It only took moments after the gunshots echoed through the confined space, deafening all of us, before an even louder and scarier noise filled the air. The rumble of stone, almost familiar now, but on a magnitude we'd never seen or heard before.

Above us, the entire city was imploding. Bereft of the Exhuman's support, the impossible skyline faced reality once again, and the graceful sweeping arches and twisting spires swept and twisted no longer, cracking and crumbling.

I couldn't really parse any of that. I was still just in shock at what happened right in front of me. The lifeless body of a child, laying in a pool of blood so dark it looked like ink.

Moon dabbed at the blood on her hands with a pocket handkerchief and carefully stepped around the spreading pool of blood to stand right in my face.

"Excuse me," she said when I didn't move.

"What." It was about all I could say.

"If you do not move, I will get blood on my shoes and they will be ruined as well. Please move."

I was still just standing there in shock, but the fact that she was more concerned with where the blood went instead of who it came from did manage to sink in somehow.

"Are you fucking kidding me?" I asked.

She cocked her head slightly. "I understand if you disagree, but I do not think my jokes are quite that poor in taste."

I shoved her, hard. She stumbled back two steps, slipping in blood, and then tripped over the body and fell on her ass right in the thick of it. "There's your fucking clean shoes," I said.

She looked at the blood on her hands and retched, clamping a hand to her mouth and leaving a red streak across the entire bottom of her face, swallowing hard as she skittered on the slick stone floor while trying to get back up. Even that pathetic act, involuntary action after involuntary action, she did with a stoic face. It really pissed me off for all the opposite reasons Tem tended to.

"Are you through?" she asked, once she'd stood again at the far end of the room, bloody handprints up and down her uniform, and uselessly wiping her blood-streaked face with a now-red handkerchief.

"Is this just some game to you?" I shouted. "That boy is dead!"

"I have no interest in explaining myself to you," she retorted simply. "Now will you move out of my way or not?"

In response, I just took a couple steps back, and as she misunderstood and began walking around the body again, I slammed the stone cell door shut, put one of my hands on the door, one on the frame, and with small intense bolts of lightning, crudely melted the rock, arc-welding the door shut. The others stirred uneasily but nobody said a thing to stop me.

If she didn't like the prospect of being locked in there with a dead body, maybe she shouldn't have made one.

"This is simply immature," she said, but walked back to the far corner of the cell and sat down.

"Immature? You murdered a child in cold blood. Not a golem, a real fucking flesh and blood person. How can you fucking talk about blood on your shoes and me getting out of your way when you just did...did that!"

"If you insist on demanding an explanation from me, can you at least ask the others to leave? I find this situation uncomfortable."

This fucking girl. Every damn word out of her mouth was like she was trying to piss me off.

"You should be uncomfortable!" I shouted back through the bars. "You're a goddamn murderer. If I can't weigh that on your conscience, maybe some blood on your shoes and a little assembly of people thinking that you're a piece of shit will help you think twice before killing people in the future. Seems to be the only fucking thing you're capable of giving a shit about."

She just sat on her heels in the corner, averting her gaze from the body, and from me.

An awkward minute passed and I spent it doing nothing but getting more and more pissed at her, pacing and swearing back and forth in front of the cell, watching the pool of blood slowly grow, as though it were fueled by my own anger. My shock had receded, and beneath it was just disbelieving rage. She just sat, peaceful and placid as anything, bloody streaks on her mouth, red splatter around her eyes, as if to mark just what a psycho lurked under that calm demeanor.

"Athan," Karu finally said, and arrested my pacing by putting a hand on my shoulder. "I understand your outrage, but this is not the way to move forward. Neither you nor Moon will benefit by locking her in a cage like an animal, and I doubt you to be merciless enough to simply abandon her here."

"You watch, I will."

"I doubt very much that you are so cruel, Ashton. I and the others will leave. I recommend you turn off your comms and converse with Moon to find, if nothing else, her rationale." She sighed heavily, and the others turned as one to leave us.

She started to go as well but stopped. "I also...urge you to remember that I was in favor of executing the Exhuman as well. His was a humane, quick death, one shot through the brainstem cleanly. It is what I would have done in the same situation, so...do keep that in mind before you hate her too much."

She gave my shoulder a final squeeze and then left with the others, leaving AEGIS' body alone in the hallway.

"Well, they're gone. Ready to fucking talk?" I asked, spinning on Moon.

Now she was driving everyone else away as well. I really could just leave now and she'd stay in this cell forever, or until the rest of the XPCA dug her out. I privately hoped it would be a few days so the body had a chance to rot in front of her and she could really get a nice thorough appreciation for exactly what she'd done here.

Man, really, fuck this bitch. I'd tried to be understanding, sympathetic, courteous, and then this?

"I am ready to talk," she said flatly. "There is nothing wrong with my ability to speak."

"You can start by never doing that again. You and your stupid fucking joudan. You know what I mean, so stop acting like a goddamn idiot."

"I am not the idiot here. Did you think this could end any other way?"

"Yeah, you could have not shot him."

"And then what? Do you know for what organization you work?"

"Yes, the XPCA would have tried to kill him if I didn't."

She shook her head. "And there lies your misunderstanding."

"What, they wouldn't?"

"No, they would. But you are only thinking of this in terms of him and them. What about you? What about the XPCA as a whole? What about Cosette or Director Blackett? Or America?"

"What about them?"

She cocked her head a little like I might be deaf. "Thousands died. Dozens to hundreds more are casualties above us."

"Yeah, that's why they sent us."

"Do you think the XPCA could survive allowing such an Exhuman to go free?"

"Obviously not, which is why I keep saying they'd try to kill him. How many more times do I have to say this?"

This book's true home is on another platform. Check it out there for the real experience.

"Zero more. You are missing the point. I am not trying to emphasize whether or not they would let him go, but rather whether they would survive."

"Not...survive…?"

I gave the sentence a think before opening my mouth to reply. This sounded a lot like the doom and gloom Blackett was spouting before his 'promotion.' The XPCA could not afford to ever fail even a single Exhuman event, because the public needed that assurance for the system to stay intact.

And an event of this size and visibility, with this many casualties, she was right that I was just thinking of that in terms of whether Ethan would be allowed to return to New Eden or not.

So maybe she was right, in a way. With something this visible, they'd have to make an example of the Exhuman behind it. And if I deliberately let him go, they'd kill me and then kill him. They'd have to, to save face.

"But I don't care," I concluded. "Fuck you."

"Very well. I would prefer not next to the corpse however."

"What the fuck."

"Joudan."

"I fucking know that. I just don't know how you can be making idiotic jokes like that at a time like this."

She gave a slow, exaggerated shrug. "Is now a crisis? The Exhuman is dead. We survived the city's collapse. The combined forces have survived. It seems a reasonable time to joke as any."

"There's a dead fucking body right there. You slipped on him and almost threw up."

"Yes. And if you had chosen to move out of my way, we would not be here with it. I fail to see your point."

I pounded my temples, wondering just how dense she was, or was pretending to be. My desire for her to be punished, and my failing patience with dealing with her bullshit were quickly stacking up to overwhelm any guilt I might have at actually leaving her here.

"You killed him. Do you get that?"

"Of course."

"And you don't feel guilty? Or bad? At all?"

"No."

"And why not?"

Finally she lapsed into a trademark silence. Finally I got her thinking about something other than stupid jokes or just telling me I was wrong. I waited impatiently, her face showing nothing of what went on behind it.

"A number of reasons. But foremost, I did not want you to die, I suppose."

"Me?" I scoffed.

"You and the rest of the P-Force. It is likely you would be disbanded if you failed this mission, and the XPCA would not allow the Exhumans on the force to simply walk free after such an embarrassment. We all would take the fall to divert blame from the greater XPCA"

"They wouldn't kill us, just for that."

"Would they not?"

"We did what they wanted. We've proven ourselves docile, if not loyal."

"You must be thinking of some other friendlier XPCA than the one I have heard of. The one I know has historically killed Exhumans, even utterly innocent helpless ones, even the voluntarily cooperating ones for hundreds of years, and are quite proficient at it."

"So you did it to protect us?"

"Protecting people is everything to me, I told you before. But not just you, no."

"Then what?"

"With the failure of the P-Force, New Eden will also fall, and all there would also be put to the axe. With his two 'New XPCA' initiatives defeated, it would only be a matter of time before people realized Director Blackett's XPCA was the same as ex-Director Albion's. Any of your friends who survived would, in a short-sighted blaze of vengeance, move to destroy that which destroyed you, returning to their roles as social activators and provocateurs, and the XPCA would fail in the public image, if not altogether. Do I need to go on?"

Everything she said I could see happening, and at times, watching her speak with apparent clarity and tranquility, sometimes I even felt ashamed for being short-sighted in my judgement. The way she talked one reasonable step into another made it feel like there really was no other way.

But the fact remained, she couldn't be right. The world wasn't a place which would fall apart on the life or death of one already-terminal boy. Exhuman or not.

"You're wrong," I said.

"I am frequently wrong."

"You're wrong about the P-Force, the XPCA, and the world," I clarified, annoyed.

"I understand I make that kind of joke frequently, but this time I honestly do not understand. Can you clarify how I am wrong?"

"I refuse to accept that this boy had to die for the world to live. I don't think the world works like that, and even if it did, that's really a fault in the world, not a reason to kill people like him."

"Going to change the whole world, then?" she said, and offered me a rare, wry smile.

"Yes. Fuck you, yes, if I have to. Killing is wrong, and every human and Exhuman knows it. The world shouldn't be built on the back of murderers like you."

"And that is the final thing I had to protect," she said, simply.

"What, my desire to fix the world?"

"Your innocence. If the world is broken, and if it is to be fixed, it will be by people like you, not me. It only makes sense that if blood is to be spilled, I do it so you have someone other than yourself to blame. For that reason...while I still question your commitment to protecting others, I am glad you refused to do it."

I leaned my head against the stone bars, hanging off of them and just wondering where the hell all my anger had gone. I had been so motivated just a minute ago, to kick this girl's ass in any hundreds of ways. Now, even looking at the body on the floor, I just felt old, tired, used-up, like arguing with her had taken more out of me than anything else on this bizarre, fucked-up day.

The problem was, ultimately, I understood her. I wanted to go back to before she'd clearly explained her points, back when the dead child was an outrage like it should have been, instead of a pawn on some political chessboard.

Even on a personal level, though I hated myself for thinking it, but if I were in her shoes, I could see myself making the exact same decisions. If Lia were for some reason the lead on this mission, and had decided to leave Ethan alive, I would have gladly gotten my hands dirty rather than let her take the fall, leave her with a clean conscience, even if it meant her being outraged at me. Even if she hated me, never spoke to me again, at least that was one thing I'd done that she would never have to.

In her own fucked-up military-apathy way, I guess this was what Cosette meant when she said Karu should do it. Karu was many things, but she wasn't shy about killing Exhumans, and she was able to justify it in her own head hard enough that it didn't seem to weigh on her. The problem was, Karu would listen to and respect me, which is why Moon felt the need to step in.

Still hanging off the cell, I pumped some lightning through it making it run in little circles around where I'd welded the door shut before, until the circle began glowing, first red and then white hot. The entire chunk within the circle simply fell out of the door under its own weight, melted free from the surrounding stone. I swung the door open and stood patiently by.

She was still guilty, as far as I was concerned, but that didn't mean the fault was hers. She did what she thought was necessary to make it by, and whether that was right or not, well, that was a bigger issue. But what she did, what I simply couldn't accept was that she acted in a way neither of us wanted, because that's just how the world worked. That's where she and I differed--that's the point where I would dig in my heels and throw my life away if I had to, refusing to acknowledge this shitty world and the way things worked in it, while she maintained what was probably healthy pragmatism.

She couldn't be right, though. Because if she was, if the world really was so fragile that the life or death of this boy meant so much, that meant I was already deciding the fate of the world, personally. And that was definitely something I wasn't ready to accept.

I turned my comms back on. "You guys still there?"

There was an indistinguishable outburst of muttered acknowledgements and the comms went quiet again. I sighed. "Papa-Foxtrot two, Papa-Foxtrot two, This is Papa-Foxtrot actual. Report position and status. Over."

Jack's voice came clear in reply. "Copy, Papa-Foxtrot actual. We are currently forty feet down the tunnel from you in a south-eastwardly direction. The tunnel is collapsed on this end and we are standing by. Over."

"Please tell the others to un-deploy their thumbs from their asses and return for extraction. Over."

"Wilco. And language. Papa-Foxtrot two, over and out."

Nobody asked about what went on between Moon and myself, but I guess the fact that nobody else was being left in a shallow grave was answer enough for them. Jack had us all huddle together, and after what felt like a couple entire minutes of honing his power, all of us stood blinking in the sudden relative brightness of sunset.

The rest of the op went by in a blur borne mostly of my exhaustion. We rejoined Taglock and Lia, who immediately jammed some device into one of AEGIS' cables and brought her back to life with a gasping start. Cosette magically cleared up her comms issues and demanded a full report, pleased as anything to hear that the fighting had stopped because I had made the right call in executing the Exhuman, and promising us all commendations for a success of this visibility. We met up with the soldiers combing the ruins and joined the trickle of wounded back towards the base-camp for the siege.

It felt...if anything, more surreal, seeing the city we'd just spent a day living in reduced to lifeless ruins in a literal heartbeat, like it was a mirage that only existed in the sun, and now that night was falling, the illusion was broken, and all the people we'd met and places we'd been sunk back into the ground.

I also had a hard time feeling like it had only been one day we'd been here. The alien nature of this place had really crept into my bones, and I felt like I wasn't going to be able to view a normal city with real humans in it quite the same way again. Not that I was planning to freak out next time I passed a person in the street or anything, but, like, when you watched a sci-fi movie that had a twist that revealed the world wasn't quite what we thought it was all along, and feel that impossible nagging doubt next time you feel deja vu, maybe it was something more.

I didn't know. I didn't care. I sat with my head in my arms through debriefing while everyone else on the team covered for me by reporting out all and everything we'd done, while Cosette plied us for every detail, probably just personally interested in the crazy world we'd just destroyed rather than for any military application.

As far as my mind was concerned, I was still down there in the dungeons arguing in circles with Moon over a dead child.