Thorne bit her tongue for a moment, then figured what the heck. You won’t know if you don’t ask.
“Can I look through the database?” She asked it simply, as if it wasn’t anything special, but still the question hung in the air. She knew – or at least hoped – she’d been gaining trust with the trio, but it was slow going. They’d let her hear Bernstein’s message, but aside from that, all her knowledge of the database came from them. She’d never gone through it on her own. Technically, Zelda was going to make a copy of it for Dawson, so Thorne knew she’d have a chance to look through it before delivering it for him to find. That felt deceitful, though. If she was going to make any meaningful progress here, she needed to be forthright.
“I know you still don’t fully trust me,” she said. “But I’ve worked for the Party for years.”
“Exactly why we don’t trust you,” Titus said.
“Right, but it can also be an asset. How much information in there is missing pieces? How much of it might I be able to add to because of my time with the Party? Bernstein’s seen everything from the outside. Combine that with my knowledge from the inside and we can have a more complete database.” Thorne paused, then bit her lip.
That’s half the reason, at least.
“And…” she said, then sucked in a breath. “And, I need to know the extent of the Party’s crimes. The extent to which I’ve been complicit in them. How much have I unwittingly helped them? I’ve always served to help the people. Has anything I’ve accomplished ever done that, or has it all been to prop up a tyrannical oligarchy? How much of—”
“Yes,” Kaiden said.
Thorne stopped. Frowned.
“All those reasons are good. Sensible,” he said. “But the heart of the matter is, well…” He trailed off, then looked up with confidence in his gaze. “I trust you. We trust you.”
“We do?” Titus asked, looking up from his soup with surprise. “News to me.”
Kaiden shook his head.
“The circumstances are strange, I’ll give you that. Thorne was our enemy. But things have changed. Just look at our last fight. Without her we would’ve been slaughtered. But Thorne fought her own past allies – and to great effect, as well. She took a massive beating keeping Esme distracted while we focused on their blast warden. That was a turning point in the fight.”
“And she stopped what surely would have been a lethal blow on me,” Zelda said, reluctant but nodding along.
“Without hesitation,” Kaiden added. “There was no thought in it. No planning, no plotting. You just… did it,” he said, looking right at Thorne now. “That was instinct.”
“She knew she had Last Rites,” Titus argued, arms firmly crossed.
“I don’t think that changes anything,” Kaiden said, undeterred. “Look, we can’t keep living in this limbo of suspicion. We’re all a team, and we need to start working like one. Anything less means we’re holding ourselves back, and if we’re going to do this – if we’re going to try to bring down the Party – we can’t hold anything back. We don’t have time to doubt each other.”
Thorne tried to hold back a smile.
Don’t gloat. Don’t look too pleased, she reminded herself. But this was exactly what she’d been thinking for so long now. Exactly what she’d wanted to say, but there was no way they would have accepted it from her. No, it had to come from someone else. That it was coming from Kaiden was all the better.
Titus still looked troubled at the idea.
“She worked for the Party, man,” he said.
Kaiden nodded.
“And you for King Street. And Zelda for Bernstein. And me for... well, no one important, I guess. But the point is we’re all on the same team now.”
“If we let the past hold us back, we compromise the future,” Zelda said suddenly and with a curt nod. She looked over to Thorne with a serious expression. “Bernstein would never have turned away a potential ally. But it’s more than that. You’ve had every chance to betray us, and yet you haven’t.” She paused a long moment, then nodded again as if confirming something to herself.
“I trust you,” she said finally, then slid the database across the table.
Chapter Fifteen
“Buh bye,” Titus said, his voice crackling and staticky as it came through comms. A moment later, Kaiden was forced to look away as a burst of fire from Titus’ turret erased the last pirate fighter in a blossoming explosion of debris.
Pirates killed: 40/40
Quest Complete: Purging the Pirate Problem
Reward: 8,000 EXP, 2,000 credits
“Nice! The scenic route might take longer, but it’s a lot more fun,” Titus said.
“Not sure how much fun has to do with it,” Kaiden said, turning off his turret and letting it whisk him back inside the Veritas II. “We have to keep hammering out these missions if we want to be high enough level to have any chance at taking Warden HQ.” All the same, though, he had to admit their progress had been good. The quests were basic, maybe, but they paid in EXP and that was what counted. They’d each leveled once already to thirty-four and were on the verge of tipping into thirty-five. Thorne had leveled from the fight with the wardens, which had put her at thirty-five. Their recent grinding had her all the way up to thirty-six.
“This isn’t a sight-seeing trip,” Zelda said from the cockpit. “It’s strategic. The major shipping lanes would be faster, but there’s too much warden traffic on them. They’ve doubled, maybe even tripled the number of patrols. Us taking down that corvette didn’t exactly go over well.”
That was putting it mildly. Their faction prestige with the Warden Corps, which had already been a whopping negative 151, had dropped even further to negative 180. And
