Page 120 of Cast in Conflict

“There’s no chair.”

“I know.”

Terrano rolled his eyes.

“I wasn’t planning on having an audience.”

“I don’t count!” He spoke Elantran. Kaylin realized he’d been speaking Elantran all along.

“I’m trying to remember that,” Sedarias snapped. “I could honestly kill you right now.”

Terrano nodded as if she were talking about the weather.

“If you were going to kill him, he’d’ve been dead a long time ago.”

“We needed him.”

“And now?”

“Why don’t you finish what you were saying before he interrupted you?”

Kaylin nodded. “I was saying—”

“That I’m unsafe. I’m frightening.”

“I was saying that it’s not always safe to be around you. Given today, you can’t argue with that.”

“I didn’t try.” Sedarias was also speaking Elantran.

“But...if I were one of your cohort—and I’m not, and I can’t be—”

“Do not say it,” Sedarias snapped at Terrano.

Terrano shrugged, but kept quiet.

“I would trust you with my life.”

Sedarias stared at her in silence.

“I mean: you’re not safe to be around, but you would always keep me safe. They don’t stay with you because they had no choice. Terrano did have a choice. He didn’t have to come back. He did.”

“It wasn’t necessarily for me—”

“Bullshit.”

Both Terrano and Sedarias stared at her again, for entirely different reasons. Kaylin reddened. It was, not surprisingly, Sedarias who spoke first.

“There were twelve of us. It’s not because of me—we fought all the time. We still do.”

Kaylin turned to Terrano. “You tell her,” she said.

“Well, but, she has a point. It’s not just Sedarias I missed. All of us are part of the same whole—all except Teela. She doesn’t quite know how to fit in.”

“She probably doesn’t appreciate the attempts to make her fit in, either,” Kaylin said, thinking about the various cohort arguments—all removed, when they could be, to the training rooms as people disincorporated in their emotional distress. “But she went to the green with me for you. For all of you. You were, besides her mother, her biggest loss, her biggest regret.

“And he has you back. It’s difficult—but it’s always been difficult to fit eleven different people into one space.

“They’re not afraid of you, Sedarias. They haven’t been afraid of you for a long time. Afraid for you isn’t the same. Yes, I agree, they probably traded names because they thought you were a threat. And I know that one: you give the dangerous people what they want so they don’t notice you and you don’t die. But you’re always waiting for the moment you can flee.

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