Page 116 of Hijack the Seas: Seismic

“You were about to tell her the truth.”

“And that’s bad?”

“It is when we don’t know what we’re facing here. She saved us out there in the rock fall. Best not to alienate an asset in an emergency.”

I frowned, although he did have a point. But then, so did she. “It sounds like she thinks you’re going to free the slaves if we win.”

“That would be . . . difficult.”

“Difficult isn’t impossible.”

“No, but if they’re free, we don’t have much of an army. They make up a good percentage of the Alorestri forces.”

“So, we’re supposed to send slaves out to die for us?”

“It’s their fight, too. If we lose this war, none of us may survive. Or they may look back on their time as slaves to the Alorestri as ‘the good old days.’”

“Maybe, but you and I signed onto this. We made a choice, one they never had.”

“Did we?” He looked at me. “How much of a choice did you ever have? How much did I? Unless you count the choice to die on our feet or kneeling!”

That last was said in the same low voice he’d been using, giving us some degree of privacy, but there was genuine anger in it. “We’re supposed to be the good guys,” I reminded him.

“We’re trying to be. I’m trying to be.” He was quiet for a moment. “Sometimes, it’s hard to know what that is.”

I lay my head on his shoulder and felt his arm go around me. “Yeah. There’s no manual.”

“What?”

“I’ve been saying since I landed this job that there should be a manual, but there isn’t. For a long time, I wondered why no Pythia ever made one, wrote down a how-to guide, a top-ten list, something. They left all kinds of other writings, whole libraries full of them, but not that.

“Then I worked with Gertie for a while and started to understand. There’s no manual because there can’t be one. She told me once to trust my heart, that it was the best guide I’d ever get in this crazy world. I thought that sounded strange, but I’m starting to understand what she meant.”

“And what did she mean?”

“That in times like these, you just have to feel your way, day to day. You want to be perfect; you think you have to be perfect, but none of us are. But the fact that you want to be, that it weighs on you when you’re not, that you keep on trying even when everything seems hopeless . . . it’s what makes you a good person.” I looked up at him. “A good man.”

“I’m not a good man.”

“If you’re not, I don’t know one.”

“Then you don’t know one.” He got up abruptly and walked away down the side of the canal.

“Pritkin—” I started after him, but Alphonse, standing at the top of the steps and probably eavesdropping, caught my arm.

“Give him a minute. He’s had a tough couple of weeks.”

Haven’t we all? I thought, wondering what the hell.

“And guys like him, who think they’re in charge, blame themselves when things go wrong.”

“This had nothing to do with him. This was Tony—”

“Yeah, but still. You wanna talk? Talk after the crisis is over. You’ll get further.”

And it was hard to argue with that.

After a few more minutes, the group reassembled, and we walked on.

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