“You aren’t.”
He doesn’t believe that. “At the Institute, I’d wake up in the morning. And I think I was still in my dreams. Then I’d feel the cold. And I’d slowly start remembering where I was, and there’s dirt and blood under my nails. And all I want to do was go back to sleep. To be warm. But I knew I had to get up and face a world that didn’t give a shit.” He grimaces. “That’s how I feel every morning now. I’m afraid all the time. I don’t want to lose anyone. I don’t want to let them down.”
“You haven’t,” I say. “If anything, I let you down.” He tries to interrupt me. “You were right. We both know it. It’s my fault your father ’s dead. It’s my fault that whole night happened.”
“Was still a shit thing of me to say.” He raps his knuckles on the ground. “I’m always saying shit things.”
“I’m glad you said it.”
“Why?”
“Because we’ve both forgotten we didn’t get here on our own. You and I should be able to say anything to each other. That’s how this works. It’s how we work. We don’t walk on eggshells. We talk to each other. Even if we say shit that’s hard to hear.” I see how alone he feels. How much weight he carried. It’s how I felt when Cassius stabbed me and left me for dead at the Institute. He needs to share the weight. I don’t know how else to tell him that. This stubbornness, this intransigence, looks insane from the outside, but inside he felt just as I did when Roque questioned me.
“Do you know why I helped you at the Institute when you and Cassius were gonna drown in that loch?” he asks. “It’s cause of how they look at you. It wasn’t like I thought you were a good primus.
You were as smart as a bag of wet farts. But I saw them. Pebble. Clown. Quinn….Roque.” He almost trips over that last name. “I’d watch you at your fires in the gulches when Titus was in the castle. Saw you teach Lea how to cut a goat’s throat even when she was afraid to do it. I wanted to do that too. To join.”
“Why didn’t you?”
He shrugs. “Was afraid you wouldn’t want me.”
“They look at you that way now,” I say. “Don’t you see that?”
He snorts. “Nah, they don’t. The whole time, I tried to be you. Tried to be Pops. Didn’t work. I could tell everyone just wished it was me that the Jackal captured. Not you.”
“You know that’s not true.”
“It is,” he says intensely, leaning forward. “You’re better than I am. I saw you. When you looked down at Tinos. Saw your eyes. The love in them. The urge to protect those people. I tried feeling it.
But every time I looked down at the refugees, I just hated them. For being weak. For hurting each other. For being stupid and not knowing what we’ve gone through to help them.” He swallows and picks at the cuticles of his stubby fingers. “I know it’s nasty, but it’s what it is.”
He seems so vulnerable here in this hall, the rage taken out of us from the fight. He’s not looking for a lecture. Leadership has worn him down, alienated him from even his Howlers. Right now he’s
looking to feel like he’s not like Quicksilver or the Jackal or any of the Golds we fight against. He’s mistakenly assumed I’m something better than he is. And part of that is my fault.
“I hate them too,” I say.
He shakes his head. “Don’t…”
“I do. At least, I hate that they remind me of what I was, or could have been. Shit, I was a little idiot.
You would have hated me. I was comfortable and arrogant and selfish on my knees. I liked being blind to everything because I was in love. And I thought for some reason that living for love was the most valiant thing in all the worlds. Even made Eo into something in my head that she wasn’t.
Romanticized her and the life we had—probably because I saw my father die for some cause. And I
saw all he left behind, so I tried to cling to the life he abandoned.”
I trace the lines on my palm.
“It makes me feel small to think I started doing all this for her. She was everything to me, but I was just a piece of her life. When the Jackal had me, that’s all I could think about. That I wasn’t enough.
That our child wasn’t enough. Part of me hates her for that. She didn’t know all this would happen, wasn’t even aware that the worlds had been terraformed. All she could have known was that she was
making a point to the couple thousand people in Lykos. And was that worth dying for? Was that worth killing a child for?”
I gesture down the hall. “Now all these people think she was divine or something. A perfect martyr.
But she was just a girl. And she was brave, but she was stupid and selfish and selfless and romantic; but she died before she could ever be more. Think how much she could have done with her life.