“I have an idea,” Miria said, breaking the silence that had settled over them. It was the following day, and she had been working through the paperwork on her desk, the finished pile finally towering over the ‘to-do’ pile. Lysander sat at his own desk, pretending to work but mostly trying not to fall asleep while fiddling with a paperclip. Without the pressing exhaustion of his first night home, he found he had trouble sleeping in the same place as Red and Noah. He kept imagining increasingly unrealistic scenarios--one involved them turning into literal shadows and wriggling under the crack of his bedroom door and smothering him--until he buried his head in his pillows and forced his mind to settle enough to fall into a fitful sleep.

So, when Miria suddenly spoke, his adrenaline kickstarted. “What? You do? About what?” he rapid fire shouted.

Miria blinked at him, surprise taking over her expression. “Uhhh, you okay, Lys?” she asked before shaking her head, “Nevermind, it’s fine. Let me get this idea out before I forget.”

“Okay, shoot.”

“Alright, so I was digging through Dad’s desk and I found some drafts for that law he wanted to pass prohibiting women from richer families from working. Remember that?”

He had completely forgotten about it, but he recalled Miria complaining about it what felt like ages ago because her father had been pushing her to find more household hobbies. “Oh yeah, what happened with that anyways?”

“Right! So, apparently the council wasn’t a huge fan of the proposition because my dad left a bunch of notes in the margins of the draft for changes he could make to make it more palatable,” she explained. She shot out of her chair and presented the stapled document for him to look through. Flipping it open to the last page, she tapped on a long paragraph of text in Joseph’s handwriting near the bottom.

Lysander skimmed through it until he got to the last line: Council set on shortening Barrier range; can dispose. “What does this mean?”

“I think Dad was looking into alternatives himself, and this was one of his solutions to the job crisis. Obviously, it was super sexist, but maybe the bones of it could work.”

Pinching the bridge of his nose, he stared at the last line until the words stopped making sense as English and turned into gibberish. “But doesn’t he imply there that the council wouldn’t listen?”

“Well, yes, but I think if we changed it, we could give it another shot! I was thinking we could rewrite it to stipulate that families above a certain income threshold would be limited to only one person employed per household. That would open up some space for more families to afford housing. It might be a tough sell, but they’ve gotta be willing to hear alternatives, right?” Miria wanted to believe the best of people, but Lysander had begun to have doubts about the kind of people who ran the city.

“I don’t know, Mir. It’s worth a shot, though,” he said.

His reticence deflated the excitement on her face, but she still nodded. “I’ll work on a draft to present to Council then. Maybe Uncle Tony would be willing to back me up.”

He scoffed, the sound escaping before he could stop it. “Wouldn’t count on it,” he mumbled under his breath.

Miria’s eyebrows pinched. “I know he’s not always the most sensitive guy, but he’s not Hitler, Lys. He wouldn’t just condemn hundreds of thousands to death if there was another way.”

There was no sense in turning her against her last family member. “You’re right. He might listen to you.”

She strided back to her desk and grabbed her planner, penciling in a note to herself to speak with her uncle presumably. “Okay! Awesome! It feels good to have some kind of plan, at least. I’m not grasping at smoke now, anyways.”

“True, maybe we can at least push the deadline back, y’know? Give us more time.” Lysander had never been so pessimistic in his life, especially with Miria, but he couldn’t bring forth any amount of excitement or expectation while the reality of what he had done swirled just out of Miria’s reach. If she knew the truth, he wouldn’t even be here with her, and that sliced into him like a thousand cuts.

Miria looked concerned as she noticed the washed out pallor of his skin, the sallow tinge under his eyes. “You can talk to me, Lys. I know things were kind of weird between you and dad at the end, but he loved you. You don’t have to beat yourself up about not making up with him.”

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Everything Miria said since Joseph’s death seemed designed to make Lysander want to crawl under a rock never to be seen again. “I know, Mir. Thanks for worrying about me, but I’m gonna be fine.”

“If you say so, I trust you.”

Another knife wedged into his lungs, but he pushed the feeling aside. He had to keep it together while they did what they could for the people of the city.

“Yeah. Thanks.”

The conversation weighed on him the rest of the day, replays of Miria’s voice saying she trusted him niggling into everything he tried to do to distract himself. Because of that, he arrived home that night in a black mood, ignoring Red’s greeting and Noah’s indifference and sequestering himself in his room.

Digging his fingers deep into his scalp, he pulled at his hair and allowed all of his self hatred to overflow into angry tears. Grabbing his pillow, he screamed into it, but for once it wasn’t enough to settle even a small piece of him, and he had to throw it across the room. It crashed onto his desk, scattering the pencil holder and picture frames he kept there. The pens and pencils clattered to the floor, tinkling mutely against the carpet. Still it wasn’t enough. He grabbed the other pillow off his bed, but just as he was about to launch it across the room, a hand latched onto his wrist and halted him.

Flipping around, he saw Red behind him, giving him her fucking impassive face, and he wrenched his hand away. “Get the fuck out of here. You told me I could have my room to myself.”

“I lied.”

A humorless laugh clawed from his throat. “What else is new?” Shoving the pillow into her chest, he collapsed onto the end of his bed. “Why couldn’t you have just killed me instead?” he whispered, the pain of it punching out of his chest, the bones splintering from the force.

Instead of answering, she kneeled in front of him. Her green eyes roved over his tortured expression. After several moments of that, she finally spoke, “I already answered that question, yeah?”

“Doesn’t mean I like the answer.”

“When did you get so bitter?”

Glaring down at her, he responded, “Oh, I don’t know, maybe around the time you murdered my foster father? Does that sound familiar to you?”

Tilting her head, she looked up through her eyelashes, “I thought you said he wasn’t your dad?”

A sound of pure frustration escaped him, “You’re impossible! It’s like you were born on an alien planet!”

Propping her elbows onto his knees and leaning her head onto an open palm, she narrowed her eyes and sat silently for another few moments, long enough that Lysander wanted to shove her off him just to watch her fall on her butt. “I watched you a lot before we met in person. You helped an old lady cross the street.”

Conversing with her was always an exercise in patience for him. “What? I did?” He thought back to a month ago, trying to remember what she was talking about, but it was difficult with everything that had happened since clouding it. Finally, he reached the memory she must be referencing, but he only recalled it because he had been teased by Sam mercilessly when he arrived late for work. The old woman had stopped him while they had been waiting for a line of buses to pass down the street and wanted to show him pictures of her long list of grandchildren. He had struggled to disengage, especially when she kept telling him he looked “sharp” in his business attire, so he had offered to walk with her so that he could at least keep moving while she talked. “Oh yeah, she was really nice. A little chatty though.”

“You’re the one who seems like an alien to me,” she offered, and the admittance caused his mouth to pop open in surprise. He had no idea the life she had led before meeting him, other than the small amounts he knew about the Alexandria Wells controversy, but that had all happened when he had been a child, so most of the details were too fuzzy to truly remember. Maybe she had no real basis for normality? It didn’t change anything, but it was kind of nice to know even this much.

“Oh,” he breathed out. Sighing, he continued, “I don’t know what to do with that. I’m just so furious with you. Honestly though, I don’t even know if it’s you I’m angry with or if it’s just me trying to put the blame on you for my own stupid mistake.”

“I don’t understand why this is hurting you so much, but I’m sorry I caused it.”

It was the first time she had acknowledged her part in his current misery without excuses and he didn’t know what to do with it. “I don’t think I’ll ever forgive you, Lexi. I can’t.”

Closing her eyes, she nodded and stood. “Fair enough, but at least you’ll be alive while you think about it.” And then she left, closing the door softly behind her.

Lysander fell back onto the bed, his hands combing into his hair and forced himself to think about, really think about, Joseph plotting his death for the first time since the day he died. Someone he had trusted to always have his best interests at heart had sat down and decided to kill him, had hired multiple people to accomplish it, in fact. It was only by some twist of fate that the first person to take the job had apparently imprinted on him like some kind of baby duck and decided to save him. The knowledge still seemed unbelievable, but he couldn’t deny the rightness of it either. It didn’t make what Lysander himself had done any more palatable, but it did help to make it slightly more bearable. And he could use it to propel himself forward for at least a little longer.

Composing himself, he stood and exited his bedroom to join Noah and Lexi in the living room and tell them about Miria’s new plan.