I blocked Warcry’s punches from nailing me in the knife scars, but didn’t take my eyes off Rali.
The big Selken wasn’t taking his eyes off me, either. “What did you specialize in, Death cultivator?”
Warcry cut it out and backed off, waiting for my answer.
“Cursed Death.”
Rali didn’t blink. “That means your other choice was Peaceful Death or something similar?”
“Blessed.”
“So you had a choice between Blessed Death and Cursed Death, and you picked Cursed.” He nodded. “Of course you did.”
That black cobra rolled in my chest, waking up at the self-righteous tone in Rali’s voice.
My eyes narrowed. “What’s that supposed to mean?”
“Just because I don’t have Spirit anymore doesn’t mean I didn’t feel the life go out of this side of the jungle, Hake. Do you know how many good people were in that Technol encampment? How many kids?”
The weight of what I’d done pressed down on me, but I pushed back, bulling forward even though I knew I shouldn’t.
“I can tell you their names and ages, Rali,” I said. “I saw every one of their faces and heard their voices asking me why I killed them.”
“What did you tell them?” he asked.
I swallowed the sick feeling of sinking. I didn’t have an answer for him any more than I’d had for the dead camp followers.
Rali shook his head, disgusted. “You had a chance to be something different, something better. You had a chance, and you threw it away.”
“That’s what you care about?” I snapped. “Me? My chance to be different? You really don’t get it.”
Hungry Ghost had told me forever ago that a Warm Heart cultivator like Rali could never understand. At the time, I’d thought it was just more lies, but now I knew it was true. Rali hadn’t seen the kids in the Every Comfort Palace. He hadn’t had to fight tooth and nail to take out the death squad trying to kill his team or been used as a handy disposal for gangsters the Emperor and Sanya were done with. He hadn’t been the only one who could burn the Bailiff’s disease out of the universe before he polluted anybody else. Rali couldn’t understand any of it.
“Not everybody gets to wear the white hat and play the nonviolent sage,” I told him. “Someone’s got to get their hands dirty so you can keep yours clean.”
“Fighting evil with evil, is that it?” Rali’s fist tightened around his walking stick until the wood creaked. “You’re forgetting a very important part of that equation, Hake. It’s the part where to fight evil with evil, you have to become evil.”
“Oi, lads,” Warcry said. “Let it breathe a minute, yeah? Let’s don’t say something we can’t take back.”
Neither of us was listening to him.
“Guys like the Bailiff don’t surrender to friendship and kindness and suddenly change their ways,” I snapped. “Their evil festers and gets worse and hurts more people the longer you turn the other way and let it go on.”
“What you did,” Rali said, “the innocent lives you took... It’s unforgivable. You’re becoming as monstrous as they are.”
“If that’s what it takes to stop them, I’ll do it. Do you have any idea how many more innocent people would’ve suffered if I let the Bailiff live? You didn’t see the things he’d done. He was only escalating from here.”
“And that makes it okay to kill innocent bystanders?” Rali demanded. “Because he was bad enough? How many more good people would you have needed to let him go? Who gets to decide what tips the scale?”
That knocked the wind out of me. It was too close to what I’d fought with Warcry about after my first kill for the Dragons’ Emperor.
Kest stepped forward. “It’s not a giant balance sheet, Rali.”
“No, it isn’t!” he yelled. “But you guys are treating it like a certain number of one kind of lives is an acceptable sacrifice to get rid of a different kind of life! They don’t equal out.”
“You wanted to live, didn’t you?” she said in a hard Cold Metal voice.
Rali looked at her like she’d slapped him.
“You make it sound like Hake had no choice but to kill everybody to save us,” he said. “There was no saving anybody. He thought—we all thought—you were dead. He did it for revenge, because he wanted to kill the Bailiff, plain and simple.”
My teeth ground and a muscle started jumping in my jaw. I wanted to be able to contradict him, to swear he was wrong, but he wasn’t. In that moment, I would have slaughtered the whole universe if it meant making the Bailiff pay for what he’d done to Kest.
“Do you think the Bailiff would’ve politely walked away once he had the Heartblood Crown?” Kest asked her twin. “Never bothered us again? He created a glass composite bullet and kept it in his revolver for me. Given time, who knows what he would’ve come up with for you or Warcry or Hake?”
“Did you forget Master Kent’s family?” Rali fired back. “Little Areen? Rose-ten? The Bailiff’s death wasn’t worth their lives.”
Kest stared into the middle distance, considering that.
“I think the argument can be made that it was,” she said. “If you take into consideration all the people he’s hurt up until now and all the ones he would have hurt in the future. And the Bailiff might have wiped out the encampment anyway if Hake hadn’t stopped him. We can’t know.”
“That’s not the point!” Rali snapped. “Your boyfriend murdered people for the power to defeat his enemies, just like every other Death cultivator who’s ever lived. It didn’t matter whether they were good or bad, innocent or evil. In the end, they were nothing but fuel to him.” He rounded on me. “I thought you were different, Hake. I thought you got it. But you’re the same as everyone else out there.”
Rali held his walking stick in both hands like a bo staff, and for a split second, I felt relief at the
