NOW

 

 

QUINT’S WORDS OFFENDED HER. Squishy stood perfectly still, trying to control the anger.

“I did not come to destroy you,” she said. “People who destroy things kill people.”

“You killed Cloris,” he said.

“I got everyone out of that facility,” Squishy snapped. “Cloris wasn’t following orders.”

“You didn’t either,” he said.

She stared at him. She was trembling. He was trembling too. He tried to be calm, but he wasn’t. Maybe she was seeing him clearer than she thought.

“I didn’t come to destroy you,” she said again. “I came to help you.”

His face flushed. The wounds disappeared in the redness. He took a step away from her, moving his head at the same time so she couldn’t see his eyes.

“That’s what I wanted to believe, Rose,” he said, clasping his hands behind his back. The posture looked terribly familiar. She did it all the time, and she realized, with a sinking feeling, she had learned it from him. “I wanted to believe that you could stop all of the deaths. Didn’t you ever wonder how you got in so easily? Why no one cared that you’d been gone for so many years?”

She had wondered, then chalked it up to the Empire’s incompetence. She figured people were watching her, but it didn’t matter. She had an entire team, she had a way to contact them if she needed to, and she had no actual work to do until she destroyed the research station. For six months, her work had been blameless, although she made a point of stopping those experiments, the ones that would have resulted in someone’s death.

He tilted his head back. “I believed in you, Rosealma. You’re brilliant. I honestly thought you could fix it all.”

Her breath caught in her throat. It all fit, how she got in, why he kept showing up, asking the occasional question, keeping an eye on her, telling her she was doing well. He had believed in her, and despite herself, she felt sad that she had disappointed him.

“I’m your magic,” she said.

He turned, a puzzled expression on his face. He didn’t remember the conversation. Of course, he didn’t. That conversation about magic and beliefs had changed her life. It had just been a moment to him.

“What?” he asked.

She shook her head. “It doesn’t matter,” she said. “I did fix things, just not the way you wanted.”

“You just set them back some, Rosealma. You didn’t fix anything at all,” he said.

She almost, almost told him about destroying the backup research, but she didn’t. The only thing her people hadn’t destroyed was the scientists themselves. Someone destructive would have destroyed them too. But she wasn’t destructive. It would take the scientists years to reconstruct their work and, maybe by then, someone new would come in, someone to tell them about the folly of their ways.

She could send them that researcher. She could send in moles who would direct them away from their own destruction and onto a path that would lead nowhere.

If she ever got out of this.

“What happened to you?” Quint asked softly. “You used to love this work, Rosealma. You didn’t believe in destroying anything.”

“What happened to me?” she asked. She couldn’t believe he had said that.

He didn’t remember that either. Apparently, he had remembered all of the wrong things.