“So it may as well be you?”
“Better me than someone who doesn’t know how,” said Potash. “I fought that bastard Rack to a standstill—I almost had him—where anyone else would have died. Everyone else did die. I followed him through a cellar so messed up I can’t even describe it to you, and I’ll have to live with what I saw down there for the rest of my life—and anyone else would go mad even trying to.”
“And you haven’t?” I asked, glancing down at the ashy remains.
“Elijah needed to die,” Potash insisted. “They all do.”
“Why?”
“Do you think he’s the traitor?” asked Nathan.
I shook my head. “No.”
“Then why are you asking him all these questions?” asked Brooke.
“Because I want to know!” I yelled. “I want to know what he’s doing here—I want to know what I’m doing here! Is any of this wrong or right? Have I been wasting my time trying to be the good guy, when good and bad don’t even make sense anymore? Elijah was one of the best men I ever met, and this guy just cut his head off, and he’ll probably win a medal for it and I want to know why! Why do our choices even matter if someone can just decide what right and wrong mean? Why did he have to die if this is all just arbitrary?”
“You’re asking why a Withered had to die?” Potash asked. “Do you even hear yourself?”
“What if he wasn’t called a ‘Withered’?” I asked. “What if he was ‘Cursed’?”
“The word doesn’t change what he was,” said Potash.
“What he was was a man,” I said. “He was a driver, and a mechanic, and a regular visitor in a rest home, and yes he made a mistake and yes he was dangerous, but he spent more time trying to be good than any of us have ever spent trying to be anything.”
Potash looked at me, the seconds ticking by, until at last he shook his head. “Making these decisions is the hardest part of our job, but we still have to do it. Killing isn’t just pulling a trigger or swinging a blade—it’s making a choice about who deserves to live and who deserves to die.”
“Elijah deserved to live.”
“That decision will hurt me for the rest of my life,” said Potash, “but now I’m the only one it will ever hurt. He won’t drain another mind, and he won’t make another Merrill Evans, and he won’t endanger another Rose Chapman. The FBI won’t spend any more time or money hunting him down and confining him, which gives them more time and money for the bigger threats, which gives the rest of the world fewer threats to worry about. The world is better off without Elijah Sexton in it.”
“And you?” I asked. “Would it be better off without you in it?”
“Everybody take it easy,” said Nathan, stepping closer to Potash. “Nobody’s going to start anything crazy, or do anything stupid, or—” His hand came up behind Potash’s back, and he shot him through the head.
My ears rang again.
“No!” screamed Brooke.
I jumped back, my eyes wide, my mind reeling. Nathan looked at me and rolled his eyes.
“What, like you weren’t planning to do the same thing?”
“He was…” I didn’t even have the words. I was used to violence, to death and pain and terror, but this was too much, and too random. Ostler and Diana, and now Elijah and Potash—it was all so senseless. “Why?” I demanded again. I tried to follow it up with another question, something biting and insightful, but all I could manage was another “Why?”
“Because he was dangerous,” said Nathan. “He was a wild card we couldn’t predict or control, and he could have outfought all of us put together.”
“But we didn’t need to fight him at all.”
He gestured at me with his pistol. “Then what were you planning to do with that knife?”
I looked down at it, clasped so tight in my hand my fingers were as white as bone. “I don’t know,” I said, closing my eyes. “I don’t know what I was going to do, or what I wanted to do, or anything else. But I didn’t want to kill him.”
“Yes, you did.”
“But I knew it was wrong!” I shouted.
“No, you didn’t.” Nathan shook his head. “You can’t have it both ways: you just spent five minutes telling the guy he was a dangerous psychopath and the world would be better off without him, and now you’re freaking out because you weren’t the one to do it? Like you’re the world’s sole arbiter of justice?”
“That’s not what I mean,” I said.