Chapter 363: Hostage Until Proven Guest

Lament shudders at the weight of my coins pressed to her shoulders. She stares deep into my eyes in an attempt to see if I’m testing her somehow. Whatever she sees scares the hell out of her. Good.

“The world or the Preservation. Pick.”

“Shouldn’t be that hard of a choice,” Gil says. “I know what I’d pick.”

A grimace splits Lament’s face. “Easy for you to say; you don’t work for the Preservation. You don’t know the good they do for everyone.”

Gil raises an eyebrow. “I do know the Preservation. Worked with quite a few of your people really closely for a few years right after the apocalypse happened, in fact. Time changes people. Or maybe it just slowly lets them become the person they’ve always wanted to be.”

“Oh, yeah? If you’re so chummy with them, name some,” Lament crosses her arms and pointedly doesn’t answer my question. “They wouldn’t be caught dead–”

“Mathilde Custeau. Montgommerry Luscious, spelt with two ‘m’s and two ‘r’s in ‘gommerry’. Yi, who never gave a second name to call him by. But those names mean nothing to you, do they?” Gil leans back against a wall and smiles. “Because they’ve never told you their real names. I don’t even know if they’re still with the Preservation, dead, or off somewhere doing their own thing.”

Lament huffs through her nose. “If you’re trying to convince me, you’re doing a terrible job of it.”

“Convince you? Lament, I’m just having a conversation. If you want to be convinced, you’d be asking things that we can give you answers to. Like how the Preservation lowered funding for the search and rescue ops last year, and they’re set to do it again. Or how they’re cheaping out on the anti-apocalypse coating for water purification units in polluted areas to save a few bucks. That’s how Detroit got destroyed a few years back, isn’t it? But you don’t care, do you?”

Gil cocks his head to the side, mouth pulled into a sarcastic sneer. “You drank the flavour-aid, and now you’ve convinced yourself that the Preservation has to be good because it does good things. And just because we do some absolutely horrendous things, it means we have to be horrendous.”

“Hold up. What horrendous things have we done?” I ask.

“Noland’s whole thing? The whole murdering his entire family thing?” Gil mimes shooting Lament in the head with a finger pistol. “Plus, we’ve killed more than a few HuSt and Preservation people. They’re probably showing that footage at recruitment drives to get them all bloodthirsty, and completely skipping over the background details of what those people did to deserve being murdered.”

I scrunch my eyebrows together in confusion. “So where are all the horrendous things we did?”

Gil stifles a laugh as Lament’s eyes grow especially wide. I still honestly don’t see what the resort has done that’s so bad; the Preservation threw Gasp under the bus and we had to kill some people to save her. Noland killed his family to spread the world-saving tech they’d been hoarding. Just because the headlines say ‘murder’, doesn’t mean the act wasn’t justified.

“Okay, I’m obviously missing something here, and now the moment’s ruined,” I sigh and pull my coins away. “Lament, you want to talk to Diane and Razi before I kill you? If their account doesn’t shake your faith, then I don’t even want to deal with you.”

“Diane and Razi? Are those the people I met in the apartments?” Ebb asks.

I nod. “Yeah. I saved them from the Preservation at the Krarig.”

“Saved?! You kidnapped them!” Lament lunges and wraps her fingers around my collar. “Even though the official news said they were dead, he never stopped believing they were alive and kept searching!”

I tilt my chin upwards. “He?”

Lament gnashes her teeth. “He! Ernest Highroller!”

All mirth leaves Gil’s face. From the way my teeth vibrate in my skull and the pants-shitting terror that pops onto Lament’s face, my expression must be a mirror of Gil’s. I hadn’t even thought about Ernest, the bastard who was the entire reason Diane and Razi had to run, in months. Even with meeting Call again.

“Ernest is looking for them,” I state with much more hate in my voice than I expected. “That’s a problem.”

“No, it isn’t,” Gil responds in so flat a tone it could cut an artery. “It’s a perfect opportunity. We let Lament go, she scurries off to tell their higher-ups everything, and Ernest intercepts that message. If he’s the kind of scum we know he is, he’ll send a few elite fighters to discreetly dispose of–or kidnap–Diane and Razi back.”

I barely tilt my head to look at Gil. “We ambush and slaughter everyone he sends?”

He nods. “Exactly what I was thinking.”

“What?! No! Ernest isn’t like that; he’s a good person, I swear, he just has–”

Ebb appears behind Lament and lazily rests an elbow on her shoulder. Blood trickles out of a very small cut from where a nearly hidden knife presses against Lament’s neck–not hard enough to sever anything important, but just hard enough to show how sharp the blade really is.

“Say the word, boss, and we’re done with this one. Won’t even make you dirty your hands.”

Pearl stares at the knife in Lament’s hands. I can feel my copilot’s burning desire to tell Ebb to make the cut. Hell, there’s more than a little bit of my own desires in there stirring the pot. But a leader can’t let personal feelings like this get in the way of something bigger. Lament’s gone from hostage to asset. If she sees the people Ernest and his disgusting ilk actually are and still sides with them…

I barely shake my head. Ebb clicks her tongue and pulls away, but not before she licks her fingers and places them against Lament’s wound. It closes instantly, leaving behind nothing but a whisper of magic and a warning.

“Ernest Highroller is the worst kind of person. You might not’ve seen him at his worst, but because you were about to say he has something off about him, you’re making excuses,” I lean in and pat Lament’s cheek with one hand. “Your precious Preservation, so good and untainted that you have to make excuses for the boss’ son. What were you going to say, Lament? What does he do that makes you feel the need to explain his actions?”

Lament closes her mouth so fast that her teeth clack. Her eyes say that she knows something about Ernest that she’s openly overlooking for… some reason. It doesn't feel like love. Hell, it doesn’t even feel like friendship. No… it feels like someone defending the horrible actions of a star athlete because they play for their favourite team.

A defence that’s more a shield for herself than it is for Ernest.

“Cute. She thinks she’s on the team,” I chuckle humourlessly. “One last question, and then we’re done. How did you feel when Gasp’s death was publicly broadcast to you? Did it make you happy? Did you cheer because the Preservation was cracking down on those scary psychics?”

Guilt passes over Lament’s face. I hit everything exactly on the mark. There’s only one little problem about that, though. I lean in close, grab her by the chin, and force her to look me in the eyes. Pearl whispers something to the bottom of my conscious mind, and even though I don’t hear it, I understand what she’s trying to say.

“How was the flyover, Lament?”

Confusion creases her brow with a frown. Then her eyes widen as realization hits her like a brick to the face. She struggles to get away from me, and I let her. Even after everything else we’ve told her… the horrible things she knows the Preservation elites do… this is the thing that rattles her. The simple fact that the outlawing of psychics was pure performance by the Preservation.

“They’re in your brain, you know,” I continue as Lament backs away. “You felt it today. How when you got close to that mech, your entire body stopped working like you wanted it to. Do you think that was the radiation? It must’ve been, right? Why would your own people do something like that? Are they looking for someone? Did you meet the specifications of that someone?”

“Stop,” Lament whimpers. “Please.”

I shake my head. “Why should I stop? The Preservation never did. I mean, that mech that exploded over the city–how many people died from that? Do you think it hit triple digits? Personally, I’d say yes.”

“NO!”

“No?”

I place my arms behind my back and lean against the counter. Everyone in the room stares unceasingly at Lament as she fights back tears, her heart finally split in two over the Preservation. Something tells me her loyalty to the Preservation is extremely deep-seated and woven intricately into the person she is today. Admitting that the organization might be flawed and might have interests that aren’t for the good of all humanity must be like admitting that she is horrible.

Because, in her mind, the Preservation is one monolith. No matter what she argues about ‘most people being good’, she means it in the ‘so we ignore all the bad being done’ kind of way. Call’s view of things is much more… realist. He sees the good. He sees the bad. And he’s actively taking steps towards making sure that bad doesn’t undo all the good that the Preservation’s done.

“She’s in denial,” Pearl mutters. “I bet she knows way more than she’s letting on. Maybe… maybe that’s why Speak was there; she thought Lament might’ve been leaking information to somebody. To Lizzie. Call must not even be on the higher-ups’ radar, or else they definitely would’ve flagged his visit to pick you up as suspicious.”

And they would’ve had an army waiting for us to leave that mech. I cyclically breathe in and out, calming my racing thoughts and the strange mixture of pity and disdain I feel towards Lament. She’s brainwashed, that much is for sure. But there’s a damn good chance she’s the one who did the brainwashing to herself with justifications for all the shit the Preservation’s done with their reputation as a shield.

There’s defeat in her eyes. But she’s not ready to admit it. I summon my two coins again, but this time, both of them are relocations. She looks at me and the defeat fizzles away, replaced with bluster and defiance that’s more of a reflex than anything. Instead of spitting it at me, though, she steps towards me and puts her hands over both of my coins.

“I’ll show you,” she insists. “You’ll see it isn’t as bad as you think it is, and then you’ll beg for the Preservation to protect you. Just like we protect… everyone.”