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Turner nodded, and Sebastian looked between him and everyone else. Turner’s face was studiously smooth, Mal’ik’s stoic, Garrett’s hostile, Joan uncomfortable and unhappy, Martha’s and Hess’s unyieldingly hard.
“It’s not patent fraud to make an antidote, or a defense, or a neutralizing agent, is it?” Sebastian took a few slow steps toward them, and Joan shrank back. She was a clever woman, but there was a reason she didn’t go to the front lines. She was the weak link. Sebastian focused in on her. “Is it?”
She licked her lips. “We’re not making an antidote for it, Sebastian.”
Sebastian had to ask because he needed to hear the answer, because the place where his mind was going couldn’t be tolerated. “Then why are we getting a scientist from the cartel?”
Martha stepped between him and Joan. “This has all been discussed extensively, and a decision has been reached.”
“Why”—Sebastian raised his voice to a shout and pointed his finger at the window in a rough approximation of the direction of Carta—“are we getting a scientist from the cartel if we’re not making an antidote?”
“Because we are making a duplicate!” Hess snatched Sebastian’s hand out of the air and spun him around to face him. “Because I have decided that it is a weapon we need.”
Sebastian swallowed. He twisted his wrist around to grip Hess’s hand with his own and lowered his voice. “So, while I was still struggling to get back after being dosed with that poison, you decided you needed some for yourself?”
“This isn’t about you.” Hess tried to tug his hand back, but Sebastian held on.
“It doesn’t have to be about me. It’s about Southern Tava, and Ralscoln, and everything we’ve been fighting for.”
“And what is it you think we’re fighting for?” Hess stopped trying to free his hand and pulled Sebastian closer to him, his grip hard and his face harder. “What is it exactly?”
“Something better,” Sebastian spat. “Something better than the invasion and the occupation. Something—”
“No, we—”
“That gas was the occupation, Hess! Don’t you get that?” Sebastian yanked himself out of Hess’s grip and looked at everyone else. “Don’t any of you get that?”
No one said anything, and revulsion rose in Sebastian’s throat.
“No, of course you don’t,” he seethed. “Because none of you have ever experienced it. None of you have ever even seen it. You’ve just sat here so pleasantly removed and decided you wanted it.”
“It’s not that simple,” Martha snapped.
“Maybe I didn’t describe it well enough for you,” Sebastian turned on her. “The fear and the treachery and the distrust and the violence, it was like the first decade of the occupation all rolled up into one little canister and unleashed on a people. We cannot do that.”
“We can.” Hess didn’t raise his voice to match Sebastian’s, and that crushed him more than if Hess had screamed in his face. “What we cannot do is lose.”
Sebastian turned back to him, ignoring everyone else’s watching eyes and didn’t bother to hide his heart breaking. “Hess…”
“We are not fighting for ‘something better.’” Hess’s upper lip curled as he quoted Sebastian back to him. “We are fighting to drive out the Klah’Eel. And if we don’t use everything we have, we will lose. They will stay, and they will cement their hold, and Southern Tava will disappear.”
Sebastian shook his head and backed toward the door. “With you in charge, Southern Tava will disappear anyway.”
Garrett stepped after him with his fists clenched. “You—”
But Sebastian didn’t bother with him. He half fled, half stormed out the door, his eyes and throat burning. Sickening and familiar impotence overwhelmed him as he got out into the hall, and he staggered and caught himself.
He hadn’t felt that since before he joined the Resistance. He thought he’d finally conquered feeling like there was nothing he could do, no value that he could bring, no real person that he could be.
This morning, even with everything going on around him, he’d felt like he’d finally found a full life for himself, and now he was back to being an empty, useless, animated human body.
He heard the door to the war room starting to open up behind him, and he quickly pushed himself off the wall. He hurried back down the hall and to the stairs, not wanting to see anyone that was going to come out of that room.
Instead, Sebastian spent the better part of an hour stalking through their new headquarters in a lather. He indulged his fury with Hess’s decision and his hurt that Hess would make it even in the face of Sebastian’s pleading. He lost himself to the embarrassment of thinking that because Hess fucked Sebastian like he was his whole world that he meant anything to him. And he wrestled with the shame that he had been foolish enough to nurture feelings for the man, even when he had known—had always known—that Hess was cruel and uncompromising.
It was one thing for Sebastian to be loyal to his leader; it was another for him to have started to fall for the man.
Idiot.
