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I want to lend it to those who live as I once lived, cut off from themselves, from one another, from hope. To those who have been hunted, taken, preyed upon, not only by systems that have failed them, but by the lies repeated so often they sound like truth: that they are alone, that no one will come, that no one would stand for them if they asked.

I fear this lie, and this isolation, is the root cause of our people’s suffrage.

I may never know the names of the people I help. I may never meet them, never hear their voices, never see what becomes of them after the moment passes, but I hope that whatever I do after tonight reaches them. I hope it touches their lives like the people I call family have touched mine.

There is honour in wanting to protect them. Not abstractly. Not from a distance polished into nobility. But truly, fiercely, because I know what it is to stand where they stand. Because I know how easily a person can be convinced they are forsaken.

I was one of them once.

I will never be one of them again.

—We Endure. We Prevail.

R.

CHAPTER THIRTY

ROBERT

Ifind him outside with the sea wind at his front, and the water below restless in a way that makes it seem almost aware of him. The turf beneath my boots is damp enough to slip on, and the cliff’s edge is less a line than a dark uncertainty.

The others have gone to whatever scraps of sleep, silence, or solace they can manage after what happened in that room, and I suppose there’s some comfort to be found in not facing such a night alone.

I can’t bear my own company right now. Every time I shut my eyes, I see that green light glaring out of the basalt and taking root in me, and I can’t shake the feeling that it claimed more of me than it did the others. That, more than anything, drove me out here.

I need answers.

Mannie stands at the cliff’s edge, coat moving faintly in the wind, his hands clasped behind him.

“I wondered how long it would take you,” he says.

I’m briefly tempted to ask how he knew it would be me, but at this point Mannie’s habit of being two steps ahead no longer feels worth remarking on.

I let out a breath through my nose. “You say that as though you knew I’d follow you out here.”

“No,” he says. “I merely observed you were not finished with the discussion, as the others were.” He lets the wind fill the silence a moment. “You have a rather loud mind.”

“That is a remarkably polished way of saying I’d worry the life out of myself.”

“It is a truthful one.”

I come to stand beside him, though not too near. Below us, the water casts itself against the rocks in long bursts of white, then vanishes again into the black.

Clouds move fitfully over the moon, and the light keeps shifting across him—silvering one side of his face, then leaving him nearly swallowed again.

Then, because I have no intention of starting with what I actually came here to ask, I say, “There’s something oddly cruel in the habit the world seems to have of separating men from the women they love.”

He turns his head and looks at me fully. “Are you familiar with our mythology, Robert?”

The question catches me off guard.

“As well as I can, given what Trinity saw fit to make available,” I answer.

Mannie turns his gaze back out to sea. “You may know little of my story, but if I had the chance to walk it again, there is much I would not do as I once did.”

The wind tugs at his coat, but he stands as though he has long since made peace with rough weather.

“One of them would have been taking my wife and children farther from danger before danger ever had the chance to close its hand around them.”