“Void, I know that,” Adequin hissed through clenched teeth. “There’s no question of how they treated the Savants. But it’s a different—”
“Different?” he snapped. “No. The only ‘difference’ is that instead of a nuisance to be exterminated like we were, they saw the Savants as their fucking property. If they weren’t being used like lab animals, then they were just cattle to be bartered to the SC. And all because, what? The Savants didn’t want to fight—they wanted to have their own lives, their own culture, and weren’t being obedient mutts coming to heel like the Drudgers.”
Hot tears rose to Adequin’s eyes, and she tried to shake her head, but it came out a short, rigid jerk, her muscles gone stiff with anger. “That’s not what I meant, Griffith. There’s no excuse—”
“There’s no excuse for not stopping it when you had the chance!”
“It can’t be that cut and dry. Not every one of them can be a monster. How would you like to be held accountable for every terrible action every other human took?”
“No. No way. They don’t get the benefit of the doubt, and you certainly don’t get to use it as an excuse. If you have a chance to end all that pain, you take it. After nine years of slogging through our friends’ corpses, I’d think you would have understood that.”
Her nails dug into her palms as her fists clenched tighter and her Imprints buzzed up the backs of her arms.
“You don’t hesitate,” he continued, “you don’t question what’s right or wrong when you’ve been fighting the same fight for a decade. You do what you were called there for, whether or not you feel good about it.”
“That’s not fair,” she said. “Think about what command was asking me to do. Can you honestly say if you’d been the one in that cavern that day, you wouldn’t have hesitated? Even the slightest?’
He licked his lips as he shook his head, scratching the back of his neck. “Fuck. Maybe it’s my fault.”
Her brow furrowed. “What? That’s not what I meant.”
“I thought it’d be safest to send you on. That I needed to hang back and make sure we weren’t getting flanked—that we could actually escape that planet alive instead of marching straight to certain death with no escape route. Never in a million years would I have guessed I needed to be there to make sure you’d go through with it.”
She scowled, letting a prickling wave of heat rekindle her anger. “You’re right. Maybe if you had taken point, you would have been there to pull the trigger instead of me. But you let me lead the way, just like you always did.”
“Because usually you’re really fucking good at leading the way, Rake!” he shouted.
“No,” she said evenly, pouring all her effort into not letting her voice rise. “That’s not on me. You never led the way because you were too scared to.”
His scowl loosened as his lips twitched with a response that stalled out in his throat. He seemed as shocked by her words as angry.
“It’s the same reason you gave up that centurion posting with the Vanguard for the lateral ranks of the Titans,” she continued. “One that meant you’d never be ‘in charge.’ And that’s why you were so damn frustrated when everyone turned to you for guidance. You were terrified that if you were given command again, you’d fail. That it’d all been a fluke, and you’d never be able to live up to that day at Redcliff. Which is why you were so damn glad when I came along—not because I understood what’d happened to you, but because you knew I was someone you could push to the front while you fell behind. Whose shadow you could walk in, so you could ensure you’d never have to be more than second-in-command again.”
His shoulders swelled, jaw firm as he stared back at her, seeming unable to form a response.