Had Gabriel thought he was exhausted before? Forget that. This was exhaustion. It was beyond exhaustion. He trudged along mechanically without really knowing where it was he was going, as long as he had the sound of someone else's footsteps to follow. Half the time his eyes were closed behind his goggles, and it wasn't always because the light hurt his eyes. (Even though it still did.)

Part of him wished he hadn't pretended to his brothers that he was more recovered than he was, but Aziraphale had seemed on the verge of hovering and Balthazar ... well, the sort-of concern the hedonistic angel had been showing had been the equivalent of Aziraphale's clearly restrained urge to be a mother hen. Either way Gabriel had given in to the desire to pretend it was all okay--just like he'd been back in Heaven, reassuring the lower ranks that, yes, Michael was fine, just concentrating on this or that and not actually angry.

His head was throbbing again, not that it had ever really stopped. That, also, made it impossible to think. So he just didn't. It was this weird kind of haziness, this state of being so tired and pained beyond words that he was actually kind of used to it now. At this point it was only the knowledge that he'd die out here, and the fact he was too proud to just up and kill himself like that, that was keeping him upright.

All of which meant he followed Re-l's tracks right to the rock and was going to run into it if she didn't say something.