The Light Will Find Its Way

Chapter II: The Immortal

Hugo's "master plan" is a somewhat loose one. His first mission is to find his way to the Speaker without being seen. Then, when the Young Wolf inevitably comes in with guns blazing and everyone is preoccupied, he will snatch his partner up and make a run for it.

He sets a timer on his watch for the amount of time until he is out of time and the Immortal is on its way to crash into the mountains outside of the city. He has already memorized the checkpoints, the timestamps from recorded data.

The moment the Young Wolf steps onto the ship. The moment Ghaul confronts them. The moment he dies.

Squeezing through ventilation shafts, scurrying down maintenance hatches, and crawling along catwalks throughout the entirety of The Immortal makes Hugo feel like an oversized field mouse trying to navigate a labyrinth. Almost immediately, he has to doff his heavy armor in the empty hold where the portal had opened.

As he removes the last of his sabatons, it occurs to him for a moment just how fucked he is without his armor or his Ghost for backup.

He is on a mission, he tells himself; he can ruminate over the dangers of the operation later. He pushes the thoughts to the back of his mind and pulls out a small data pad, flipping through files until he finds the blueprints from Rahool.

Navigating is a lot harder than he had anticipated, and to his dismay, he is still slithering through the ventilation system without a clear idea of where to go when his watch beeps a two-hour warning.

He is running out of time.

---

Then at last, voices.

"You would know this if you hadn't been wasting your time communing with the machine and the creature who claims to speak with it," a Cabal is saying.

Hugo claws at the sides of the duct, trying to propel himself faster. He is so singularly focused, he doesn't feel several of his nails break and tear off as his fingers collide with the back of the grate. His breath catches in his throat when he pauses for a moment to peer into the room. The Cabal are arguing; a large white one speaking to a much smaller one in red.

In that moment, the enemies seem unimportant as his eyes lock on the contraption that extends from the ceiling and the man who hangs helplessly from it by all four limbs like a human-sized X. His hands and feet are enclosed in what Hugo can only assume are locks, and steam seems to rise from his body underneath the white, unforgiving light.

As a sudden wave of emotion crashes over him, the Titan feels icy tendrils of anger claw at his throat and stomach and his body temperature plummets. Frost forms on the ductwork where his bare hands meet metal as he clenches his jaw and squeezes his eyes shut.

"Not now. Please not now," he whispers to himself.

"Tell me, Speaker," Ghaul rumbles, and Hugo's eyes snap back open at the mention of his partner.

"What more does the Traveler want of me?"

"It wants you to fuck off back to whatever disgusting cesspit you crawled out of," the Titan snarls quietly. He looks back at his watch. Any minute now.

"Ghaul," the Speaker says softly, " I speak... for... the Traveler. I never said it spoke to me."

Hugo shudders.

The voice that came to him in dreams and haunted his nightmares, the voice that spoke to him from empty corners and ghostly shadows. The voice he had begun to think he would never hear again.