Vale didn't answer right away. The hills rolled past, gold going amber as the sun dropped lower, and the Charger hummed underneath us like a living thing.
"I want," he said finally, "the next generation to be strong enough that I get to stop." He said it so quietly I almost missed it under the engine. "That's the secret nobody tells you about being the strongest. You don't get to rest. You don't get to be tired. Every gate that goes wrong, every Void event, every thing that crawls out of the Under too big for the current generation to handle, it lands on the six of us who can actually do something about it, and the six of us are getting older and slower and there's nobody coming up behind us fast enough to matter."
His jaw worked.
