and she knows it's what she chose to do and not what everyone expected her to do.”
She stopped, suddenly and burningly aware that she had never once expressed that so clearly to anyone.
Including myself, she realized wonderingly. I've never found the words for it before. Maybe because I've never really looked at it that clearly till I had to explain it to him. And I did have to explain it to him, even if I never have to explain it to another human being ever again. I had to tell him.
“I can see that,” he told her, and she realized he truly could. That he did, with a clarity no one else could have matched. He looked at her for another few moments, and then his eyes darkened and he looked away, as if unable to meet her gaze any longer.
“I can see that,” he repeated in a low voice freighted with some emotion she couldn't quite identify, “because I'm running away, too.”
She stared at him, and suddenly she knew with that emotion was. It was shame. And it was worse than that, for it was leavened with horror as well. It was that darkness within him, and it frightened him as dreadfully as the neural whip had terrified her, but—
“You're wrong,” she told him softly. He froze, and she squeezed his hand. “I know what you're afraid of, and you're wrong.”
Stillness hung between them for long, silent seconds. And then, finally, he looked back down at her, and she felt the roiling force of his emotions.
Neither of them, she realized in that moment, would ever be able to lie to the other. Whatever sang and danced between them, there could be no prevarication, no deceit in it. But the fact that they couldn't lie didn't necessarily mean that what they believed was the truth, either, and she felt the power of his rejection. Felt his need to strangle the monster before the monster destroyed him or, far worse, the people he cared about.
“I know what you're afraid of,” she repeated, and squeezed his hand even more tightly, shaking it between them for emphasis. “I know. I don't know how I know, and I don't know why, but I do, and you're wrong.”
“No,” he half-whispered. “You're wrong. You weren't there. You didn't see.”
“I didn't have to be there then,” she said gently. “I was here now. I saw the man who came for me, who saved me, and I know that man better than I've ever known anyone else in my entire life. I know him better than I know myself, because I see and feel him whole and entire. Because—Oh, I don't have the words for it, Alfred, and neither do you, but you know what I mean!”
“Allison—”
His hand tightened on hers, and for the first time she felt its true strength in that viselike pressure. It hurt, but it was a good hurt, and she met his eyes unflinchingly, knowing what he was about to say.
“I got people killed,” he told her, his voice frayed around the edges, his eyes bottomless as interstellar space. “So many people. And I killed so many others myself. It was . . . it was—God, I don't know how to tell anyone what it was like!”
He was trembling, and she laid her left hand atop the one which was crushing her right as she saw the ghosts in his eyes and felt what he was feeling as he faced them.
“I had to do it,” he said. “I had to. If I hadn't, even more people would've died, and not just on Clematis. I didn't have a choice, and I knew it, and it was what I was trained to do. But I did it so well. I was like . . . like a machine, Allison. It was all ice and focus and purpose and I'd never been so alive in my life. And it was even worse than that. It was a need . . . a hunger. I knew exactly what I was doing every moment, and I never hesitated, never flinched, never once stopped to think about all the lives I was taking. At the end I was covered, literally covered with blood, and I probably shot at least a dozen people who were only trying to surrender before I could make myself stop.”
His soul was in his eyes, strangled by the ghosts of his dead, and she recognized the anguish in it. She understood it, and she felt