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“Are you still worried about them?”
You turn towards your best friend of many, many years, and for once, you can’t contain your frustration.
“Yes, I’m still worried about them, Isaac. If it bothers you so much, no one is forcing you to stay with me.”
“We have a job to do. And they have theirs.”
“Oh, yes, ‘a job to do’. No wonder you’re the Wise One’s hero.”
He sighs and you want to slap him. How you wish Ivan was here right now, that you could get a better read on whether you’re just overreacting out of hurt or whether there is something wrong in your best friend that’s been growing for the past thirty years.
Or for longer than that. It’s always been there, really, but there’s something in him that has just sharpened every day, with every trial, ever since the first time you lost Felix.
Since he lost his father.
He really hasn’t been a child ever since.
And now that he’s an adult, every year that passes takes him further away from you and your experience of normality, even though you’re still the one who is closest to him (it’s you, Isaac, Jenna, it has always been), and you don’t know what to do.
You don’t know what to do, because something ominous is in the air, and when the world is in danger, those who know how to save it care little for the means.
“What is that supposed to mean, Garet?”
“Let me ask you a question. Have you told these kids absolutely everything?”
He stays silent.
“That’s what I meant, Isaac. You, the Wise One—you’re all for the world, for the greater good, you’re ready to make sacrifices. But that’s not me. Unfortunately, I still care about the world being cruel. I can’t manipulate people. I can’t send them to get hurt just because they’ll be better off after. And I don’t send kids on missions halfway across the world in times of unrest for a cause they don’t know all the factors of.”
“We were their age when we left,” he says, like he has more than once before.
“Yes. We were. And look what it did to us. Look what it did to you.”
He looks at you, much too old and much too young at the same time, ageless and childish and perfectly goal-driven.
“I’m fine,” he says.
“Yes. That’s exactly what scares me.”