The name breaks something. Not loudly. Not dramatically. It gives way inside my chest with the dull collapse of old stone.
“I told her I would get her to the ships,” I say. “I told her she was safe because I needed her to stop crying and breathe through the smoke. She believed me.”
I cannot look at Evie now. I look at the display case, at the reflection of my scarred face in the glass, at the monster wearing a worker’s apron dusted with flour.
“I failed them.”
Evie’s voice comes low and fierce. “No.”
The force in that one word strikes hard.
“You were not there.”
“No, I wasn’t. But I heard what you just said.”
“I said I failed.”
“You said command gave you bad intelligence, the route collapsed, extraction came late, artillery hit civilians, your squad died, and you still kept carrying people.”
My jaw tightens. “I was responsible.”
“You were abandoned with an impossible task and then left to blame yourself because dead commanders and late ships couldn’t carry it.”
I turn toward her.
She is crying, but not the way people cry from pity. Her face is flushed with anger. Her hands are shaking. She looks ready to fight every officer, every order, every warship, every piece of history that put a child in my arms and then told me strength should have been enough.
“That little girl should be alive,” I say.
“Yes,” Evie says. “She should. And the people who put her in that corridor should have moved the stars to make sure she was. But you were one soldier, Kauss. One. Even if you’re huge and terrifying and impossibly strong, you were one man in a war that used civilians like fuel.”
The words land too close to truth.
I shake my head. “Vakutan warriors protect those who cannot fight.”
“And who protected you?”
I have no answer.
The silence that follows is not empty. It is unbearable.
Evie steps closer. “Who protected you afterward?”
“No one.”
My voice is almost too quiet to hear.
Her face changes. The anger does not vanish. It deepens into something hotter, something that makes her look more dangerous than any weapon in the zoo.
“That is what I’m mad about,” she says. “Not that you survived. Not that you carry grief. I’m mad that nobody looked at you afterward and said, ‘This should not have been yours alone.’ I’m mad that they let you call yourself cursed because it was easier than admitting the whole damn war was built to crush people exactly like you.”
I breathe once. It shakes.
“Evie.”
She reaches up.
I could step back. I should.
