“I need to know something,” I said, leaning closer to Albert, as soon as Lou stepped out of the room. “A friend is wounded, it will be fatal if untreated, but you have what you need to take care of it. If you choose to do so, you may be captured, and there may be significant consequences if you are. What would you do?”

Albert didn’t even seem to entertain the notion that this was hypothetical. His eyes looked terribly sad as he took my hand in his, blood covered and all, squeezing it tightly.

“Aera,” he said softly, “I know you enough to know that you acted in the way you believed was right. You mustn’t berate yourself. If you disagree with the choice now, then you are better informed for the future.”

“This isn’t about me right now,” I said, clenching my jaw in hopes of keeping from tearing up.

I may want to simply destroy my tear ducts. I cry too easily.

“This is about you,” I said. “Right now. I want to know. What would you do?”

“I? I have never been one to turn away from those who needed me, but I have also never been in that situation,” he said.

“You’d have saved him, then,” I said, sitting down.

“Perhaps,” he said. “It depends on a great many factors. Tell me what happened.”

I looked at him in silence for a long moment.

“Lou hates magic,” I said. “Fears it, maybe. I don’t know. I’ve trusted her, but…”

I swallowed.

“You question her counsel,” he supplied carefully. “You wonder how she can advise you if she objects to the very power that you require advice for.”

“Yes, exactly, yes,” I said. “I don’t know if she’d have made me abandon him had she learned what I’m able to do, had she trusted my abilities. She’s never even been curious about it.”

“A shame,” he said, with a gentle smile. “Your ability is a curious thing.”

“I don’t know what to do,” I said, curling in a ball.

“No one can truly answer that for you,” he said, his voice kind. “People can give advice, others can give orders… but for the question, what is the right thing to do? No one can know. We can but try.”

“Then how do I avoid doing the wrong thing?” I asked.

“Even inaction can be the wrong thing, at times,” he said. “You can never be certain to avoid it. I have often wondered at things I have done, or not done. Hindsight may share insight, but the future is shrouded in mystery. What can be done, then? My answer is but one of many, and it is this: to educate oneself; to pursue a brighter future for all; to care for all mankind; to be ever vigilant and ever hopeful.”

“It’s a lovely thing to say, but it still doesn’t make it simple,” I grumbled.

A serious expression crossed his face.

“It is tempting, and easy, to look for simple answers to these sorts of questions,” he said. “Answers that you can apply without thinking about the situation, without straining your imagination to the end results. Blind obedience to faith, or dogma, or nations, leads to terrible outcomes.”

He sighed, and looked at the wall for a moment, his eyes distant, before returning his attention to me.

“In Germany, today, my own country of origin,” he said, his voice saddened. “They seek a simple answer, and they find it in exterminating others in blind adherence to a new dogma. I wonder how many Nazis would seek to kill Jews such as myself, were they to truly think on the matter, and come to carefully considered conclusions themselves.”

We were silent for a moment while I tried to make myself think. My hands were still soaked in his blood, in the blood of my friend, and I…

“So your answer… is that there can never be ‘an answer,’” I said softly.

“Save for thinking, learning, growing, and trying,” he said wryly.

I groaned.

“So what am I to do, then?” I asked, staring at my hands.

“I have no simple answer for you,” he said. “I can only entreat you to learn, to grow, and to never give up.”

I moved to sit next to him and leaned my head on his shoulder. Several minutes passed in quiet company.

The door burst open, with a sound that was painfully loud compared to the silence I’d been enjoying.

“Mr. Einstein, Ms. Koryn,” the soldier said, looking like he’d just sprinted here. “The Germans are making a move. Looks like they’re coming here. You need to leave the base immediately.”

Albert did not stand immediately, but looked to me, his expression concerned.

“I’m not leaving,” I said quietly.

“This is non negotiable,” the soldier said. “Please follow me.”

“Go,” I said to Albert, getting to my feet.

He stood as well, and tried to brush the drying blood off his hands as he did so. I quickly removed the blood from him, yet I still couldn’t bring myself to remove it from myself.

“I need you to be safe,” I told him. “I proved today I can’t guarantee your safety. I’ll take care of myself.”

“Very well,” he said. “Please do not be incautious with your own life, Aera. I would be saddened to lose your company.”

He smiled at me, but his face was tight with worry.

“Ms. Koryn,” the soldier began.

“As you said, it is non negotiable,” I told him crisply. “Inform the General that I will no longer pretend to follow his orders.”

The soldier blanched a little, but nodded, and escorted Albert away.

I walked after them, heading to the vehicles, since I imagined there was a good chance I would see the General overseeing the process.

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The soldier brought Albert to him and they exchanged words briefly. The general looked annoyed, and glared in my direction. I didn’t feel… whole enough to react.

My heart continued to pump blood in my veins, while Nicholas’s blood continued to dry on my hands. Unimportant things like people moving and yelling happened around me for some unknown amount of time.

A trusted person (was she?) grabbed me by the shoulders and hauled me into a jeep. I didn’t resist as much as I could have. Magic requires emotional investment; commitment. I couldn’t commit to resisting her, and thus my body was moved.

The jeep began to move.

Even inaction can be the wrong thing, at times, a memory whispered in my mind.

I was doing nothing. That was why the blood was on my hands.

“Where are we going?” I asked, scarcely aware of my words.

“Into the forest,” she said. “We have a radio. My job is to get you safe, get you able to get information, and transmit that information as needed. It’s just us since we figure you’d get all difficult if soldiers were with us.”

Getting information was an action. A good action, I thought. This was okay.

Lou took care of both driving and the radio. That seemed not okay. After a few instructions, I was able to manage the controls of the radio. Lou did the talking, though. That was okay.

The base was quickly overtaken by the Germans. Based on the radio comments, it sounded like they used short range teleportation to bypass the majority of the soldiers, and used simple waves of force to knock the remaining ones to the ground. They quickly captured the General. They never even tried using guns against the soldiers. Pash must have informed them about the mass-produced protections I’d made, as their offensive was perfectly designed to never even trigger those defenses.

“Aera,” she said, sounding like she’d been trying to get my attention for a little while. “Come on, Aera…”

“Sorry,” I said.

“They want you,” she said. “They tried to negotiate for your surrender over the radio, and I politely told them to go fuck themselves.”

“Why do they want me?” I asked.

“Why does that matter?” she retorted. “They can’t have you. Obviously. Gathering info for the base is a bust, we’ve got to get the hell out of dodge.”

But it does matter, I thought. Pretty much anything they could want, other than killing or enslaving me, is probably worth negotiating over.

A strange feeling came over me for a fraction of a second, and I blinked.

“Magesense,” I said.

“What?” Lou asked.

“I think we’ve just been spotted by something like my long range magic tracking,” I said.

A long string of expletives left Lou’s mouth, but she couldn’t go any faster. We were driving through the woods, with the aim of avoiding being followed conventionally, but it drastically limited our speed. Lou glanced at the area map and compass, presumably looking for roads.

With magic, I could keep up with cars on a road. Compared to this speed… but I couldn’t flee with Lou. I should have learned how to move quickly with someone else. That was so obvious.

Gods, I was an idiot.

But then, even if I could take Lou and run… would that be the right thing to do?

The blood on my hands burned.

Running with Lou wasn’t an option. I had to think. What were my options? And of those, which was the right thing to do?

I didn’t know enough about the situation I was in. That made it easy. Getting information was the right thing to do.

The boundaries of my soul - or rather, my spirit, to use the distinctions I’d made for Liam - flew from me to encompass the forest. My magesense slipped through everything that was dead, and crashed over everything that lived.

Strange. My range was further than it had ever been. But then… I needed to be correct, this time. I needed the information, from the very depths of my soul.

Four locations tangled with my extended spirit, lighting up like fires in the night. Three were somewhat dim - easily identified as mundanes equipped with a handful of enchantments. The fourth was startlingly blurry, but not bright. I couldn’t tell if he was a spellcaster or not, but I could clearly see that he was almost as thickly covered with enchantments as my father tended to be. Except, the large number of enchantments was, with no exceptions, weak.

Like the walls of their encampment.

“They’re catching up,” I said in a monotone.

Lou grabbed her gun. I twitched. A bullet was why Nicholas’s blood was on my hands.

No. I am why Nicholas’s blood is on my hands.

I stayed silent.

“Halt!” came a voice through the forest, thickly accented.

“Fuck off!” Lou yelled back as she gunned it and ran over a small sapling. The jeep trucked on with no issues.

A sphere of fire flew through the air, oddly beautiful in its bright contrast with the darkness of the forest. It splattered against a tree a few yards ahead of us, blossoming into a rather sedate explosion. It couldn’t have done more than superficial harm - even the squirrels would have suffered nothing but disorientation and burnt fur.

What was that attack? A warning?

“Aera! Can you get them?” Lou shouted, as the man’s voice yelled out again for us to stop.

An invitation, maybe? He wasn’t being threatening to me, after all.

“Aera, now is not the time to zone out,” Lou growled at me.

She was right. It wasn’t the time for inaction.

But what was the right thing to do?

Fear bubbled up in my chest, paralyzing my mind and magic again. I didn’t want to decide. I didn’t want the consequences of that decision to belong to me.

It hurt. The fear tore at my heart and my eyes watered again, the accursed things. I swallowed past the lump in my throat and stared at my hands.

They burned, and it was worse than the fear. If I did nothing, Lou’s blood might mix with Nicholas’s.

“Cowardice,” I whispered, staring at my hands in horror.

That was the flavor of the blood on my hands. That was the true origin of all the blood on my hands. I’d known, but it had never burned so fiercely. Nothing had been stronger than the fear.

I clawed at my chest, bent double and shaking, writhing beneath the burning agony of guilt.

I was a coward. I didn’t want to be.

Then don’t, Liam’s strong voice echoed from memory.

The pain was stronger than the fear, but it was more than that. It was better than the fear. I embraced the burning agony as my attention shifted.

Hate grew in my heart, hate of this blemish that had stolen so much from me. It was clear, now, as the brightness of the burning contrasted against the darkness of the fear.

Another gentle explosion emerged, a wave of heat passing over the car.

“Aera!” Lou screamed, fear in her voice.

I unraveled, and gazed at my hands again, with my own blood mixing in from the fevered scratching at my heart.

A kind, if greedy, friend lost his leg. A man who loved me suffered an unnecessarily painful goodbye. Six body bags lay outside a building. Several men hunted me, to no consequence. I, too, suffered these last years, trapped in a prison of my own making.

I knew what the alternative looked like. What it felt like. I’d known it the first night I’d made love to Liam, when lust had overwhelmed my fear. That was me, too. Just a better version of me. I remembered how much I loved the feeling, how much I revered the memories, despite how distant they felt now.

I did not want this cowardice, and so I rebelled against it. The fear was not me. It was my enemy. It burned as I condemned it.

As it burned, it seemed to change, tearing out a chunk of my heart with it. Pain, instead of compulsion.

Pain I could bear. I deserved it.

My face raised to the sky and I screamed.

“Enough!”