I fumbled with my keys, my arms feeling like lead before I could get the reader to beep me in and then crossed the threshold, bringing the stink of my sweat into our living room. I’d intended to make a beeline for a shower and change of clothes but stopped at noticing something…different.

It took a second to place, but I saw the chairs were back at the table, instead of having hitmen strapped to them in the corner of the living room.

“Hi Athan, welcome back. How was the gym?” AEGIS asked from the kitchen.

“…it was fine. What happened to the two guys and the body?”

“Hmm? Oh. Uh. Nothing, really. Could you try this broth for me and tell me if it’s got too much salt?”

My stomach did an involuntary flip by reflex as AEGIS brandished a spoon at me, and I took a deep, steadying breath and reminded myself that the one who couldn’t cook had left us. The one in front of me…well…she couldn’t cook either. But she didn’t have the insane fixation with overseasoning and oversweeting everything.

Yet. Which is why that spoon terrified me. But I knew cognitively this was a new AEGIS, and I had to give her the benefit of the doubt.

“It’s…actually not bad,” I said, smacking my lips. “Maybe a little salty.”

“Hmm, I thought that might be the case,” she said, sniffing it with a look of mild frustration. “I don’t know what ‘a pinch‘ or ‘a bit‘ or ‘a dab‘ of salt quantifies. As much salt as I can pinch? A bit is an eighth of a byte. And I don’t even want to know what dabbing has to do with measurement.”

I laughed as she continued her mini-tirade, somewhat at just how wound up she was over something this small, but mostly just relief flooding me that she was just failing at following recipes, instead of trying to exploit some loophole in human psychology with blatant disregard for taste.

And then I caught myself and went back a minute. “Uh, wait. So those missing people? Can you explain to me again where they went?”

She blinked at me. “Erm.”

“Erm what?”

“Erm, please wait…about one-point-three minutes.”

I felt my brow furrowing at her. “What?”

“You’ll, uh, see. More importantly, I won’t have to explain it.”

“Well that just sounds ominous as fuck. AEGIS, where’d they go? I made it clear nobody here was supposed to harm them, any more than Moon already did.”

“Yes. And everyone heard you and none of them did a thing to our guests.”

“Then where are they? We didn’t release them did we?”

“No, we certainly didn’t do that either. Uh, one-point-two minutes now.”

“Jeez, AEGIS, it smells like rot in here,” Lia said as she entered the room. “Oh it’s just Athan. Why aren’t you in the shower, stinky?”

“Because I’m trying to find out what happened to the two kidnappers and the dead body we had in the living room?”

“Oh,” she said, checking her mobile. “You’ll find out in like, a minute.”

“One-point-one minutes,” AEGIS confirmed.

“Are you guys like, conspiring to make this as difficult as possible? I’m asking what I think is a super reasonable question about a very kind of important thing. If there’s some guys who are going to go running to Idris and Ichiro about Moon being an Exhuman…I’d like to stop them before a minute from now. And if one of you deliberately decided to go murdery after I specifically asked not to…well at least, I don’t see the reason to delay telling me,” I sighed.

They glanced at each other, but still nobody volunteered anything. I took the hint and started for the shower.

“Hey before you go, I do have news,” Lia said, her face serious. “The last few moves within the XPCA from our known sources are being executed. Things will be in position for Dragon to act anytime starting tomorrow.”

“Then he’s likely to strike tomorrow,” I said. “He’s not one for waiting, I don’t think. Not longer than five seconds, anyway.”

“And we’re still in the dark about so much,” AEGIS fretted.

“It hardly matters,” I shrugged. “We know he’s coming, we know what he’s coming for, and where, and relatively when. Even if the XPCA can’t do anything about it, we can.”

She gave her hair a few strokes. “I still would like a better plan than ‘throw Athan out there as a speedbump and hope it stops him’.”

“We’ve been talking to Cosette,” I said. “But honestly, I don’t think she’s convinced, and she’s told us outright there’s no way she’ll be able to convince her superiors that there’s some kind of XPCA-wide conspiracy with a quarter dozen moles and dozens of corrupt enlisted and officers.”

“So as usual, the strategy is ‘do the stupid thing Athan wants to do’,” Lia shrugged.

“You seem pretty nonchalant about this whole thing,” AEGIS accused.

“That’s because I expect it to all wind up being for nothing,” Lia said. “If you think Dragon’s going to show up in person at an XPCA facility when he’s got the power and influence to micromanage soldiers and schedules, instead of just paying someone to snatch or smuggle his precious, I’d say you need a few lessons in delegation.”

“Yeah,” I said. “But I still think he will.”

“Why?”

I shook my head. “It’s what I think. I don’t need to have a reason for it.”

“Uh, you do if you don’t want me to just mock you,” she said.

“Mock away, sis. It’s still what I think.”

“You’re kind of a stubborn butthead, anyone ever tell you that?”

“Only all the freakin’ time.”

“Maybe if everyone’s always telling you the same thing you should consider listening,” AEGIS said with sudden concern as she stirred her pot of broth on the stove.

“Yeah, well.” I really didn’t have much a better argument than that, which just proved the whole stubborn butthead thing, I knew. Lia of course pointed that out, and I just responded by sticking out my tongue.

The front door opened, and Karu walked in, armor gleaming in the midday sun. “My, but it smells rank in here,” she said by way of introduction. She eyed AEGIS cooking with some suspicion.

“Hi Karu, welcome back,” Lia said with a wave.

“…back?” I asked. “She was here while I was gone?” I frowned and checked my holo. This would be about a minute after the girls told me to wait a minute. It only took me a few seconds to put things together, and then I closed my eyes and rubbed my forehead with my knuckles. AEGIS gave me a reassuring rub on the back.

“You said nobody here did anything to them,” I said.

“Right,” AEGIS agreed.

“Karu wasn’t here.”

“Yeah.”

“She just took them all somewhere and killed them, didn’t she?”

“They were a liability,” Karu stepped in. “They knew too much and would report to your enemies. As your appointed protector, I would not permit it.”

“Self-appointed,” I groaned.

“Yet appointed nonetheless,” she smiled broadly at me.

“Um, I think that really remains…to be determined,” AEGIS said from her cooking. “Athan might have other preferences in…people to…protect him.”

“What, such as a gynoid who has died ineffectually in the process twice?” Karu scoffed.

A case of theft: this story is not rightfully on Amazon; if you spot it, report the violation.

“Guys, don’t fight,” I said, my voice feeling empty and defeated. “I’m going to shower. Try not to kill anyone else while I’m in there.”

“Food will be ready when you get out, at least,” AEGIS said with far more hope in her voice than a stupid bowl of soup would warrant.

I spent a long time standing there letting the scalding stream hit me in the face with my thoughts running. There’d always been a lot of difficult questions inherent in my whole strategy of doing what I thought was right, was necessary, for someone to do, even if it wasn’t me. There’d been a lot of people hurt…or like Alyssa, killed, because of my actions or inaction.

And today, even though I was only tangentially involved, that number increased by three. The first one, I could understand as somewhat necessary, maybe. Or, if nothing else, an outburst by Moon, whom it could be argued had been chased and hounded for weeks now, and was in no fit state to be trusted with judgement on people’s lives. Especially her pursuers.

But those other two. After the events of the day, I’d just wanted to escape for a bit. Go do and be something normal, so I ducked out to the gym and put in some time punching a bag around.

And as a result, they were dead. It was Alyssa all over again. Sure, they were probably awful people, but did they have kids? Did they have parents or spouses? How long would it be before their families stopped looking for them? How would it break them?

It’d taken one day to turn my parents from controlling, doting, normal folks into broken husks, defined by violence and denial. Karu knew that. Everyone out there knew that, but they just kept on with this shit like none of it mattered.

The water fell away from me and ran down the drain in a swirl while I wondered just how long I could keep hurting people in order to do the right thing before it wasn’t right anymore.

I came back out, towel on my head and a change of clothes on my back and found Karu and AEGIS still, and Saga, to my surprise. AEGIS was just finishing putting food in front on the table for the two of us who ate.

“Where is Tem?” I asked. “Has she eaten today? Soup is probably pretty good for her.”

“I think she’s been living in the nest I made above the garage,” AEGIS frowned. “Even though that was supposed to be space for Whitney and me.”

“Well, she likes being close but not in the way,” Saga shrugged. “She’s basically a big stupid cat.”

“I’ll get her–” I said, stepping towards the garage, but AEGIS intercepted.

“No, you sit down and eat. I’ll get her something and make sure she eats over cams,” she said. “Sit down. It’s not awful, I promise.”

I did sit down and looked into the faintly-yellow bowl. Compared to everything else, it just felt stupid and pointless.

“Don’t be like that,” Saga said. “Some of us don’t even get to eat.”

“Dragon’s coming tomorrow,” I muttered.

“Or he is not,” Karu clarified. “He could come as early as tomorrow. Or as late as a week hence.”

“He’ll come tomorrow, and in person. I know it.”

“I believe that you believe you know it,” Karu said, shaking out her short hair as she pulled off her visor and inspected the soup by eye. “But you will not know until it has transpired.”

“No, I know. I’ve spent so long studying him, reading up on every scrap we’ve got on the guy. If anyone knows, it’d be me.”

“Or Lia,” Karu said taking a spoonful and swishing it in her mouth. It was apparently good enough to have more. “The girl’s abilities to read others is nonpareil.”

I stood up and left Karu sitting there with a stunned expression on her face. In case the message wasn’t clear, I slammed the bedroom door on my way in.

I’d only just thrown myself on the bed and buried my head under a pillow when I heard it creak open again.

“This isn’t about Dragon, is it?” Saga asked, as she closed the door behind her.

“You asking me things you already know the answer to, Saga?”

“Tends to happen when you know the answer to everything already,” she said, and I could hear the smile in her small voice. It’d been so long since she’d shouted mentally at me, I’d begun thinking of this as her normal way of speaking. Since New Eden, she’d just been a lot smaller in personality in general.

“I don’t think of it as smaller,” she said. “More subdued. More refined. Like the difference in a bottle of skin lotion instead of having a tub of lube at your desk.”

“Your analogies haven’t gotten subdued or refined.”

“Well, get some XPCA jerkoff to hold me prisoner who forces me to use my analogies to torture people and I might think of refining them too. But we’re not here to talk about me, no matter how much I love hearing you do so.” She sat down on the bed next to me even though there wasn’t any space, and pulled the pillow off my face.

Her brown eyes hovered a few inches above me, the curtains of her hair making it very nearly as dark as with the pillow in place. She looked at me seriously, her eyes focused and darting in a way that reminded me of Whitney eying a broken circuit.

“Do you know what Karu’s big revelation was that turned her crazy?” she asked, her voice barely more than a whisper.

“She killed Blackett, and the guilt of it ate her up, because he was the first person she ever killed without a contract or who wasn’t an enemy combatant or something.”

She smiled. “Close. And not factually wrong. But she had a thing in her mind that those events crashed into, and it was the war between those which is what broke her. The unstoppable force which was her own actions, and the immovable object which was her belief. Turns out we do know what happens when they collide — you go a bit crazy.”

“Saga, I just want to be alone and think for awhile, okay?”

“So impatient. You know the points I made at the ends of these things are always kickass.”

“I don’t remember you ever making a kickass point.”

“Oof, ow, my pride,” she said through a smile. “Fine, I’ll cut it short then. My point is that Karu, like you, like Moon, like so many others out there are all hung up on this idea of good and evil. When that doesn’t even exist.”

“Great. Already heard this talk, thanks.”

“Karu made a great hunter because she could justify any killing she did in her work as good, no matter who she put down. But by that definition, any killing she did outside of it must be evil. She crossed that line, and you see what happened to her. That’s what happens when you start seeing yourself as evil. Well, that or you move the goalposts a little to justify it, but I think her goalpost is permanently affixed to the stick up her ass.”

I turned and faced the wall, the strands of her long hair tickling my cheeks.

“You, on the other hand, equate any kind of killing with evil, and that’s just so adorable, but you’re also flexible enough to know that it’s not a hard and fast rule. But in a way that’s even more dangerous, as your body count creeps upwards…you’re gonna ask yourself just how long you can keep making justifications before you can’t face it anymore.”

“Yes. Thanks. You’re telling me exactly what I’m already thinking. It’s like you’re a mind-reader or something.”

She chuckled. “I’m telling you that you need to stop looking at the world like that. There’s no good and evil, no absolute right and wrong. There’s just perspectives. From Dragon’s perspective, you’re a huge pain in the ass…or were, until you lost your powers and he stopped giving a shit about you. Whatever his goals are, he probably thinks they’re noble and justified from his own point of view, and that makes you evil. Is he wrong?”

“Of course he’s wrong. He’s an unrepentant killer.”

“You don’t know that. For all you know, right now, he’s curled up on his bed with a Sino girl giving him a pep-talk as he struggles through his own hangups.”

“He’s fucking not.”

“But you don’t know. From his actions all you know is he’s a killer.”

“Okay, and he’s planning to kill again. So he’s obviously unrepentant.”

“And yet,” she said, shifting and making the bed creak under her “Tomorrow, you’re planning to head out there and stop him, even if you have to kill him. So you’re also an obviously unrepentant killer.”

“Are you telling me I’m just like Dragon? Seriously?”

She snorted. “Insofar as thinking you’re good and the other is evil, yeah, probably.”

“I thought you said you were skipping straight to the point?”

“That was the point, dummy. You and Dragon can’t both be good and evil both, if there’s an objective good and an objective evil. It’s all just perspectives. Good and evil are just labels you put on things that you want to give a little more moral weight to, but basically boil down to ‘things I agree with’ and ‘things I really disagree with’. You need to learn to let it go.”

“And what? Become like Karu? Just fucking kill whoever gets in my way? Did you hear her out there? She’s still wiping their blood off her hands and comments ‘they’re a liability‘, like that’s a reason to kill someone.”

She sighed, and stretched out on the bed with some effort. Mostly because I was taking up the majority of the bed and had no inclination to move to make her job any easier. I was still punished by being cuddled by something very cold and very bony.

“No, Karu’s a pretty terrible role model. I’m thinking more like Lia, or AEGIS. Or me, if you’re daring.” Her face flashed into my field of view long enough to give me a saucy wink before I pushed it back out of my peripheral.

“And how are they any different from me? Lia and AEGIS don’t like killing either.”

“Yeah, for the most part that’s the same. But they’re not exactly opposed to killing in principle either, and that’s all the difference. If either of them thought someone was a danger to themselves or even more, someone they loved, they’d kill without hesitation, and without question. And then they’d sleep fine after.”

“AEGIS doesn’t sleep.”

“Yeah, just nitpick your way out of this one buddy. I’m sure that’ll help you.”

“Ass.”

“Dick. I hear those two go well together if you’re interested.”

“Saga please, just leave me to think. I have a big day coming up, okay?”

She slid off the bed, which surprised me, but maybe it was just because she’d said all she wanted to. It didn’t stop her from pausing at the door though to get in one final word.

“I know you’re just as willing to kill to protect people as Lia and AEGIS, but you should be as willing to accept that and forgive yourself for that as they are, too. If you have things or beliefs you care about, you’ve gotta understand that there are equal and opposite people who will do those things or people harm. Instead of looking at it like you’re murdering a person, consider that death a consequence of your beliefs. And if that upsets you, go re-evaluate your beliefs and see if they’re really worth killing for.”

She paused for a moment, holding the doorknob. “And eat some soup, mister. You’ve got a big day ahead of you tomorrow.”

I was going to retort but the door clicked shut behind her.

Stupid. Like a few words were gonna change my whole perspective on the value of a human life. I could kill to protect Lia and still feel bad about it.

Right?

It just made sense. I could…and should, even. Because killing was wrong. Ignoring that fact led to seeing the world like Karu, which we all agreed was a mess. It stayed your hand when and where you could, kept you from going off the deep-end like a sociopath.

Right?

But then again, I would never stay my hand if it meant Lia was in danger. I’d kill exactly whomever and however many it took. She was just that important to me, right and wrong be damned. But something about fighting to protect Lia being somehow evil just didn’t compute. Killing was wrong. But killing to protect her?

…right?

I closed my eyes and put the pillow back over my face. I fucking hated when Saga made sense. It was easily the second-worst thing she ever did, after not making sense.

Whatever my personal feelings were, I was going to put them aside for now. I had to. Tomorrow as a big day, whether it was going to gunk up my morals or not, I had to be there and had to stop Dragon.

Three times now, we’d met, three times I’d been nothing but a shadow of his power.

I flexed my sore arms and felt electricity shimmering down the surface of my skin.

“Not this time,” I whispered. “No more Defiants, no more Alyssas. This time, the one who dies is you, Dragon.”

And I thought, if he died, no matter the reason, whoever did that was doing good in the world. As much sense as Saga made, as true as her words might have been sometimes, the fact was, she was still wrong. There was objective good in the universe, and putting dragon down was part of it.