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He walks the same.
With the scope or without it, black coat or black smoke, Ana would know Gabriel’s stride at six or six-hundred yards. Death had given his hips a bit of a hitch, though.
Yours too
, her own joints groan. From her high perch, sweating a little under her cowl, Ana puts the soft dip between Reaper’s shoulder blades in the center of her crosshairs, then slides it up by a fraction.
“Do you think he still talks in his sleep?” Jack mumbles at her side, close enough to draw a shiver along Ana’s arm.
She remembers it sounding more like spells or prayers, Gabe’s mumblings, softly hissed, rolling past full lips into the pillow.
“Or if he has nightmares?” Jack adds.
In the scope, Reaper’s hooded head gives a quarter-turn, as if he’s heard them.
No breeze. No haze. The sun is bright, lovely as justice and twice as hot. The shot won’t get better than this. But beside her, Jack hesitates for both of them, takes the loss for all of them. It’s not her old Kinamura, but the biotic rifle’s just as heavy. Every notch is still more than one life, as it always was, even the dark one framed in her scope. Ana eases off the trigger and lays the rifle down.
“If you really want to know,” she says with a sigh, pulling her sidearm, squinting to aim again, “ask him when he wakes up.”
Unlike .338 rounds, the darts don’t crack and boom. They hum. Like something half-heard in a dream.