“Hey, take it easy,” she warned, holding up a steadying hand.
“I’m fine,” he grumbled. “In my debrief, Lugen said…”
“Like you said, he covered it up. He just … altered the details slightly for your version.”
“You mean he covered up his fucking cover-up?”
“You know how bad it was before Paxus, Griff,” she said, the inside of her mouth suddenly bone-dry. “Lugen didn’t want to keep watching people die. Recruitment had bottomed out—the last thing he wanted was another conscription.”
“You’re deifying him even more than normal, Rake,” he growled, his deep voice wavering with anger, a scowl lining his sweat-slicked forehead. The muscles in his neck wrung taut, and he tugged at his collar to loosen it. “Lugen may have had his reasons for lying,” he went on, “but don’t think for a second it’s because he cared about whether we lived or died.”
She took a dry swallow, trying to steady her racing pulse to keep her response even. “You’re right. He knew what it meant to be a soldier; it was never about our lives. But it trickles down. The population was—is—still in decline, and only getting worse. He knew humanity couldn’t afford for the Resurgence to turn into another thousand-year war.”
Griffith shook his head. “That doesn’t mean you just throw in the towel and give up when you’re within arm’s reach of victory.”
“He made a hard call, but you know it was the right one,” she argued. “And it’s not like he had a choice. Even if he’d wanted to pursue them, they were already in the wind. It could have taken years, if not decades to find them.”
“Right. Because you…” He glowered and his lips twisted as if he’d tasted something bitter. “… let them go.”
Adequin ground her teeth. “What difference does it make whether they escaped or I let them go? They’re still alive either way. You never questioned that before.”
“Because now I know you had a choice.”
The disappointment lining his tone sent a wave of nausea through her. She certainly hadn’t expected a forgiving, or even empathetic response, but she hadn’t expected sheer anger either. It rolled off him in palpable waves as he steadied himself and rose to standing, shoulders hunched.
“It makes a difference, Rake,” he went on. “If you would have just shot the damn breeder like you were supposed to, Lugen wouldn’t have had to decide whether to cover it up or not, whether to go after them or not. You held humanity’s future in your hands and you…” He trailed off, his gaze glossing over as he broke eye contact and stared down at his boots. He tugged at his collar again, his fingernails scratching at his Volucris tattoo.
She cleared her throat, but her voice still came out weak. “I was trying to be merciful, Griff.”
He barked out a bitter laugh. “Why? They were never merciful to us. The only reason Lugen had to worry about population decline in the first place was because the bastards spent a thousand years ruthlessly exterminating us—and when that wasn’t enough—they weaponized sterility so we couldn’t keep making more human fodder to throw at them.”
“That was hundreds of years ago, and there’s no definitive proof that was engineered.”
“Bloody void,” he growled, disgust pinching his brow. “Not this again.”
“Think about what we saw firsthand in the Resurgence—they weren’t even a shadow of the monsters they’d been made out to be. That could all be myth for all we know.”
“You try telling that to Mesa,” he fumed, and a blistering spike lanced between her ribs, stilling her breath. “Ask her how pleasant those POW camps were, and whether or not she thought the Viators might be ‘misunderstood’ while she watched them torture and kill her family and friends.”