Page 76 of The Sunlit Man

He smiled. If she thought this shell of what he’d once been was a killer… “I don’t have time to teach you, Rebeke. Give me a few weeks and maybe I could train you in some combat skills. But that’s merely learning to fight. Learning to kill…it’s something else.”

“They’re different?”

“One requires skill. The other…”

“No conscience?” she asked softly.

“It’s the existence of a conscience that makes it difficult. Combat training is about preparing you to actregardlessof conscience—usually via repetition. We make it so that your body knows what to do before you actively consider what it will mean. Or what it will cost you.”

“That sounds horrible,” she whispered.

“You’re the one who asked.”

She gripped the control wheel tighter, eyes forward—though the landscape had grown dark. They’d entered the shadow of cloud cover, and rain sprayed the windshield.

“You don’t need to be a killer,” he said, “to get people to respect you, Rebeke.”

“Then how?”

“Keep following your gut. Keep doing what needs to be done. You’ll get there.”

“When?”

“Can’t say,” he replied. “But don’t be so eager. There are burdens to being in charge that you’re not considering. I guarantee it.”

She glanced at him. “Is that what happened to you?”

“Let’s just say that leadership didn’t agree with me.”

That’s not true, Nomad. You were a good leader.

“Aux, ‘good’ isn’t enough. Life, like measurements in science, often depends entirely on your frame of reference.” Then, to keep Rebeke from brooding, he reverted to her language. “I think Elegy is getting better.”

“She remembered something?” Rebeke said, eager.

“No,” he said. “But earlier she didn’t seem quite so feral, quite so eager to kill everyone around her. We had a conversation before we went up the mountain. I think it might have gotten through to her.”

“Thank you,” Rebeke said, “for caring about her.”

“I have empathy for abandoned soldiers,” Nomad said. “Being one myself.” He nodded toward the sliver of sunheart—just a fragment, smaller than a person’s pinkie finger. “What’s that?”

She glanced at it. “Mother’s soul,” she said softly. “The main core was drained almost entirely in the escape. Solemnity Divine cut me off this small piece, as she thought I might want to keep it close on this mission.”

“Do you?”

“I don’t know,” she said. “I’m starting to wonder if I fixate too much on the dead and not enough on living.”

Strange words, the knight notes, for a woman who lives in a society that is powered by the dead.

Nomad picked it up off the dash. He still needed a way to tweak his own soul, to make it so he could fight—actually fight—if he needed to. “Mind if I take it, then?”

“Go ahead,” she replied. “I thought that if I kept her sunheart close, I’d feel her. But I never have.”

He mused on that, turning the sliver of sunheart over in his fingers. Then he sat back, closing his eyes. “I’m an idiot,” he muttered.

Now, now, the knight says. You’re not an idiot, Nomad. An idiot is someone without knowledge or ability. You’re something else: a person with knowledge or ability who misuses it. That makes you a fool instead.

“And you got those definitions from…”

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