I sat up straight and tall, smoothing out the front of my uniform as Talon eyed me. If I was representing the XPCA, even unofficially, I should try to seem respectable at least.

Never mind the fact that I came in here to bitch out a high schooler and tell on her to her mommy. Or that Talon reacted to my preening with a bemused smile which showed off his large white teeth.

"Okay then, Mister Talon," I began formally, which made him grin broader. "I think the question the XPCA is most interested in knowing is, what do you want? Why did you attack our agents and then arrange this meeting?"

"To clear any future misunderstanding, we didn't attack your agents," he said, settling into a more serious expression which still had a small smile. "Some of our members were living their lives innocently and had their homes invaded by your agents who threatened and then administered force. We defended ourselves, and even then, did not use lethal force."

"And they threatened and attacked because you refused to relocate back to New Eden?"

"Correct."

I sighed and scratched my head before I remembered I was trying to posture here. It was hard to argue with that when I'd been sent on an identical mission just a couple days ago, and from the sound of it, mine was just one of dozens going on right now. We'd been negotiating for all of two sentences and I already couldn't refute his reasonable claims.

"Something the matter?" he asked.

"I don't know how I'm supposed to argue with that," I said.

"Then don't?"

I pulled out of my thoughts and looked at him seriously. Still, he was just watching me, bemused, his eyes fixating on single points for long moments instead of darting around. I could see why he was their leader, he seemed to exude a lot of natural charisma. I wondered what his powers were.

"I'm supposed to. I can't just accept everything you say, we're supposed to be negotiating," I said, and he laughed...at me, I think?

"Oh boy. You're sort of terrible at this, aren't you?" he laughed.

"I am not! I just...it's a lot of responsibility suddenly. I just came over here to talk--"

"And now we're talking."

"No, we're negotiating. I'm unofficially running these talks for the moment, and I have a responsiblity not to fuc--err, mess it up. If things go south here, this is the largest Exhuman event in the world we're talking about."

To my surprise, he just laughed at me again, literally throwing his head back as he went. I didn't think anyone ever actually did that. Felt kind of small and shitty having him mocking me like this when we were supposed to be negotiating…

"Look," he said once he'd calmed down some. "No literally. Look around. What do you see?"

I did look around. I didn't see anything particularly new since last time...a bunch of people giving us space and eavesdropping politely while eating pizza. I gave Rito a small wave when I saw her and she waved back.

"Um, a bunch of people and pizza? Exhumans and pizza I guess?"

"Yeah. And do they look pissed or angry or ready to start smashing up the city?"

"No. A little nervous maybe. But there's like a couple dozen XPCA agents across the street ready to start shooting at the drop of a hat."

"Then maybe you should be negotiating with them," he laughed. "We're here to talk, and that's what we're going to do. We have no intention of blowing up anyone or anything, unless they start it. So take it easy."

"O...kay," I said, taking a deep breath. I wondered if this was a negotiating trick of some kind, but I didn't see how keeping things calm could possibly worsen things.

"Besides, it doesn't really matter anyway," he said with the same bemusement from before. "Nothing you say or do is enforceable or representative of the XPCA and they know it. You're not an official representative, none of your promises would binding, and even if they were, it wouldn't stick because Exhumans like me are explicitly outside of the law. Even if Director Hall walked in here and signed a contract in blood, he could shoot me in the face five minutes later and have done nothing legally wrong."

I blinked at him slowly while I chewed on those words. I felt like Moon, trying to tear apart every line he was saying for any ambiguity or discrepancy. I knew what being an Exhuman meant. What he said didn't sound wrong, but--

"There's a problem with that," I said. "If it's legally meaningless talking to you...if this is just a talk and not a negotiation as you said, then why would Cosette...why would my CO approve it...and why would you do it?"

He smiled broadly. "They have nothing to lose by it because any information you gain is good for them. I have nothing to lose by it because I like you and thought it might be a pleasant chat."

"Oh."

I felt like I'd already fucked up a lot here somehow. It wasn't like I'd planned to come in here and fix the whole situation, but once I'd gotten swept into talking to the leader of the Defiant, it felt like that possibility had landed in my lap. If I were a better talker, a real leader...heck, if I were Lia, maybe instead of explaining to me why none of this mattered, Talon might be seriously discussing his grievances, while I came up with some brilliant solution that defused the whole problem?

I realized that was an expectation I'd just sort of put on myself, and that was why I was being stupid and awkward, why Talon kept laughing at me. All I expected from myself was to be able to fix everything all on my own, and even I had to admit that was pretty stupid. I constantly had to rely on my friends to save my dumb ass, and that was in situations where I actually could do something. Here, all I had was words.

I tapped my comms. "Cosette, I don't think I can negotiate this," I said. "I'm just...gonna talk to him and find out what they want."

"Isn't that what I told you in the first place?" she fumed over several other yelling voices. "Just keep him talking, we have your feed going through to the crisis management team, and the more they know the better."

"Sure. Do you know when they'll be ready to negotiate with the Defiant for real?"

"I don't have that kind of information, but they've been on-site forever. Everyone's just arguing policy and what they can demand and either wanting nothing to blow up or wanting the Defiant exclusively to blow up. It's a goddamn mess. And since you walked in there, I've got about a hundred people asking me personally all kinds of questions and giving me conflicting orders. I didn't ask for this!"

She stopped for a moment to argue with someone apparently in the room with her, ending with 'He's my subordinate, and I'll tell him whatever the fuck I want' before addressing me again. "Look, I'm probably not going to be acting as your central for much longer on this op...or maybe any other one, if these buzzards keep squawking. Yeah, I'm talking to you General Moroles! I know you can hear me!"

"Cosette, I don't think yelling at them is going to help."

"Oh, you're gonna tell me how to do my job now too?"

"Easy there, I just want everyone to calm down."

"Well, tell them to calm down. I'm perfectly calm. Fuckers."

I gave Talon an apologetic smile while he sat there with the patience of a saint and an amused grin.

"Anyway," Cosette started again after collecting herself. "Talking is useful, get him to do that. If the crisis team comes in, you leave. If things are looking messy, you leave. It's pretty simple, okay? Just talk and try not to think about the hundreds of disrespectful assholes listening to everything you say."

"Thanks, Cosette. Good luck."

"Oh, I'm not the one who needs--"

I tapped my comms, putting it back in transmit-only.

"Sorry about that," I said, feeling embarrassed and stupid for wasting Talon's time with my call. I tore open a garlic knot and pulverized the soft innards between my fingers. Cold already.

"Not a problem. We don't have much to do here anyway until your side acts, so it's not like we had a lot going on. You didn't seem to be enjoying your call though...you have issues with your superior?"

"No...we bump heads sometimes, but honestly, she's way more patient and understanding than I deserve." Not to mention willing to literally let me get away with murder. "She's just dealing with some shit right now with all the New Eden stuff happening. Sounds like I made more trouble for her by getting involved in it again."

He laughed again. "I know the feeling. You know, I never wanted to lead this bunch, but nobody else seemed interested in handling things properly. Sometimes it feels like leadership isn't so much stepping forward as it is simply refusing to let everyone else step back."

I laughed. "Yeah, I think that's how I became strike lead of my squad. I just started giving orders and people started following them."

We laughed and after a few more exchanges, I realized I'd successfully made small talk for a few minutes. By the end of it, I even felt relatively normal again. Realizing I had no responsibility or obligation here seemed to make the conversation flow out of me much more naturally.

You might be reading a pirated copy. Look for the official release to support the author.

But even so, I still had a job to do, I thought. I had to try at least. And so next time the topic changed, I steered it back to its original course.

"So...even if I'm not officially doing anything here, I still want to know, what is the Defiant Unchained, and what do you guys want?"

"Interested in joining?" he asked with a grin. "I promise fewer issues with your immediate superior...since you wouldn't have one."

"Sorry...I'm kind of a fan of XPCA black," I said, grinning back. "Plus they keep the world safe, and I am also kind of a fan of the world. I lived there once, you know."

"No kidding? Me too." He lowered his chin to look more seriously down at me and I felt us cross some threshold which made both of us leave our smiles behind. "In fact, that's very much the point of the Defiant. We want to live in this world like normal people, and what the XPCA demands isn't really living at all. New Eden was just a glorified jail, and none of us are criminals."

"But...other people don't feel safe around Exhumans...around us. We can be dangerous, heck, I know I'm dangerous. Every time my sister hugs me, I have to concentrate so that my powers don't blow her to pieces. We can't just walk down the street like that, as much as I wish we could."

"It's true, some powers are just too dangerous," Talon said. "But that's not the case for any of us, or for most people in New Eden. Almost everyone in there voluntarily submitted for relocation, and before that had been living with some degree of success in normal society. If they had powers that made them detonate a city every time they sneezed, they'd have been dead a long time ago under old XPCA policy."

"But those Exhumans are still out there. We can't just make new rules because you guys happen to be okay, or the second one of them shows up, it'll prove the whole system doesn't work."

"Except we're not here to try to negotiate on their behalf. We're here to talk about our rights and that's it. We don't want to lay down laws that shape Exhuman policy from here to the moon, we just want the New Edeners to be able to live in peace. If some other group of Exhumans shows up in the future, they can form their own Defiant Re-unchained or whatever," he laughed.

"So...you just want an exception, basically?"

"For those of us who've proven ourselves responsible enough to live normal lives, why not?"

"Because...it'd still make a panic. Everyone would suspect their neighbor of being an Exhuman if it was known they lived out there."

"And people don't already?" he laughed. "Besides, isn't that really their problem? If you assume someone's bad because of what they are, we call that bigotry. Just like you can't go around stringing up your neighbors just because they're Jewish or Hispanic or gay if they've done nothing wrong, we want the same applied to us. Instead, nobody even has to shoot us because the government will do it for them. It's a dispicable state."

"I get you. I really do, and I don't want to sound like a broken record...but being Jewish or Hispanic or gay doesn't instantly give you the power to destroy your neighbors with a thought if you feel like it. Exhumanity isn't the same, it can't be treated the same."

"Then how should it be treated?" he asked. His question was light, but his eyes held steady on mine like he was looking right through me, not a trace of a smile left on him.

I didn't know how to respond. Was I expected to just...whip out a perfect solution for the Exhuman problem?

I mean, I tried. But the more I thought, the darker my thoughts became. As I cast my mind around in search, what I found inside it...I remembered why I ran across the street in the first place. What I was running away from.

"I don't know," I said, unable to hold his gaze any longer and staring down at the shreds I'd turned the last garlic knot into. "I used to...used to have ideas. All these ideas, you know? About how things should be, about what was right, what was inviolably right. Things which, if the world had a problem with, that was because the world was wrong, not me."

I began turning the shreds into crumbs with my fingertips. "But the more I work this job, the more I see, the more times we have to put an Exhuman down or figure out what we're doing with...with real, actual lives, really...the harder it gets. I thought I was doing well by making New Eden where Exhumans could live free…"

I crushed a piece of the knot under my thumb back into tacky dough. "...but I went there...and everything was just bad and wrong and messed up. There was so much corruption, everyone was so miserable and suffering. There were Exhumans who were killing each other for sport, just to get some release. Killing! To get a reprieve from what I put them into. So I dove in head-first to try to fix it, and...and it feels like every person I cared about got hurt because of that. My sister. My girlfriend. My friends…"

I thought of AEGIS, not the old one whom I'd loved with all my heart, but the jealous, bigoted, petty thing I'd turned her into. I thought of Karu, hiding in the corner behind Deej, trembling to flee the second she saw me, a scared girl under her armor. I thought of Lia, her face and hands black and swollen with blood from the missile which almost hit her. Thought of all the visions I'd had through Moon, all the near-deaths we'd only just avoided.

"And all for what?" I asked him, slamming the table and making the cups and crumbs jump. "So that we could fix up the prison and put everyone back in it? A place I helped make that I couldn't even believe in? The suffering of everyone I was trying to protect? Is that all I was fighting for? What was the point in hurting so many people?"

To my surprise, he took my hand and squeezed it in both of his, his brown eyes serious as he just held me there, telling me without words that he understood, that we were the same. That more than what we were, we were both men defined by what we lost.

"I was half-kidding before, but I'd like you to consider joining the Defiant," he said. "Everybody needs a home."

"I can't."

"I know. But if the weight of the world ever gets too heavy...look us up. You're too young to be dealing with all of this shit. I know this doesn't really apply to us Exhumans but...I look at you and can't help but feel every adult in your life has let you down for you to come to this. Kids should be dreaming, it's what they do. And I think it's shit that because we adults made this world the way it is, your right to dream gets robbed from you."

"You want me to join you and we'll fix it together?"

"Of course not," he said, putting a grin back on and releasing my hand. "I want you to join me, and you can sit back and watch as I handle it myself. That's what adults are supposed to do, isn't it?"

I think I was supposed to smile or laugh, but I'd kind of forgotten how at the moment. All the thoughts I'd been struggling through before I came in here had just caught up to me and now I felt like I was drowning again. I took a deep breath and tried to ride it out.

"It's a nice offer. I appreciate it. But...I think...I think I've seen too much, already. I've seen how fragile the world is, I've seen it tip with the actions of a single person, seen it tip with my actions, even. I can't just go back to letting other people make decisions after that. Not that I now know what's at stake and how easy it is to lose those stakes."

He smiled and nodded at me again. "Leadership is cruel, huh?"

"I guess so."

He patted my arm affectionately. "You're still young. In between all the things you do, don't forget to have fun sometimes."

"Fun seems so pointless when there's so much work to do. So much suffering out there."

"It sure does, but it's important anyway. If you keep growing up the way you have been, you'll wind up forgetting why you wanted to save the world in the first place. Considering you already seemed a bit lost on that front, keep it in mind. Even a world as mismanaged as this one has lots of beautiful things in it if you look for them."

I really hadn't expected fatherly advice. His words echoed AEGIS's when she'd made up her mind to date me--that if I was going to spend my life making it my mission to save others, she'd make it her life mission to make me happy, whether I wanted it or not. The sudden realization that this was a guy who really cared about me, even though we'd just met...it hit me in the chest like a sledgehammer. I wasn't going to show it, but I felt tears threatening to well up in my eyes.

I saw motion behind Talon, out on the street through the window and realized that the XPCA was finally moving. A middle-aged man in a suit was exiting the building, buffeted on all sides by generals and aides, primping and preening and prompting him with last-minute updates and policy bullshit.

"Your negotiator is here," I said, feeling my throat closing up as I refused to let emotions out. I sounded like a flattened frog.

Talon glanced back. "So he is."

"If...if negotiations mean nothing, legally...why are you doing this? Why did you come here to talk in the first place?"

He grinned apologetically. "Negotiate is kind of an exaggeration, honestly. We're here to lay down an ultimatum. We want to make it clear exactly what the Defiant Unchained are, because...it's not the kind of thing that'd work if it wasn't perfectly known."

I'd already asked this question twice and gotten different answers both times, so I asked again. "So what is the Defiant Unchained?"

"Well...put simply...we're mad."

"O...kay. I think we knew that."

"No, M.A.D. Mutually Assured Destruction. We're twenty-two Exhumans who have agreed that an attack on one of us is an attack on all of us. If they try to force us out of our lives, however many of us they take down, they'll have the rest to answer to. We're prepared to burn the whole damn country down if we have to, and they need to know that we're serious about that."

The smoldering intensity in his eyes lightened a bit as he leaned back. "Of course, we all hope it won't come to that. We just want to be left to live in peace like humans, but that's our ultimatum. We want peace...but if they won't give it to us, they don't get it either."

I just stared at him blankly for a minute while the real negotiator paused in the street outside listening to his comms. A number of the generals and others suddenly ran back inside and in the glimpses I could see through the door, it looked like the whole place had gone apeshit.

Talon took a glance and laughed, standing up and then offering me his hand. I took it stupidly and he shook mine with a warm, solid grip.

"I think they've got our message, though not quite like I would have liked to relay it," he said with the same bemusement as before, as though the full-tilt panic of the XPCA was exactly on par with a stupid high-schooler who didn't know the first thing about wording good well. "I suppose that's our cue to exit before any of them gets the smart idea of bombing the building and killing all of us at once."

I found myself on my feet as a reflex by shaking his hand. So many thoughts were slogging through the mud of my brain, and he was leaving, and I didn't even know what to say. The others were moving to the back room with Rito, who could port them all out, but Talon himself seemed to linger as though my expression had dropped an anchor on him.

He hesitated for another moment before speaking. "You're a good kid," he said with the same broad smile. "You still transmitting from your comms?"

I nodded stupidly. He made a shushing gesture with one finger on his lips and then drew out his mobile. With a couple of taps and a swipe, my mobile pinged, and when I looked at it, I saw a new contact request.

He grinned at me. "Like I said, if the world gets too heavy, consider joining. I'd love to have you. And I think we want a lot of the same things out of this world. Peace, coexistence, security."

My mental wheels were still just spinning and kicking the mud in my brain all over the place now, but one random question crystallized which I managed to blurt out before he slipped away.

"Mister Talon!" I shouted. He stopped in the doorway to the back. "Before...before you turned...who were you?"

He turned and I saw his grin in profile, positioned right between his bright eyes and strong chin.

"Public defender," he said with obvious pride. "Saved a lot of innocent people from terrible fates."

And with that, he disappeared into the back room. It was only a minute later when the negotiator came in, and when not a single of the Defiant could be found, a team surged through the building, sweeping every inch of it to no avail.

As for me, I was immediately detained for debriefing and questioning. As I sat in the back of a black XPCA van, sitting between two troopers in a way which just skirted the line between escort and captors, I couldn't help but grin as I thought over the stupid last question my brain had decided was important at that moment. I should have asked about his plans, or his powers or something, but nope, a completely useless question which wouldn't help the XPCA in the least going forward.

But I had to grin because in the end, with that question, I realized the truth of my being there. It was as Talon had been saying all along.

I really was just there for a friendly chat.