Chapter Eight: One Woman Self-Destruction Tour, Tickets at the Door

There's a bonfire burning in her chest so huge and hot that Rake is half convinced one wrong move will destroy the next three planets. She can't think past it. Can't feel past it. Can't hardly see well enough to steer her ship away from Enceladus but it's not like she can trust her ghost to do it, so she struggles through the blurring. If she crashes, she crashes. So what? It's not like that could kill her. It's not like anything can kill her. It's not like her ghost will just let her die.

The bonfire fills her mouth. Rake clenches her hands on the controls, teeth creaking with the effort of keeping it back. Hazily, she hears her comm ping and ping again. Her fireteam, probably. When she misses the first few attempts, her ghost accepts the signal himself but the voice filtering through may as well be static. She can't hear anything past the roar of her light, past the screaming in her ears—

Is she screaming? She might be. It's hard to tell. Her mouth feels full of glass and sand.

There's no words for this. They've all leaked out of her head. She stands at the helm because it's about as much as she's capable of but her ship flies in loose corkscrews, playing chicken with every passing asteroid. She wonders if it would be possible to shatter herself so badly her ghost couldn't put her back together. She wonders where she's even going.

She can't return to the tower. Not with Cayde's stolen, inactive—dead, he's dead, he died in your arms—slumped in the co-pilot chair next to her. She can't go most places like that, honestly. The Vanguard will no doubt have put some kind of bulletin out on her, a bunch of fucking do-gooder Titans scouring the system for her renegade self and cargo.

But there is one place, she thinks, and through the howling in her ears, Rake almost laughs.

Io. Ikora won't expect her to hunker down on her very own precious shithole home planet. And she'll have company, at least. A mirror to the howling abyss in her chest. Asher, she knows, will understand.

Asher doesn't swear often. He considers it a mark of poor intellect. He makes an exception for her.

"What," he says when he returns from scouting supplies and finds her sitting cocooned in a sleeping bag in his cave, Cayde's body sprawled beside her, "in the Taken-addled fuck is this? You steal Cayde and bring him here? Of all places, here? Are you absolutely out of your mind? What could you possibly be thinking? I will not be providing any kind of—of sanctuary or whatever other insane thought brought you here."

It's enough. Somehow, it's enough. The fires, the screaming in her chest, it quiets a little. Cayde, he said. Not Cayde's body—Cayde—with that look of righteous indignation his face, not sickened at what she'd done but angry at the inconvenience—

And Rake realizes she's laughing. She's crying, too. She suspects she hasn't stopped for days; it would explain the blurring. But she's laughing and the howling abyss hurts a little less.

Asher, on the other hand, stares at her in abject horror. "You stop that right now."

Time passes so weirdly anymore, Rake isn't sure how long it takes to get her emotional incontinence, as Asher calls it, under control. He pretends to ignore her through the worst of it, bent over one of his experiments with a look of elaborate, manufactured concentration. The effect is somewhat ruined by the fact that he keeps glancing back to check on her, anxiety hidden poorly on a man deliberately unused to caring about anyone.

She appreciates this, too. It makes her feel almost human again, puts the light back under her skin where it belongs and Cayde is dead. Cayde is dead. But somehow, right now, it hurts more like a bone-bruise than a knife in the gut.

There's stew for dinner. Asher doesn't offer her any—that would be too much like friendship—but he makes enough for two in between stealing studiously unworried glances at her and the invitation is clear, even if he doesn't put words to it.

He retreats to a far corner with his bowl. For a moment, they sit in silence broken only by the scrape of his spoon against old world china.

At last, he asks, "Why?"

Rake considers this. There's a thousand whys to choose from. Why did this happen? Why did she react the way she did? Why did she kill so many? Why did she slave over fixing what couldn't be fixed? Why do the ghosts hate her enough to betray her like this, over and over again? Why is nothing she does ever enough? Why Io? Why Asher?

Of all the options, Rake thinks he probably means the latter. She says, "Because I knew you'd understand."

Asher purses his lips at her. "I have a massive intellect. There is very little in this universe that I cannot understand. That does not, however, in any way answer my question."

Rake shrugs, wincing as the motion sends shooting pain through her back and shoulders. Slumping back against the wall, she slithers deeper into her sleeping bag, pulls it like a hood around her head. It's stupid and childish, but it reminds her of a safe house on the moon, deep enough in a mountain to drown out the screaming hive nearby, and Cayde's voice whispering through the dark, "Wanna make a blanket fort?"

It almost doesn't hurt. But then, maybe she's just too tired to hurt.

"Call it research, then," she says. "An experiment."

"An experiment," Asher repeats. His massive intellect seems to be failing him at the moment. "Let me be certain of the parameters of this so-called experiment. So, Cayde's ghost is killed," he ticks off on his fingers, "Cayde himself is critically damaged. You repaired him, I assume, based on the lack of obvious holes or you bring him to me because… I am in any way interested in Exo technology?"

Rake smiles. She probably doesn't look as innocent as she means to, leaking light, dirty and dark-eyed from exhaustion, but it needles Asher just the same.

"You absolutely are," she says. "You're just too shy to admit it."

Asher sputters like she threw water in his face. "Shy. Shy?"

"Well, you can't exactly ask an Exo to examine them without it looking like some weird kink."

"Get out," he snaps. "Leave my vicinity this instant."

Rake very carefully doesn't think. She doesn't breathe. She knows why she came here but she can't look at it directly. She's not quite ready to face it yet.

She says, "But you can examine Cayde." And tries not to hear herself saying it.

It gives Asher pause. He looks between her and—the body—Cayde, almost curious.

"Why in the world would I want to do that?"

Wiggling an arm out of her sleeping bag, Rake reaches over and tugs up leg of Cayde's pants. She doesn't look at what she's doing, hoping what she doesn't see won't send her spiraling back to a burnt out car in old Russia.

Instead, she watches Asher. His eyes widen. He scoots a little closer, like a feral cat wary of being caught. It's gratifying, in a way, to be able to surprise him.

"That's—" he starts and shakes his head. "Well, no, it's not impossible. Clearly, it's possible. But it's improbable, certainly, likely incompatible and highly ill advised. When did this happen? How? When he was caught in the Vex portals?"

Rake shrugs again. The lightning strikes of pain keep her from dwelling too much on what she plans to offer him.

"Before that. Couple years maybe, I don't know. We were dealing with Oryx at the time. Used to work on these to distract us from the impending death and sublimation of the entire known universe."

"You," Asher says and somehow his flabbergasted outrage makes it a complete sentence. "The two of you? You."

"Yes."

"You built this? With, with what, exactly—bits of things you found lying around? Killed a minotaur and thought, oh, I know, this would make a fantastic new leg?"

Rake smiles. It's a painful thing, small and crooked, but it's a smile. "You should have seen him jump."

Asher gapes at her. His human hand clenches and unclenches at his side. "You're insane."

"We think it might be why the vex portals didn't notice him right away," she offers. "He's technically a robot and he's at least partially vex."

"Which you did to him on purpose." A muscle jumps in Asher's jaw. His voice sounds oddly choked. "You successfully integrated Vex tech into the body of a sentient, non-vex individual, on purpose, and you did not think to at the very least inform me?"

Oh. Oh.

It's easy to overlook Asher. His cultivated aura of arrogant disinterest, the way he shuns all companionship and denies any attempt to help, makes it easy to forget how much pain he's in. How desperate his situation.

Rake is the kind of animal that lashes out in pain, the kind to take the world down with her. She forgets Asher isn't. He's the kind of animal that holes himself away to die.

Looking at him now, Rake sees what she missed before—his clenched fists, the trembling shoulders, the shine in his eyes—and his outrage isn't just at misapplied science.

"Asher," she starts, but he rolls right over her.

"You didn't feel this information would be in any way pertinent? Did you not consider my research?" he demands, growing louder with every word. "Did you not for a moment consider that perhaps this foolish game of yours might not carry implications for the self-replicating infection that corrupted my ghost? That is currently attempting to destroy and consume me?"

"You're right. I didn't think of it, but I should have. I'm sorry."

It's easy to forget Asher hurts. He doesn't hear apologies often. This one sucks the heat right out of him, leaves an aching vacuum behind. He sits down hard, an arm's length away from her on the cold cave floor. He drops his head into his fleshed hand, hiding his eyes from her. Rake pretends not to see the way his shoulders shake, for his sake, but she can't help reaching for him, placing a careful hand on his knee.

She knows this pain. She knows how deep it runs. She wishes she could show him the way out, but she doesn't know it. She hasn't found the path herself.

Still, she tries. She offers, "Maybe you'll forgive me, when I tell you what I did with Sundance?"

"Sundance?" Asher's voice chokes and cracks. He falls back on his old armor of irritation to hide it. "Who or what is Sundance? I cannot possibly be expected to remember the name of every blasted person, animal or thing you encounter."

"Cayde's ghost."

"What about Cayde's ghost?" he snaps. "It's dead, isn't it? What use it is to me now? Their inner workings are of a complexity far greater than my ability to replicate, even had I the appropriate tools and a—"

"I brought her back."

He stops dead, actually looks up at her despite the glittering of his eyes. "You what?"

"I brought her back. They don't die. Not really. The essence of what they are goes back to the Traveler. They're all in there, apparently. Every ghost that ever died."

"Impossible," he says, but it's more like a whisper and his hands are clenching on the hem of his coat. She sees in his eyes the mirror of her own pain and it's too much. It all comes roaring back to her, so huge she could choke on it.

"I know a lot of Cayde's caches," she manages, though her throat's gone thick and tight again. "I got one of her spare shells and I drove my fucking ship into the Traveler and I screamed in his goddamn light until he gave her back."

Rake laughs but it's so bitter you could hardly call it laughing. She wipes irritably at her face with the dirty edge of her sleeve.

"Fat lot of good it did. She came back. It was her. She knew him. She even looked inside his body. But she didn't res him. She flew off instead—took me to fucking, fucking Enceladus, and picked some goddamn skeleton out of storage. Brought back that asshole instead."

Asher watches her with wide, intense eyes, leaning forward. "You're certain it was Cayde's ghost that you found?"

Rake glares, but her anger isn't really for him. "We were well acquainted."

"And yet she still resurrected someone else?"

"Does he look alive to you?" she snarls but people are angry at Asher so often, it means very little to him in the face of new and interesting scientifically prospects.

"If it is unequivocally Sundance, then a ghost once it has chosen a guardian will only ever resurrect that guardian. Which means, given that Cayde is an Exo, that the body she resurrected must have been Cayde's original body. His human body. Cayde-0, if you will."

The abyss opens under her again. May as well let it swallow.

"I'm aware," Rake says. She sinks into her sleeping bag, pulls it tight around her. "Does it matter? If it's his old body or some random cryo-pod of bones? Either way, it's not my Cayde, is it? He's a brand new guardian. Fresh slate. Him and his killer both."

She sinks down all the way, into the warm and blessed black.

"Fuck it," she says. "Maybe they'll be friends."

Asher leans back. Whatever brief glow of enthusiasm he'd had died in the face of her bitterness.

"Where does that leave you?" he asks quietly. It's uncharacteristic empathy. She thinks maybe he sees too much of himself in her to ignore.

Rake wants to laugh, wants to scream, wants to shatter, wants a burnt-out car in old Russia and a thousand years to sleep.

"Right here," she says. "Where else?"

They sit in silence for a long time afterward. Asher stays there on the ground beside her, heedless of his robes on the cave floor, staring into the middle distance with his vex arm cradled to his chest. Rake stares with him.

"This isn't healthy, Rake," her ghost whispers, in her head.

She hates him. She hates him so much, her clenched hands leave crescent moons carved into her palms, but he's right, damn him. It isn't healthy and Cayde isn't coming back and she picked Io for a reason. She chose Asher for a reason.

The searing pain in her chest, all day, every day. The fire licking at her bones. The rage. And it's not good or right or fair, but Rake wants so badly to make someone, anyone else feel even just a fraction of her pain. When she looks at Asher, she knows he feels the same.

He can make this mean something. Maybe nothing she wants, but something.

She says, "Can I leave Cayde with you?"

"If you do," he answers quietly, "I will dismantle him."

His honesty is an ice cube on a broken limb. It's not enough—nothing will ever be enough—but at least it isn't I can't help him and creeping funeral shrouds and back dock dealings and dead is dead. It isn't a ghost that knew her name, her loss, and chose to resurrect the creature that ripped out her heart anyway. It isn't failure after failure despite moving heaven and earth. It isn't one last betrayal and the wrong dead man tumbling out of a broken cryo-pod.

It's, at least, something.

Rake knows why she came to Io. If nothing else, she thinks, Cayde would have liked to be useful.

"That's okay," she says. "I'm ready for it to be over."

It isn't over.

The pain doesn't leave. The bonfire leaking out of her skin doesn't die. Rake thought closure would give her some semblance of peace—thought giving Asher something to science would make Cayde's death mean at least a tiny iota of something—but it doesn't. She doesn't feel peaceful; she feels like a traitor. She feels like she abandoned Cayde to die.

She could have gotten there faster. She could have been smarter. She should have seen the trap coming. Should have known something was wrong when none of his other fire teams responded. She should have seen the trap coming. She should have saved him. She should have been able to fix him.

His loss hurts worse now without him—dead—sleeping in the co-pilot's chair. It's too real. Too raw.

Dead is dead and she has no more chances left.

She failed.

She failed and her ghost is relieved. He tells her so on the ship, as they head towards Earth. He's happy she's moving on. Rake takes vicious pleasure in rendering his relief short lived, by-passing the Tower for the Crucible queue instead. There's something screaming in her head—a white hot siren of pain and loss and fury—and she needs to drown it out.

Shaxx is delighted to see her up and about again as well. He tells her so at volume. At slightly less volume, his version of conspiratorial, he tells her he does not agree with the Vanguard's choices and admires her strength and leadership. He thinks the Tower is better for her.

Rake does not attack him, but only just.

It's not his fault, anyway.

Instead, she attacks those that signed up to be attacked. The novelty of her participation draws crowds. At first the matches are normal, 6 v 6, but Rake destroys everyone over and over again and Shaxx tries to even the odds. The matches go to 3 v 6, then 1 v 8. Shaxx continues to announce her wins with gusto, but his enthusiasm fades somewhere after the forty-eighth round. He changes the matches to 1 v 10 and the promise of a prime engram to the winning team.

"Hell, I'll throw in a sparrow!" he thunders. He's starting to sound desperate.

After several days of this, her ghost begs her to quit but Rake chooses not to hear him. Her light burns so huge and overwhelming it almost—if she does not let herself think—shines bigger and brighter than the screaming void inside her. She wanders around in a daze, feeling halfway outside her own body.

She may well be halfway outside her own body. She can hardly see for the glare.

Mostly, she finds other guardians by the flicker of response their light makes to hers. She seeks them out like a bat in the dark. Sometimes they shoot her. Sometimes—in th and higher—she even dies. But the relief is short lived and soon she's up again, hunting, searching, trying to suffer and cause suffering enough to fill the hole in her chest—

—staring down at her own blood-oil-death soaked grieves through the gaping pit in his chest—

Don't think of that.

Rake abandons her guns. They're not enough. Not what she needs. She goes forward with Ace of Spades, still broken. A sword on her back. Knives in both hands. Shaxx is pleased, for a moment.

"An interesting development—" he crows over the comms. The last, she doesn't hear. A particular spark of light ducks around the edge of a nearby building. All at once, the light recedes back behind her skin, leaving her sharp and clear and cold and so full of hatred she shakes in every limb.

Uldren Sov.

Her vision narrows.

She ignores everyone else. She follows his tracks in the dirt when she finds them, follows his scent—the ozone tang of darkness all the Awoken have and something else, something close proximity to an ahamkara left him with—and Rake hunts him down.

The first time, she cuts his throat.

The second, his head.

The third, she guts him.

The fourth, she take her sword to his knees and stares at him wriggling there in the darkening dust and she hates, hates, hates—but the blood loss is too fast to keep him there for long and the game continues.

The fifth, she finds him cowering in an old bodega. She lets her light sink teeth into the brick and brings the whole building down.

The sixth, she rips his heart out. It gives her an idea.

The seventh, she carves off pieces of herself, fills the battlefield with shining decoys shaped from shards of her own light. Savathun taught her this. Oryx taught her this. The Traveler taught her this.

Rake pins Uldren Sov into a dead-end alley. She hears him yelling, but the words mean nothing to her. She can see him waving frantically at Shaxx's ship overseeing the battle from above. It doesn't matter. She burns so bright, her light bigger even than Gaul's. When they try to transmat him, Rake swats away the signal.

And with the sharp edge of her own pain, she starts to pry his light away.

She can see how to do it—that's the funny thing. With as much light as she has, as useless as it has become to her, she can see the seams where it resides in others. She can see how to dig it out.

And that would be a fitting punishment, wouldn't it? This thing, so useful to him, his ill-gotten gains for killing the one person she—

No, don't think about that. Concentrate.

His light doesn't come easy. It's tedious work, made worse for his screaming. Rake stumbles, rips a chunk of his light away where she meant to peel a strip—

No, not stumbles. She is pulled. The shouting coalesces into words—

"Stop, Rake, stop. You have to stop. The match is over. Stop! Please, you have to—"

And there are guardians grabbing every part of her, dragging her backwards through the alley. She is only vaguely aware of the scrap of enemy light in her hand and so she doesn't notice when she lets it go—doesn't notice it fly back to its guardian like a sucked-in breath. She fights. She kicks and slashes and when someone pries the knives from her hand, she bites.

"ENOUGH!" someone bellows. "STOP THIS AT ONCE."

Furious and blind with light, Rake aims a devastating kick in his direction. She hisses, "Make me!"

It's Shaxx, as it turns out. And he does. She is unarmed and encumbered with nine other guardians. He puts a sword through a chink in her breast plate with businesslike precision and she grins blood at him as she dies.

She stays blissfully dead for some time.

"It is as close as I could get to making you sleep," her ghost says, when he finally deems fit to res her. "Now would you please eat something?"

"No," she says and goes back to the Crucible.

But Shaxx shakes his head. He looks at her like a pathetic thing, like a starving wolf outside the gates.

"You're banned," he tells her and it is gentler than she expected, probably gentler than she deserves. "As much as it pains me, Guardian, my Crucible is not what you need right now."

He says more, but that's as much as Rake can bear to listen to. His sympathy, his pity, sandpapers her wounds in a way his sword could not.

And anyway, she knows someone else with a playground and fewer pesky scruples. Doesn't even get all the way back to her ship to call him before her ghost pings with an incoming message and then there's Drifter oozing out of his speakers, saying, "Heard the other kids don't want to play with you anymore. You ready to join the grown-ups?"

"Coordinates," she demands.

Drifter laughs.

"My kind of lady."

And Rake loses herself in gunfire again.