Hank didn’t look great. He didn’t even look up as the door to his room opened, instead remaining splayed out on his bed. His stubble was growing in thicker and his clothes were dirty and worn thin. A hole remained in his pants from Artemis’s shot, and the flesh beneath was bruised purple. Worst of all were his eyes, that haunted look in them, like someone who had lost everything and knew that it was all his fault.

I motioned for Seren to take a seat but remained standing as I shut the door behind me. I kept my distance for now, though. “Hello, I’m not sure if we’ve officially met. I’m Placid Wainwright and this is my factory.”

Hank looked over to me, his head rolling to the side on his pillow. “Fuck off.” His voice croaked out, rough and unsteady.

“Well, I should have expected that.” I sighed and pulled over another chair, sitting down next to Hank and his bed. “I’ve been told that your name is Hank. Is that correct?”

Hank nodded.

“Okay, good. That’s something.” I glanced over to Seren briefly, who was busy studying their notebook. I turned back to Hank, trying to meet his gaze, but his eyes flickered away as I did. “Have you been treated well here? Has anyone tried to hurt you?”

“I’ve been fine.” Hank rolled his head back up, staring up at the ceiling. “No one has said anything to me. Not even Ai when she brought my banquet.” He motioned over to an empty bowl resting on his desk.

“Alright, that’s something at least.” I glanced off to the side myself. “I was going to ask if you’re doing alright, but you’re clearly not.”

“Oh, I’m doing just fine!” He let out a laugh that sounded more like a hacking cough. “Just enjoying my staycation in this pleasant little abode, has everything a person could ever need.” He murmured something under his breath that sounded to me like “better than my old apartment though.”

“How do you feel about the stuff you did for Chad?”

His expression went still then, face freezing in the middle of a sneer before turning into an intentional blank. “I did what I had to do in order to survive. We didn’t all get some fancy place handed to us, some of us had to fight and scrape for every inch. We don’t all get shit given to us.”

I didn’t respond, but simply kept my own face blank as we made eye contact finally. He grunted, then continued. “Sure, some of it sucked.” He jerked his head to the side, trying to break that eye contact, but it lingered. “Sure, okay, I didn’t like doing it. But I was just-“

“Just following orders?” I let out a heavy breath from my nose, as that fire began to ember in my belly.

“Yeah!” Hank shouted and then pushed himself into a seated position. “You would have to, if you were in my position. Surrounded by monsters on all sides, needing every edge you could to hold onto just in order to make it another day. And then you have these fucking wimps who couldn’t stand up in a fight, and you’re trying to make them useful and they refuse to listen and you gotta make them useful, or else all of your friends are going to die and it fucking sucks, but you gotta do what you gotta do.”

I nodded slowly, taking in Hank’s words without judgment or bias, just letting them sink into me. My gut roiled in disgust, in a desire to see vengeance done, to find retribution for the evils that this man perpetrated. I didn’t listen to my gut, though, this was not the place to allow instinct to guide me, I needed to think rationally, I needed to figure out all of the angles.

“Sounds like a rough job,” I said.

“Yeah.” Hank buried his head in his hands. “Yeah, it fucking sucked. He made me get the people who tried to get away, and bring them back. For their safety he said. Sometimes had to take them down in order to get them to cooperate. Do you think I like punching old ladies and kids?”

“I don’t really know what you do and don’t like.”

Hank looked up with red, moist eyes. “I’m not a fucking monster, okay? I know you all think I am, but I’m not. I’m fucking not!” Hank’s voice lifted into a shout, then cracked as he seemed to sink into himself. “I didn’t like it.”

“That’s good.” I realized that he was in a very vulnerable position here, and while it could have all been a plot, I wanted to hope that it wasn’t. “That’s good, I promise. If you had liked what you were doing, then this conversation would be over. But, you seem like someone with a conscience who was in a rough position, and had to make some rough choices, and you made the ones you thought best.”

“Yeah,” Hank said. “They don’t get it though, I don’t think they ever will. Probably want me dead.”

Stolen from its rightful author, this tale is not meant to be on Amazon; report any sightings.

“Right now, this isn’t about what they want. It’s about what you want.” I leaned in closer to him, resting my elbows on my knees. “What do you want from your life now?”

Hank was quiet for a long moment, but then began to cry, quietly, the tears carving a path down his unwashed face. “I want to run. I want to move. I want to be free. I want to be safe. I want so many damn things that I’ll never get.”

“If we let you go, will you go back to Chad?”

He straightened up at Chad’s name, almost like he had been slapped, before loosening his posture. “Nah, fuck that guy.”

I glanced more to Seren, before setting my jaw and looking back to Hank. “What if I wanted to get the rest of Chad’s men out from under his thumb? Would you be willing to help with that?”

“Some of those guys suck as bad as Chad, but the rest of them.” He trailed off into thought. “They deserve a chance to get away too, you know.”

“Okay.” I rose slowly to my feet and put my chair back where it was before. “I can’t make this decision on my own, but I’m going to talk with everyone else tonight. I trust you, though.”

Hank stared at me for a long moment, before finally nodding and laying back down. Seren rose to join me and we both stepped out. I locked the door behind us and nodded at them to follow me as I led the way to my bedroom. Within, we took seats and I fell silent, letting my thoughts work through me.

“So, how are you feeling?” Seren asked softly.

“I’m surprisingly okay. Still kinda processing, you know?” I offered them a gentle smile and took their hands into mine. “How are you doing?”

“I’m surprisingly okay.” They offered me a quick grin. “Really though, I’m doing alright. That’s more than I’ve ever heard Hank say before, though, he’s normally so quiet.”

“Maybe quiet with you.” I let out a heavy breath. “But I feel like he’s the kind of person that’s more outgoing with his friends, but who keeps his circle of friends real small.” I squeezed Seren’s hands. “And now he’s feeling the sting of feeling abandoned. He must have been friends with some of Chad’s guys, those people he wants to liberate from his control.

“I honestly think that he doesn’t care for Chad, not anymore at least. That grief, that anguish, it felt real to me in a way that-” I cut off, looking down. “It felt real to me.”

Seren nodded, seeming to understand some of what I was talking about, some of the pain that was reflected in my eyes. We didn’t speak of it, but they nodded in understanding. “I think you might be right. Now we just need to convince the others that you’re right.”

I frowned deeply. “They are going to be hard to convince, but it is worth doing. Hell, even if we only buy some time, that’s better than signing him up for execution. Even if we can’t find some way to let him help us, then we can at least show some mercy.”

We remained in that space, silence, hand-in-hand, for an extended time, allowing the minutes to stretch out in that space of peace and quiet. Here and there, one of us would feel an impulse to move, signaled by a tightening of grips, but it would fade sooner or later. Eventually, they said, “I don’t think now is the time, really.”

“Yeah.” I smiled a touch sadly, but nodded. “We got too much on our plates right now. Maybe once things finally calm down, once there’s some stability, then we can see what we are.”

Seren smiled, far more brightly than me. “Yeah, that sounds very good to me. We can keep this for now, though. You’re nice to spend time with.”

I flushed before laughing and slowly standing, only then releasing their hands. “I should get to work, hopefully burn off some of these nerves. It’ll help me get ready for the meeting.”

“I’m going to prepare my notes and make some copies for everyone.” They tilted their head to the side. “Did you know that there’s a printer in the Research Lab? I can scan in hand-written stuff and it’ll print it out all typed.”

“Huh.” I shook my head. “Never knew it could do that. Good to know.”

Soon I was back on the factory floor, getting prepped for my next development push. First, I made mines for the other three attunements that I had access to. While the basic elemental ores weren’t super interesting to me, I was deeply interested in the potentials of the Wyrd attunement. I sent all of that ore into different smelters, collecting the ingots as they popped out. The first set of ingots went to make a Wyrd Mine.

The second set of ingots I fashioned into spikes. For all that the spikethrower wasn’t really carrying its weight anymore, the spikes were still the best ways for me to see the use of an attunement in battle, and from there I could design other testing for its usage. I only made a couple sets of them, I didn’t want to burn too much of this stuff if I didn’t need to.

I headed out into the western expansion to do my live fire testing, as there weren’t really that many people moving around out there, and those that were kept to the cleared areas. So, once I was carefully sequestered away within the trees, I took aim and fired off a Wyrd spike. The spike didn’t look much different from a standard spike, but had more of a bronzeish appearance in contrast to the steel of the standard. It also didn’t do anything when it hit into a tree, thudding into the mass of the trunk.

I considered for a moment, then an inspiration hit me. Wyrd was all about destiny and fate, things which were more humanistic rather than naturalistic. So, I spent some time building a simple dummy out of sticks and twine, setting it up against a tree as a target. It had a vaguely human shape, and when I looked at it, I felt this sensation that I could assign it the concept of being an enemy. My mind clicked and the designation fell into place.

My skull throbbed suddenly as I felt new erg patterns flowing to my forehead. I gripped my head firmly in hand, rubbing the heels of my palms against the pain, but it continued to mount and mount, until something burst and the erg flowed like a river released from a dam.