“So yeah, I might be caught up in something that happened five years ago,” she went on, “but at least I’m not stuck fifteen years in the past.”
Fury flashed across his eyes again, but at once it melted away, his features going slack with realization. He swallowed, wiping beads of sweat from his forehead with the back of his hand. “Shit,” he breathed. “I get it. This is why…”
Her eyebrows pinched together, heart hammering in her chest during the heavy silence. “What?” she managed.
“This bootlicker act … Void.”
“What are you talking about?”
“That was never the Quin I knew.” His eyes narrowed. “You know, the ‘person whose shadow I could walk in,’” he added bitterly. “I never understood why you’d changed so much after Paxus. Why you were suddenly so worried about being a perfect little soldier all the time.”
Warmth flooded her face, stinging her partly healed burns and sending her bruised cheek throbbing.
“You think you can make up for what you did,” he continued, “by acting like some exemplary commander for a bunch of criminals at the edge of the universe? Because you fucking can’t. That’s not how it works.”
“That has nothing to do with this. I’m only trying to make the best of a shitty situation.”
He shook his head, ignoring her. “I always thought Lugen had just opted to pull the plug. That he couldn’t stomach another wild goose chase across the galaxy along a hundred trails of paper-thin intel, or maybe he was getting pressure from the Quorum to end it. That you were just the closest person he could point a finger at, so he’d sent you away for a few years to act as a scapegoat while the rest of the brass cooled off about it. But they don’t even know, do they?”
She swallowed, shaking her head slowly. “I don’t think anyone but Lugen knows.”
“So this—the Sentinels, the Argus. This was a real punishment.”
She nodded.
“All because you had a chance to end it, and you threw it away … but all eyes were on the First back then, so Lugen couldn’t just disappear you. And he loved you too much to execute you outright.”
His last words hung in the air, ringing harshly in her ears. She’d never been able to fully wrap her head around why Lugen had handled it the way he did. But she couldn’t imagine it’d come from a sense of devotion to her, considering her current circumstances. By all rights, he’d left her out here to die.
“I don’t get it, Rake,” Griffith went on. “You’ve been a legionnaire since you were sixteen. How could you justify that level of betrayal? Outright defy an order like that?”
“It wasn’t about defying orders, Griff. It’s way more complicated than that—it’s xenocide.”
“It was xenocide,” he corrected, the sharpness rekindling in his tone. “A chance at xenocide. Now it’s just a mistake you can’t fix.”
Adequin’s seething stomach turned, and only when the floor thrummed did she realize it wasn’t from anger, but because they’d dropped from warp speed.
Jackin’s voice came through her nexus. “We’re here, boss. Cruising up to port now.”
The ship gave a short jerk as the ion engines engaged. She pressed the link to respond, doing her best to steady her shaking voice. “Thanks, Jack.”
She swallowed hard as a volatile mix of frustration and worry and guilt strained against her ribs and twisted in her ruined stomach.
Griffith stood with his hand over his eyes, squeezing his temples between his thumb and forefinger, his other hand braced on the edge of the exam table.