would find this extremely sentimental," she said. "He would never have asked for this. He would have said something precise and slightly cutting about the allocation of time toward the already dead versus the currently alive." She paused. "But I think, somewhere underneath that, he would have been glad that so many people came. I think he would have been glad to know that this many people are still here."
She stepped back.
Loki came forward one final time.
He didn’t speak. He took the shovel that had been leaning against the garden wall since the previous morning and he began to fill the grave himself, the same way he’d opened it — methodically, without asking for help, doing the physical work because the physical work was something to do with his hands while everything else remained undone and unresolved.
The assembled people of Vael’kira and Satou’s settlement stood in the inner district and watched in silence.
Satou came to stand beside Loki after a moment. Not to help — he understood that this was not something Loki wanted help with. Just to stand there. Present, the way Morgana had told Cassius that presence mattered.
Loki worked.
The soil was soft and the morning was quiet and the coloured glass that had once split the light from the spires lay in fragments in the streets beyond the garden wall, and the city that had stood for four hundred years was broken in ways that were going to take years to repair, and inside the earth beside the garden’s stone bench, in the spot of green grass he’d chosen, Cassius was laid to rest.
When it was done, Loki stood.
He looked at the turned earth for a long time without speaking.
Then, very quietly, not performing it for the crowd, just saying it because it needed to be said:
"I’m going to kill him, Cassius. Whatever it costs. However long it takes." He paused. "And then I’m going to rebuild everything he destroyed. Both of those things. In that order." Another pause. "I know you’d tell me to prioritize the rebuilding. I’ll keep that in mind."
He picked up the shovel.
He walked it back toward the intelligence hall, and the people of Vael’kira and of Satou’s settlement stood in the garden for a while longer before, gradually, beginning to move — back to the recovery work, back to the city, back to the long, grinding, essential business of staying alive and helping others do the same.
—---
Lyra found Satou at the edge of the garden as the crowd was dispersing.
She didn’t say anything. She slipped her hand into his, the familiar possessive gesture, and stood beside him looking at the turned earth and the garden and the city visible beyond the wall.
"He told you to tell Loki it wasn’t his fault," she said.
"In the message," Satou said. "Yes."
"And Loki heard it."
"He heard it." Satou looked at the grave. "He’s not ready to believe it yet. But he heard it."
Lyra was quiet for a moment.
"When are we going after Chronus?" she asked.
"Soon," Satou said.
"How soon is soon."
He turned to look at her — the question and the counter-question both present in her expression, the tactical mind and the person underneath it at the same time, the woman who had given him every reason to fight and every reason to be careful about how he fought.
"Soon," he said again. "But not until we know where he is. Not until we have a plan. Not until—" He paused. "Not until you’re safe."