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When I came, Arcos hid the children from me here, some Gold, some Silver, some Pink and Brown. Tactus could kill half of them with a lazy swing of his razor before we reach them.
“Tactus, remember your brothers,
” I say to him, looking at the children.
“My brothers are shits.” He laughs coarsely, voice sounding strange. “Said I should get out of your shadow. Mother calls me the Mighty Servant. Did you know that?”
Children sob in the corner. One buries her face in her mother’s lap. The women are not armed. These are not warriors like Victra and Mustang. A Brown nursemaid covers a Gold child’s eyes. I hear Arcos in the tunnel behind me.
“Lune’s orders are wrong,” I say to Tactus.
“She asked me if I could fill your place, Reaper,” Tactus says quietly. “Said she didn’t think I could. Said I was so long in your shadow that she didn’t know if I would ever be more than an echo of you. I told her I could do anything you could do.”
“Tactus, she is evil.”
“Is she?” He spits blood on the ground, still not facing me. “They say the same thing about you. They wonder who you think you are to do what you do. To challenge the men and women you challenge. They wonder what right you have.”
“We all have a right to challenge. That’s the point.”
“The point. Was there a point?” he asks. “I was never told. You took me for granted. Never telling me anything.” Just as I’m doing with Roque. “Always whispering with others. Dismissing me like I’m a fool. You’re just like her …”
“Your mother?”
He says nothing. Arcos edges in beside me. I put a hand out to stop him.
“Would you kill them, if Augustus told you to?” Tactus asks me, turning slightly.
“No,” I say. “I’d rather die.”
“I didn’t think so. She was right. I am the Mighty Servant.”
I open my hands to him. “I don’t know what I’m to do now, Tactus.”
“That’s a first.” He laughs bitterly, voice slurring slightly.
“Hardly. I didn’t know what to do when I whipped you,” I say. “At the Institute. I didn’t want to lose you from my army because of your talents. But I couldn’t not punish you.”
“Talents. Talents. Talents. Then that’s the difference between us,” Tactus’s voice thickens further. “Because if it had been my army, I would have killed your arrogant ass.” He turns more and I see the hints of the ruin the bomb’s made of his face.
“You know what happens if you kill any of them?”
He nods to me, then to the Rage Knight, as if saying it’ll be either one or the other that does him. “I’m not sorry I took Lysander, you know.”
“I don’t think you’re ever sorry for much.”
“Not sorry.” He chuckles and dips a toe in the blood surrounding him. “But I think I shouldn’t have done it. I was testing you at the Institute. But … I wanted to see what you’d do. If you were worth following.”
“Was I?”
“You know that answer.”
“Am I still?”
He nods. “Always,” saying it so pathetically that it feels like my heart has been pulled into my throat. He’s a traitor, a liar, a cheat. Yet I see a friend. I want to fix him and make him whole. What am I doing? I have to put him down. But I’ve done that before with Titus. That cycle erodes us. Death begets death begets death, and ever more.
“What if I let you live?” I ask suddenly, drawing a confused, frantic glance from Tactus. Of course he doesn’t understand forgiveness. “What if I let you come back?”
“What?”
