Fuck no.
“You want to create more Reshayes.”
Out of the corner of my eye, I saw Tisaanah back against the desk, sinking into the chair — as if utterly overwhelmed.
Despite everything, a part of me still hoped Nura would correct me.
But she just said, “We don’t have a choice.”
“Of course we have a fucking choice.”
“You saw what I saw,” she shot back. “You saw what has already started coming for us. How do we defeat that, if not with the greatest weapons we can create?”
There was a silent plea beneath the hard edge of her words, as if to silently add, You of all people believe me, don’t you?
“Nura, look at this. Look at what you’re doing. This is— this is insane. You think this is the right thing? Torturing them so you can create more monsters to go slaughter someone else’s family?”
A flicker of hurt crossed Nura’s face.
“I think about them all the time, Max. Every single day. Don’t throw them at me like I don’t.”
I spent years telling myself how much I hated Nura, telling myself I blamed her for all of it. It was never true — I had never blamed her as much as I blamed myself. But I hated knowing the shape of her grief. I couldn’t hate her and feel bad for her. I couldn’t carry the weight of her pain after I was so tired from carrying mine for so many years.
It was easy when I could think of her as cold and unfeeling. Black and white. Bad and good. A strong, clear divide between the girl I had known as my best friend and the woman who had ruined my life. Not this — this person who was so hurt, so fucking broken, that she would let her grief destroy the damned world.
“I know this isn’t morally good,” Nura said. “I know it isn’t right. But I’ve made the hard choices before, and I’ll do it again if it means saving this country. Someone has to. You saw what I saw — what failure means. We need to be more powerful than that, no matter what it takes.”
“That is what the Nyzrenese said, too, once,” Tisaanah said. “They created the most incredible instruments of death and threw a million men wielding them into war against the Threllians. Only for those weapons to be turned against us in the end.”
Nura’s expression shifted. She turned to Tisaanah. “We found the hands, when we went to the cottage. I saw the tattoos.”
Tisaanah went still.
“Then it would appear,” Nura said, “that our greatest enemies have allied themselves with each other. It makes sense, doesn’t it? All of the research I’ve done indicates that the Fey have power, but they don’t have numbers. No one has greater numbers than the Threllians. And no one has a greater shared interest in Ara. There were children’s hands in that crate, Tisaanah. Children. I want to create weapons so powerful that there isn’t a chance of even one of those bastards walking away alive. Are you telling me that isn’t what you want, too?”
Tisaanah was silent, her jaw clenched.
“Reshaye never saw the difference between colors on a uniform,” I said. “The things that you’re doing, the things that you want to create, they won’t know the difference. And who’s going to pay the price for that? You’re building weapons to indiscriminately kill the slaves that the Zorokovs are going to throw at them.”
Nura flinched, as if I had slapped her across the face. And now, for the first time, I did understand how much she grieved the lives lost in collateral damage. I don’t know why it made it that much worse to me. It would be one thing to claim heartlessness or ignorance. Another to know — to know — exactly the scale of what she was inflicting, and to do it anyway.
Tisaanah leaned over the desk, hands at her temples.
“I know you’ve never had the stomach for it,” Nura said. “But we’re past the point where there’s a choice.”
“You don’t even know what they want, or what they intend to do. And you’re already—”
“What is this?”
Tisaanah’s voice was quiet, but sharp. Nura and I turned to see her holding up a stack of parchments. They appeared to be documents, written in Thereni, stamped with an unfamiliar crimson seal.
“What is this?” she said, again.
Only now, for the very first time, was there unabashed shame on Nura’s face. Her mouth opened and closed several times before she answered.
“We need numbers. If we are to win.”
Tisaanah stood. The paper buckled beneath the slow clench of her hand.
“How many more? This cannot be the only bill.”
“No. Only enough to—”
“How many slaves did you buy?” She threw the papers down onto the desk, sending them scattering.
My blood went cold. I whirled to Nura. “You what?”
Nura looked as if she wasn’t breathing. She approached Tisaanah the way one might approach a wild animal.
“If we want to win, we need manpower. Ara is a small country. When this is all over, we’ll free them. We’ll provide for them, we’ll—”
“‘When this is all over?’ How many times have you people said that to me? How easy it is for you to make promises for a future that might never exist.”
“If we don’t win this, there won’t be a future. I don’t like it, either. Trust me, you don’t know—” Nura bit down on her words, losing track of them. “But we need them, Tisaanah. Threllians. They’re our best chance to…”
I looked at the notes and instruments around us with renewed horror.
Needed Threllians.
Needed Threllians the way she had needed Tisaanah.
And Tisaanah understood just after I did, her whole face crumbling with the realization. “This? This is what you need them for?’
“No. I— I would never… Only volunteers—”
“Volunteers? Volunteers like I volunteered?” Tears of rage filled Tisaanah’s eyes.
“I never claimed it was good. I never claimed it was right. It’s terrible. I
