The descent from the Pichincha was slower than the climb, weighed down by the heavy silence of a war that had finally ended and the literal grit of emerald dust clinging to our skin. The morning sun in Quito was a blinding, pale gold that didn't warm the air so much as it exposed the wreckage we were leaving behind. Behind us, the "Observatory" was a tomb of shattered glass; ahead of us, the city lay spread out like a circuit board waiting for a new power source.
Roman walked beside me, his hand never leaving the small of my back. He didn't look like a man who had just lost a forty-million-dollar fortune. He looked like a man who had finally cleared his ledger of every debt that didn't involve me. Viktor and the local team followed at a distance, dragging a bound and gagged Marcello throu
