Cavalon nodded slowly, his pale skin gone gray in the dull light. “That would have been right before she went missing. I—uh, the boy was eleven. He doesn’t remember it that well.”
The solemn look in his eye told her that wasn’t the entire truth. If anything, he’d tried not to remember it. But Adequin certainly did. It’d been one of the biggest news stories around the time she enlisted, and a point of bitter contention between the Allied Monarchies and the Legion for many years after.
“She was a geneticist, right?” Adequin asked.
Cavalon’s lips twitched with a weak, fleeting smile. “Aren’t we all?”
“Do you have any idea what happened to her?”
He shook his head, and his voice came out a dull croak. “No.”
Adequin chewed the inside of her cheek, trying to decide whether she could believe that. People went missing all the time, all across the galaxy. But not high-ranking members of the royal families. In fact, she couldn’t recall another instance in modern history. Surely he had some notion of what’d happened.
But her doubt melted away when she looked back over to Cavalon, shoulders stiff as he slouched against the wall beside her. He stared down with a doleful glower as he wrung his hands. Someone, somewhere, may have known what happened to Corinne Mercer. But her grandson clearly didn’t.
“Sorry,” Adequin said quietly. “I didn’t mean to derail the story.”
“It’s okay.” Cavalon rubbed his eyes, and some of the color seemed to return to his cheeks. “I always encourage audience participation.”
“What’s next?” she prompted.
“Right. Well, for the sake of brevity, we’ll skip over the years from sixteen on, in which the boy attended university and stayed as far, far away from the shithead and his shitheadedness as he could. Because the real fun began when the boy became second in line and was expected to return home, for good. To fall in as the shithead’s right hand.”
“Wait, second in line? What happened to the father?”
Cavalon remained silent for a few long moments. When his voice returned, it came muted and gravelly. “I was kinda hoping we could skip that part.”
A lump grew in her throat, and she swallowed. “Okay, what happened next?”
“He returned to find the shithead had made an even more epic shitshow out of the SC than the boy could have ever imagined.”
“He really didn’t notice it while he was away?”
Cavalon diverted his gaze, looking down as he picked at his fingernails. “His … uh, recreational habits … had hindered his ability to clearly see what’d been going on.”
She gave a grim nod. “I see.”
“Though honestly, it’d always been bad. Since before he even left. But he’d been inside it for so long, he hadn’t been able to see it for what it really was.”
“He couldn’t see the forest for the trees,” she offered.
His bloodshot eyes flit up to meet hers, almost startled. As if he didn’t think she’d actually been paying attention. “Right. Exactly.” He shimmied against the wall to sit up straighter. “He could see it all so much clearer—including how the shithead had managed to get away with everything he did. How flawed the whole damn system was.”
“The System Collective?”
He nodded.
“How so?”
“Well, think about it,” he began, and his voice picked up strength. “It was created seven hundred years ago by a society that’d been wracked by endless war for centuries. They’d been battle-hardened, guarded, and rightfully fearful—and the tenets of the government they built reflected that. It served a certain purpose, but that’s not what we need now.”