Marcus met me there, and Rishi immediately jumped into the seat behind Oberi. “Where are we going?” he asked.
“You’ll see,” I replied, clapping him on the back.
Marcus and I climbed into the carriage, and Oberi took off out of the palace gates.
“You want to know what your limits are, Marcus?” I asked as we wove through the streets of Ilamanthe. “Then you need to get in touch with your dark side. You need totestthose limits. You can sit around all day dreaming up imaginary scenarios and what you might do in those situations. The reality is you don’t know what you’ll actually do until the decision is right in front of you. Are you going to fight back? Are you going to run? You only get a split-second to decide.”
“Can’t I prepare myself?” he asked.
“Absolutely, and that’s what we’re going to do,” I told him. “But we’re going to start with something simple, and we’re going to see what your bad side has to say about it. From there, we can decide what limits to test next.”
I hoped he made a decision tonight, though, because we really didn’t have time to be fucking around. He needed to figure this out now, before we left for Chicago.
Marcus hesitated. “I don’t know if I have a bad side like you do, Charlie. I’m a good person who’s done bad things, but those were mistakes. What if I want to be good?”
“What if it’s good to be bad?” I asked him. “When I was torturing that guy, I wasn’t thinking about how bad I was for hurting him. I was thinking about the good that could come from it. If we don’t get answers, the Blessed Haven is fucked. Isn’t it worth hurting one guy to save the world? I don’t buy into the bullshit that the world is black and white. What if you didn’t have to worry about whether you were good or bad, only had to exist just as you are?”
“And what is that, exactly?” he wondered. “What am I?”
I tilted my head. “Well, you’re an artist, aren’t you, Marcus?”
The air shifted around us, and I could sense tall buildings rising on either side of us as we entered a narrow alleyway. Oberi nickered and came to a halt. I hopped over the side of the carriage and opened the trunk, displaying over a dozen cans of spray paint.
“You… want me to paint?” Marcus questioned.
I grabbed a can of spray paint and shook it. “Hell yeah. You want to see what your bad side looks like? Why don’t we do something bad in this abandoned alleyway?”
Marcus chuckled lightly as he hopped down from the carriage. “Painting isn’tbad. I’m not hurting anyone.”
I cocked an eyebrow. “Isn’t vandalism illegal?”
“Um… I guess?” he replied. “I suppose someone owns this building and wouldn’t appreciate me destroying their property.”
“Destruction? But I thought it was art,” I said with a smirk. I popped the top of my spray can. The canister hissed as I sprayed an X over the wall.
This looks like fun!Oberi exclaimed. He shifted into a husky and slipped out of his reins. He and Rishi approached the wet paint I’d just sprayed onto the wall. Their paws made a squishing sound as they pressed them into the wet paint, then started placing paw prints all over the wall.
“I think I get what you’re saying,” Marcus mused. “It’s bad to vandalize, but it’s good to make art. So the good thing cancels out the bad.”
“Uh, no… not exactly. More like… being bad doesn’t have to be abadthing. Maybe it’s okay to be bad.”
Marcus absorbed this for a moment. “Do you really think I can get to a place where torturing someone feels like a good thing?”
I shrugged. “You tell me. You’ve got limits that clearly I don’t have. At what point do you start to feelbad?”
I sprayed another X on the wall, but Marcus didn’t answer. “Come on,” I encouraged. “Paint something. You’ve done this a million times.”
“Yeah, on Institute walls and shit,” he said. “The Institute deserved it.”
“Bullshit. You told me your rap sheet. You have a bunch of misdemeanor charges from tagging buildings in Octavia Falls before you got to prison.”
“Yeah, but I did that to people who were assholes,” he protested. “We don’t know who owns this building, and I could really hurt their feelings.”
The building was owned by the royal family, but I didn’t tell him that. Marcus needed to get in touch with his inner villain to see how far he’d go. It was simple and harmless, but if he couldn’t spray paint a fucking building like he had a million times before, he’d never make it through the first stage of the heist.
“Who’s to judge who deserves what?” I asked. “Maybe it doesn’t matter what people deserve, and morality is merely a tool for control. People can call us bad, and so what if we are?”
I pressed the spray can into his hand. “Following the rules has never worked for you, Marcus. If you want to feel good, you need to do something bad. There are no consequences for people like us, because this world is ours for the taking. You get to decide just how bad you want to be. No one else gets to tell you what to do. It’s time to stop thinking about everyone else and what they think of you. What about Marcus’ feelings? What doesMarcuswant?”
