Page 246 of Reaper Said Mine

“I thought if I became terrible enough, no one would look away from us again.”

Skahar says nothing.

I continue because the words have been gathering for days, and if I do not speak them now, they will rot in me. “I wanted the Combine to fear every shadow in the Badlands. I wanted their children to hear my name and understand a fraction of what their fathers purchased. I wanted their executives to wake sweating. I wanted their ships to vanish from routes they stole. I wanted them to learn loss from me.”

“Reasonable desires,” Skahar says.

I look at him sharply.

His face remains grave. “Reasonable does not mean wise.”

A sound catches in my throat and turns into a bitter laugh. “You always sharpen the mercy before handing it over.”

“Dull mercy is condescension.”

Below us, the gray-skinned Reaper girl breaks her biscuit into unequal halves and gives the larger one to the human boy. He notices and tries to trade. She refuses with imperial dignity. Children at war still negotiate like kings if hunger allows it.

“My revenge failed me,” I say.

The words leave me before I can dress them in something stronger.

Skahar turns his head slowly.

I keep looking at the children because facing him would make the confession feel too much like bleeding.

“It filled me when I was empty,” I say. “It gave me a direction when grief was just a room with no doors. It made me dangerous enough to survive, clever enough to take ships, brutal enough to take Guyver. I thought that meant it worked.”

“And now?”

“Now I look at these people sleeping on market floors while Coalition fleets fly through my lanes and Alliance intervention plans multiply because I signed a treaty under fire. I look at dead children from Rekk and Brindlehook, dead workers at Dakkor, frightened colonists at Bravax, and I understand that my enemies did not fear my revenge enough to stop. They learned to use it. They turned it into weather other people have to survive.”

Skahar’s old hand tightens around the cane.

“I killed many Combine men,” I say. “Some deserved it. Some likely deserved worse. None of it brought back my parents. None of it rebuilt the home-ship. None of it saved my colony. None of it taught the powerful mercy. It only taught them how to provoke me.”

The confession leaves the corridor very quiet around us.

Skahar exhales, and the sound carries more age than irritation.

“Boy,” he says, but the word is soft this time.

“I do not know what is left if I stop hating them.”

“That is a lie.”

My eyes open.

He looks up at me with that harsh, ruined face that has steadied me through mutiny, hunger, command, arrogance, and mistakes large enough to require maps.

“You know exactly what is left,” he says. “You are afraid it is harder.”

Below us, the market shelters breathe with frightened life.

People.

Of course.

The answer has been crawling around me, coughing smoke, asking for blankets, needing corridors, reading evidence on public feeds, telling me not to chase bait, telling me the living will know better.