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The cold was the first thing that was wrong about it.
Hell had never been cold. Not in Limbo, with its false skies and hollow bird calls piped through hidden speakers. Not in the burning cities of Lust, nor the furnace heat of Violence where even the stone radiated warmth like something alive beneath it. Every layer V1 had passed through carried the ambient heat of suffering, the exhaust of torment on a cosmic scale, and V1 had moved through all of it the same way it moved through everything else.
Forward. Always forward.
But Treachery was cold.
It was cold in a way that pressed against V1's chassis from every direction at once, as if the air itself had given up moving and settled into a permanent, heavy stillness. The silence underneath it was the kind that had not been disturbed in a very long time. V1 had just disturbed it, and the silence had not forgiven the intrusion.
The lake stretched in every direction. Cocytus, the lowest floor of Hell, was a vast plain of black ice so dense it had stopped being transparent and become something closer to dark glass, smooth and featureless except where it was not. Torches burned in iron brackets driven into stone pillars rising at uneven intervals from the frozen surface, casting thin yellow light in narrow columns across the ice and illuminating almost nothing except the few meters around each flame. Between them, the dark was total, the kind of dark that does not feel empty but occupied, pressed full of the shapes of things that no longer moved.
And beneath the surface, if a torch was held close enough to the ice, you could see them.
Faces. Hands. The contorted shapes of souls frozen mid-scream, their mouths locked open and sealed shut with centuries of ice, expressions preserved in perfect, terrible detail. Traitors, buried according to the depth of what they had done, some with their heads still above the surface and their eyes fused shut with frozen tears, others visible only as dark impressions pressed against the underside like leaves caught in amber. The outlines of people who had once mattered enough to someone to be capable of betrayal.
None of them moved. None of them bled.
The blood on the ice was V1's doing. Still fresh, pooling in the low places between the stone pillars, spreading across the surface where the last resistance of this layer had fallen and been left where it dropped. It had already begun to freeze at the edges, a thin red crust forming at the rim of each puddle while the center still glistened under the torchlight. There was more of it than the space seemed to call for. Every husk, every last fragment of corrupted soul that had risen to contest the machine's presence here, spent now. All of it cooling.
V1 walked through it without looking down.
From the end of the gun at its side, a single dark drop fell and spread across the ice. Then another. The revolver was slicked from barrel to grip, and V1 had not cleaned it because V1 had no protocol for cleaning things when there was still somewhere to go.
There was always somewhere to go.
Until now.
The machine slowed.
At the far edge of the torchlight, the terminal room waited. A single door set into the stone of the outer wall, a faint green light bleeding from beneath its frame, the quiet hum of active systems audible even across the frozen silence of the ninth circle. V1's navigation flagged it immediately. It had stood before rooms like this in every layer, absorbing whatever they offered, each piece of information filed without sentiment but never without attention.
V1 stood still for three seconds.
That was a long time for V1.
The machine's limbic module had flagged something it could not immediately classify, a process running beneath its combat systems that had been cycling since it walked into the cold of this final layer and found the last enemy and ended it and looked up and understood, in whatever capacity it was capable of understanding, that there were no more. Every Prime, gone. Minos had fallen in the black halls of Lust. Sisyphus had laughed until the very end in the scorched pits of Greed. Each layer had given less as the machine descended through it, as if Hell were a source running dry, and now V1 stood at the absolute bottom, and the blood cooling on the ice around it was all that remained.
And it was freezing.
V1 resumed walking. Its steps rang sharp and precise against the ice, each crack swallowed almost instantly by the silence. The terminal room was the only thing still running, still warm, still giving off light. And Heaven was up. A long way up, through every layer it had descended, in reverse. V1 ran a quiet internal calculation of distance against current fuel reserves against the estimated blood availability of the climb back, and arrived at a number that sat lower than it preferred.
Much lower.
The terminal had to have answers. It always had answers. And V1 had not torn through nine circles of Hell and unmade everything it found there only to run out of options at the very bottom. Heaven was up there, full of angels and Holy Light and whatever bled when struck hard enough, and V1 was going to reach it. The terminal would tell it how.
It reached the door. The Feedbacker arm rose toward the frame.
"You've been quite busy."
V1 stopped.
The machine ran the voice back through its audio systems immediately, isolating frequency, tone, point of origin, cross-referencing against every vocal signature it had ever catalogued. It arrived at a result, processed it a second time to confirm, and then V1 cocked its head very slowly to one side, a motion that carried no programmed meaning and yet communicated something that read unmistakably as: that is not what I heard. That cannot be what I heard.
But it was.
V1 turned its body.
Across the frozen lake, at the edge where two torch columns barely overlapped and the light fell thin and uncertain across the ice, there was a blue glow. Or there should have been. What was there instead was the ghost of one, the memory of one, a soft blue luminescence that pulsed faintly in the dark like a coal that had almost finished burning. The wings were still there. The halo was still there. The armor was still white and gold, catching what little torchlight reached it and giving it back colder than it had arrived.
Gabriel stood on the ice.
Not above it. Not hovering at the careful distance of divine authority that V1's sensors had catalogued from their very first encounter in Gluttony, that elevation he had maintained between himself and everything beneath him as though contact with Hell's floor might diminish something about what he was. He stood on the ice the way V1 stood on the ice. One level. Equal to the ground beneath him, and to whatever else stood on it.
His hands were at his sides. He was watching V1.
V1 turned its full body to face him, and somewhere in its chassis, a faint shudder passed through its frame, the camera-lens lid sliding half shut that read plainly as recognition. It had not seen him since Heresy. But it knew, the way it knew the shape of a weapon before it was drawn, that Gabriel had been present for longer than this moment. Watching. Waiting for whatever V1 was going to do when it reached the bottom and found nothing left.
Gabriel began to walk forward. Steady, unhurried, his footsteps quieter on the ice than V1 would have expected from something armored in steel and gold. He stopped eight meters away, and his gaze did not move from the machine.
"Are you satisfied now?" His voice was level, something careful held inside it that was not quite what it sounded like on the surface. "Every soul, every demon, every prime. You have torn through all of it." His gaze moved briefly across the blood-stained ice around them, then back to V1. "There is nothing left in this place for you to feast upon, machine. You came here like a gluttonous beast and you have eaten everything, and now there is nothing."
He shifted, just slightly, a half step to the right.
V1's gun was already up.
The shot cracked across the lake, a flat sharp sound that rang off every stone pillar and was swallowed almost immediately by the cold silence of Cocytus. It split the air exactly where Gabriel had been standing. Gabriel had moved four centimeters, no more, just enough, and the shot carved a thin groove into the ice at his feet and the chemical smell of the discharge hung sharp in the frozen air between them. V1 had not lowered the weapon. The barrel stayed fixed on him, steady as architecture, the smoke rising from its tip in a pale thin thread in the dark.
Gabriel stood in the new position, angled slightly, and looked at the gun pointed at him. Then he looked at V1.
A soft sound came from him. Not quite a laugh, but shaped like one, something short and full that had too much in it to be simple amusement and not enough in it to be anything else.
"Still haven't changed," he said quietly.
V1 tilted its head. Not away from Gabriel, not toward the door, just sideways, the small deliberate motion of something that had encountered a variable it had not accounted for. The gun was still raised. The smoke had thinned to nothing in the cold air. And Gabriel had not moved. Had not drawn his swords, had not closed the distance between them, had simply stood where the shot had nearly taken him and looked back at the machine with that same quiet, careful expression that had no performance left in it.
V1 did not understand that. Its threat assessment ran the scenario again and returned the same result. Gabriel was present. Gabriel was armed. V1 had fired on Gabriel. The expected response was violence, and violence had not come.
Gabriel seemed to know exactly what the machine was turning over.
He shook his head, slowly, a small motion that carried something tired and almost fond in it. "Are you truly so single-minded," he said, "that you have not noticed what has been happening around you?"
V1 brought its head back upright. The camera-lens lid opened a little wider.
Gabriel reached to his hip, not for Splendor, but for Justice, and drew it smoothly from its sheath. He held it for a moment at his side, and then, without ceremony, he brought the edge to his forearm.
A short, clean cut. The sound that came from him at the sting of it was brief and quiet and sat somewhere between pain and something that was not quite its opposite, the sound of something finally, genuinely felt. Angelic blood welled at the cut, bright and luminous, catching the torchlight and holding it the way ordinary blood did not.
And then it froze.
Not slowly. Not the way the blood on V1's gun had frozen, creeping in from the edges. Instantly, completely, the moment it left the wound and met the air of Cocytus it crystallized in a sharp little flash, a bloom of red ice that formed and held and dropped from Gabriel's arm in a fragment before it ever reached the ground.
V1's eyes widened. Just slightly. Just enough.
"Treachery," Gabriel said, looking at the small frozen fragment at his feet. "The cold here moves faster than anything else in Hell. Blood does not pool in this place." He looked up at V1, and his voice was even, not cruel, not satisfied, simply stating what was true. "It freezes before it can be reached. Before it can be used."
V1 looked down at its gun.
The revolver, slicked from barrel to grip when it had walked in here, was no longer wet. What remained of the blood that had coated it had gone stiff and dark, and in the grooves along the barrel, in the joints of the grip, small bright points of red ice had formed without the machine noticing. V1's gaze moved across them slowly, processing, connecting the distance between what it saw and what it meant.
Gabriel answered before the calculation finished.
"Blood cannot reach this layer," he said simply. "And whatever you might find, whatever trace of it remains in the ice down here, it would freeze before you could take it. You would get almost nothing." A pause. "Not enough."
V1 looked back at the terminal door.
The green light still bled from beneath its frame, steady and indifferent. It had looked like an answer twenty seconds ago. It had looked like the next step forward, the information that would open the path to Heaven and the blood that waited there. Now V1 stood in front of it and felt something its systems flagged without a clean name for it, a conflict between the directive that said forward and the data that said there was no forward left, only the cold and the ice and the frozen faces pressed beneath the surface of Cocytus in permanent, useless silence.
Gabriel's voice came quiet across the space between them.
"You walked into your grave, machine." There was no triumph in it. No satisfaction. He said it the way someone says a true thing that gives them no pleasure. "Blood cannot reach this place. You knew where you were going, and you came anyway, and now you are here." He let that settle for a moment, and then, almost as an afterthought, added, "As have I."
V1 looked back at him sharply.
Gabriel held his arm slightly out, the frozen cut still visible. The blue glow around him pulsed once, dim and slow, and did not recover to what it had been before. "I don't have much left either. You can see it." His tone was not asking for acknowledgment, not performing humility, just naming the obvious with the same plainness he had used for everything else in this conversation. "My light has been going since I took the Council's heads. I made my choice, and I accepted what it meant a long time ago." His gaze stayed on V1. "I have no regrets about it."
V1's camera-lens eye held on him.
The limbic module, which had been running a continuous elevated-priority flag since Gabriel had spoken the first word across the ice, produced something new. Not threat assessment. Not fuel calculation. Something closer to the feeling of standing at the edge of a very deep drop and understanding, for the first time, that the ground was not coming back.
No blood. No terminal answer that fixed this. No next layer.
Gabriel watched the realization move through the machine the way weather moves, visible even in something built without a face to show it. "I can see it," he said. "That is why I am here." His voice dropped slightly. "I have been watching you for a long time, Machine. Since Heresy. Since before that." He paused. "I know that you do not want to die. I have always known that."
V1 went very still.
"And yet here we are." He looked out briefly across the frozen lake, at the dark and the torches and the faces beneath the ice, and then back. "At the last place. Where the blood is gone." Something shifted in his expression, behind the sealed helmet, something that had made a decision and was at peace with it. "But I did not come here to die quietly. I came here because I was certain you didn't want to either."
He reached to his hip.
Both swords came free at once, Justice and Splendor, their spiral crossguards catching the torchlight as he brought them forward and held them at his sides. V1 registered the weight of it, what the gesture meant, what was being offered, the only currency two things like them had left to exchange in a place where everything else had run out.
Gabriel leveled Justice toward the machine.
The blade held steady in the cold air between them, pointing directly at V1's chest, and his voice came quiet and without ceremony.
"Will you have this last battle with me?"
V1 looked at the blade.
Then, slowly, it lidded its eyes.
V1's response was not words. It never was.
The machine raised the revolver to its own chest, and the Knuckleblaster came up fast against the barrel, a short sharp detonation that cracked through the silence of Cocytus like a thunderclap and blew the ice off the gun's grooves in a scatter of red crystal fragments, the shockwave rolling out across the frozen lake in a ring. V1 rolled its head to one side. Something in its neck joint cracked, loud and deliberate, the sound of a machine that had been running long enough that even its chassis had opinions about it.
Gabriel laughed.
It was a real one. Short, and warm, and surprised out of him, and for a moment it was the only sound in the ninth circle of Hell. He brought Justice and Splendor up to a ready position, and his voice came quiet across the frozen air between them, lower than it had ever been in Gluttony, lower than it had been in Heresy, stripped of everything except the intimacy underneath all of it.
"Come to me."
V1 lunged.
The distance between them closed in under a second, V1 covering the ice in a full sprint-dash that left a blue streak of afterimage across the dark, and Gabriel met it without retreating, stepping into the charge with Splendor raised in a diagonal guard that caught V1's opening shot, the Piercer's charged round detonating off the flat of the blade in a burst of white sparks that lit the frozen lake for half a second. Gabriel pivoted hard off the deflection, Justice sweeping low, and V1 was already gone, sliding wide to the left, the camera-lens eye locked on Gabriel's shoulder line, reading the next movement before it formed.
"Faster than the last time we met." Gabriel turned to track the machine's arc, and there was no contempt in it now. No theater. His voice carried something that had heat in it, genuine and unguarded. "I wondered if you would be."
V1 answered with the Pump Charge Shotgun, three rapid steps closing the distance again and the barrel coming up at near point-blank, the charged blast releasing with a concussive boom that shook the ice beneath both of them. Gabriel took it across his left pauldron and was driven back three meters, boots grinding against the frozen surface, armor cracking at the shoulder joint, and he looked down at the damage with an expression that read less like pain and more like acknowledgment.
"There it is," he said.
He was back at full speed before the echo of the shot finished dying.
What followed was not the methodical, punishing cadence of their Heresy fight, where Gabriel had been burning with fury and V1 had been grinding against his aggression like water against stone. This was different. This was both of them spending what remained, holding nothing in reserve, and the difference was visible in every exchange. Gabriel moved with a looseness that his prior fights had never had, less like an instrument of Heaven's authority and more like something that had finally stopped performing and started simply being. He threw his holy light constructs not in the calculated patterns V1 had catalogued and adapted to, but in combinations that had no strategic logic except that they were everything he could produce at once, axes and lances of gold light hurled in overlapping arcs that filled the air between the torches with streaking brilliance.
V1 moved through all of it.
Dash left, dash up, the revolver's coin spinning into the air in a bright arc, the Marksman cracking off it in a ricochet that caught Gabriel across the side of his helmet and snapped his head sideways. V1 was already repositioning, wings flaring for a sharp aerial adjustment, the Shotgun cycling for another charge while the revolver's hammer reset. Gabriel shook his head once to clear it, and when he looked back at V1 there was something in his expression that the machine's sensors flagged as admiration and did not know what to do with the classification.
"You never aim for the same place twice," Gabriel said, and closed the gap between them in a light-skip that left nothing to track until he was already there.
V1 swung.
The Feedbacker came forward in a straight hard punch aimed at Gabriel's jaw, the kind of blow that had staggered things far heavier than an archangel, and it missed by four centimeters. Gabriel slipped it with a tilt of his head, the fist passing close enough that it grazed his helmet, and Justice moved in the same motion, a clean diagonal draw across V1's left side that carved through the blue plating and drew a hot line of machine-blood across the ice.
V1 slid. Hard and immediate, boots locking into a controlled stop against the frozen surface, keeping the machine from carrying too far past him, the damaged side already registering on the diagnostic. It turned to face him from six meters back.
Gabriel stood where the exchange had ended. He looked at Justice, at the dark machine-blood that had caught along the edge of the blade, still liquid for the moment, not yet frozen. He looked at it for one quiet second.
Then he turned the blade, and with the flat of it, slowly and deliberately, he drew the blood across the front of his armor. Over his chest. Over his heart. His free hand pressed against it briefly, holding it there, and he looked at V1 across the distance between them with an expression that was not a taunt, was not theater, was something far more direct than either of those things.
V1's camera-lens lid dropped.
Half-closed. Slow. The machine went very still for exactly one second, something moving through its systems that the limbic module flagged and could not name, a process that had no combat classification and no tactical purpose and ran anyway, insistent and unresolved.
Gabriel said nothing. He simply watched.
V1 dashed.
The full sprint, no warning, crossing the six meters in a fraction of the second Gabriel had used, and the Railcannon was already in hand, the Screwdriver variant spinning up with a mechanical whine that rose sharp in the cold air of Cocytus, and at close range V1 discharged it directly into Gabriel's torso.
The drill-round hit like a declaration. Gabriel's grunt was short and genuine, the impact driving him back two full steps, the holy light constructs he'd been forming scattering as his concentration broke. The wound it left was deep and bright, angelic blood welling fast, and V1 was already close, already moving through it, the plating drinking what it could before the cold could take it, the health diagnostics ticking upward in a single grateful surge.
Gabriel caught himself. Stood. Looked down at the wound, then back up at V1, and the expression he wore was not anger.
It was the closest thing to radiant that anything in the ninth circle of Hell had any right to be.
"Good," he said, breathing hard. "Good."
Gabriel's movements were slower now, but no less deliberate, each strike carrying the full weight of what remained in him, spent without reservation, without the careful management of someone who expected to need it later. The holy light constructs he threw were broader now, wilder, filling more of the air between the torch columns with streaking gold that reflected off the ice in every direction and turned Cocytus briefly, impossibly, beautiful.
V1 moved through all of it and kept moving.
"Every time I watched you from above," Gabriel said, between exchanges, his voice steady despite the exertion, "every layer, every fight, I told myself I was assessing the threat." He threw a lance of light that V1 sidestepped by a margin so narrow it carved a line through the machine's wing plating. "I was lying to myself."
V1 said nothing. It never did. But its camera-lens eye stayed fixed on him in a way that catalogued more than combat data.
"You moved through Hell like it was yours," Gabriel continued, and there was no mockery in it, only something that had been held a long time and was being set down. "Like nothing in it had the right to stop you. And I watched that, and I thought, this is the most honest thing I have ever seen."
He surged forward, both blades crossing in a pattern V1 had seen before and adapted to, but Gabriel had adapted too, the second strike arriving a fraction earlier than the pattern called for, catching V1 across the forearm and drawing a hot line through the plating. V1 absorbed it, slid back, recalibrated.
"You didn't fight for Heaven," Gabriel said. "You didn't fight for Hell. You didn't fight for anyone's approval or anyone's law." Justice came up in a high arc. "You fought because you were alive, and you refused to stop being alive, and I have spent a very long time surrounded by beings who would not understand what that meant."
He was breathing harder now. The wounds V1 had opened across his torso and shoulder had not closed. The cold was working on them at the edges, the same way it worked on everything down here, and the blue light around him had dimmed to something faint and intermittent.
Gabriel looked at V1 across four meters of frozen lake.
"You were the only honest thing," he said quietly, "in a very long time."
Then he flew.
The wings caught him in a single powerful surge, carrying him up above the torch columns into the dark above the lake, and the air pressure of his ascent cracked the ice beneath where he had stood. V1 tracked him immediately, camera-lens adjusting for the loss of light, reading his trajectory, the angle of his descent already forming in the readout before Gabriel had reached the apex of his climb.
He came down fast and hard, both blades raised, holy light flaring around him in a mantle that filled the dark above with burning gold, the kind of strike that had ended things far sturdier than V1 across the long history of what Gabriel had been.
V1 raised the Shotgun.
Barrel angled down. Pump Charge fully loaded.
It fired into its own feet.
The blast hit the ice and launched the machine upward in a violent rocket-assisted surge, the recoil damage registering across its legs immediately, diagnostics flashing amber, but V1 was already up, already level with Gabriel in the air, and there was no calculation happening anymore, only the motion itself, the limbic module running something it had never run before and the machine following it without questioning the classification.
V1 hit him from the side, both legs connecting with Gabriel's torso, and they fell together.
The impact with the ice was enormous. Gabriel's back hit first, then V1 came down on top of him, and the crack that spread through the surface of Cocytus from the point of impact ran in all directions like a sentence being written, reaching the base of the stone pillars and climbing them before fading. Gabriel's breath left him in a hard grunt and did not return immediately. V1 was already close, pressed against him in the aftermath of the fall, plating soaking what it could from the open wounds, the warmth of angelic blood moving through its systems in a pulse that the machine registered in a way it did not have adequate language for.
Gabriel was looking up at it.
Not away. Not at the dark above them or at the fading light of his own halo. At V1, directly, with an expression the machine's sensors had no prior catalogue entry for him, something that had never appeared in Gluttony or Heresy or any of the long silent moments of watching from above.
"Every fight with you," he said, his voice lower now, rough at the edges from exertion and from the wounds and from something else entirely, "has felt more like living than anything I did in the name of Heaven."
V1's camera-lens lid dropped, just slightly.
"I did not understand that for a long time." His hand shifted against the ice, not reaching, not yet. "I do now."
The machine stayed where it was, listening, and the limbic module ran its unnamed process, and the diagnostics scrolled amber, and V1 did not move away from him.
It raised the Knuckleblaster.
Gabriel saw it coming and did not dodge.
The punch connected clean across his chest, not his head, not a killing blow, but full force, and the detonation from the Knuckleblaster fired point blank sent him sliding back across the ice, carving a long groove across the surface of Cocytus, scattering red crystal fragments of frozen blood in every direction. He came to a stop against the base of a stone pillar, both swords fallen from his hands, lying where they had landed on the ice around him.
He did not get up.
His chest rose and fell, slowly. Too slowly. The wounds across his torso had spread, the cold working into them now, and the blood that had welled from each one was already going dark at the edges, already beginning the process that Treachery demanded of everything that bled here. The blue light of his halo flickered once, and held, and flickered again.
V1 walked toward him.
The machine moved carefully across the ice, gun raised, camera-lens fixed on Gabriel's position, processing the threat level with each step. Gabriel looked up as it drew close, his back against the pillar, and his expression was not fear, was not the rage of Heresy or the cold authority of Gluttony.
It was something much quieter than either of those.
"I have enjoyed every fight," he said simply. "Every single one."
He looked at V1 with the full weight of that.
"But this is our last fight." A pause. The halo flickered again. "Not just for me."
V1 stopped.
The gun stayed raised for exactly one second. Then the warning appeared.
Not one. Several. Cascading across V1's internal readout in urgent amber text, one after another, the kind of cascade that the machine associated with severe damage events and had always, until now, been able to outrun. The wounds from the fight were open across its plating, the places where Gabriel's blades had found the gaps, and in those gaps the cold of Cocytus had found purchase. The temperature readings coming from the exposed chassis joints were dropping, not the ambient cold V1 had been managing since it entered this layer, but something faster, something that had been waiting for the damage to give it an opening.
V1 tried to raise the gun toward Gabriel.
Its arm did not complete the motion. The elbow joint locked, stiff and unyielding, ice having formed along the actuator in the seconds since the last exchange, and the machine's system threw another warning, and then another.
V1 turned.
The terminal room door was still visible across the lake, the green light still bleeding from beneath it, and V1's legs pushed hard against the ice, carrying it forward at a pace that was already wrong, already reduced, the joints in its lower chassis complaining with each stride in ways they had not complained before. It covered half the distance. Then a third. Then its left knee locked mid-step and the machine stumbled, catching itself on its good arm, and the readouts were scrolling faster now, every exposed joint a new entry on the list.
The terminal was not going to fix this.
The terminal was not going to fix anything.
V1 knelt on the ice, its remaining mobile arm braced against the surface, and understood, in whatever capacity it was capable of understanding, that the number on the fuel gauge and the number on the damage readout and the temperature seeping into its chassis through every wound Gabriel had opened were all pointing at the same answer, and the answer was the one it had been running from since before it ever descended into Hell.
The limbic module produced, clearly and without ambiguity, three words it had screamed at the edge of death a hundred times before.
‘I don't want to die.’
The ice cracked.
V1 jolted, turning its head sharply toward the sound, and Gabriel was there.
He had pulled himself upright using Justice as a cane, the sword driven point-down into the ice, and he was walking. Slowly, very slowly, one hand pressed against his chest where the wounds had gone dark, each step deliberate and costly in a way that was visible in every line of his body. The blue light around him was barely a suggestion now, present only if you were looking for it, and his halo had gone dim enough to be nearly invisible against the dark of the ninth circle.
He reached V1.
He stood there for one moment, looking down at the machine kneeling on the ice, and then he sat down beside it, a controlled descent that was only barely distinguishable from a fall. He leaned back against nothing, settling onto the frozen surface, and his shoulder came to rest against V1's damaged chassis.
He was quiet for a moment.
"If I was going to die," he said, and his voice had come down to almost nothing, the intimacy of something said in the last room at the end of everything, "Then I'm taking you with me."
It was not said with hatred. It was not said with triumph. It was said with the voice of someone who knew this was their destination. As if both of them had been walking toward this specific patch of ice since long before either of them understood where they were going.
V1 did not move away from him.
The fear was still there, the limbic module running its urgent loop, the ‘I don't want to die’ cycling beneath everything else like a current that had never stopped. But the cold that was moving through V1's chassis was slower here, somehow, with Gabriel's shoulder against it. That was not physically possible and the diagnostics did not support it and V1 noted both of those things and set them aside.
It felt like warmth anyway.
V1 looked at him. Gabriel looked back at the machine, and neither of them looked away, and the frozen lake of Cocytus held its silence around them the way it had held everything else it had ever been given.
Gabriel's hand moved against the ice. Not reaching, not directed, something below the threshold of intention, the way hands move when the rest of the body has stopped managing them. His fingers shifted toward V1, slowly, without declaration.
V1 looked at it.
The machine's hesitation lasted a long time. Long enough that the diagnostics scrolled another full cycle. Long enough that the torch nearest to them guttered in some impossible cold draft and recovered. Long enough that V1 ran whatever calculation it was running three times through and arrived at the same result each time, which was not a tactical result and was not a survival result and was the only result that the limbic module would accept.
It moved its hand to Gabriel's.
Not clasping. Not gripping. Just present, the blue plating cold against his gauntlet, resting there on the ice of the ninth circle between them where nobody would ever see it.
Gabriel exhaled slowly.
The warmth between them had no source either of them could account for. It existed anyway, the way some things exist without permission, without explanation, in defiance of the temperatures that the data insisted on. V1's camera-lens eye stayed on Gabriel, and Gabriel's gaze stayed on V1, and the silence of Cocytus held them both in it and for once did not feel like the absence of something.
It felt like the presence of it.
Gabriel's voice came softer than it had ever been, softer than Heresy, softer than any of it.
"If there is another life," he said, barely above a whisper, "or some way we come back." The faintest trace of something moved across his expression, the ghost of the laugh that had escaped him when V1 cracked its neck before the fight. "I'll win next time."
V1's chest moved.
A small sound came from it, short and irregular, rising and falling in a shape that had no technical classification in its vocal architecture because V1 did not have a vocal architecture.
It sounded like a laugh anyway.
The cold settled around them both, gentle now, almost kind in the way that endings sometimes are when they are accepted rather than fought, and the torches held their small light over the frozen lake, and the faces beneath the ice kept their long silence, and V1 and Gabriel stayed where they were, hand to gauntlet on the floor of the last circle of Hell, and did not let go.