When he opened his eyes, he saw a look of such deep sadness on Joe’s face that it made his heart hurt.
“Before First Night,” said the ranger, “I spent my entire adult life working for a government organization that did only one thing: We hunted down the kinds of people who wanted to see the world burn. Terrorists, religious extremists, actual mad scientists, governments that had gone
off the rails. Time and time again I led good men and women into battle to stop the release of a doomsday weapon. I won every single time. I lost a lot of friends along the way. I even lost the first woman I truly loved. My body’s covered with scars from injuries taken in the line of duty. Me and my guys, we were sometimes all that stood between the world and the end of everything. Sounds grandiose, right? But that’s how it was.” He sighed.
“You failed,” said Lilah. She made a statement of it, harsh and naked.
He raised his hands as if indicating the whole world. “Some people kept their secrets a little too long and a little too well, and by the time my team knew about it, the devil was already off the leash.” He shook his head. “That’s not an apology, and it’s not an excuse. I want us to understand each other. I’m a ranger. I do not work for the American Nation. I work with them. There are some good people helping to build a new government. But there are some people who still hold on to the old ways. Their religion is the cult of secrecy, and they are every bit as dangerous as Saint John and the psychopaths running the Night Church.”
“Why tell us all this now?” asked Benny. “What aren’t you telling us?”
“Benny,” cautioned Nix, but Joe shook his head.
“He’s dead right, honey. When we go into that hangar, you’re stepping outside of the world you knew and into a bad slice of the old world. They’re going to want to push you around. They’re going to try and close you out of their vault of secrets. You’re civilians and you’re kids and they believe that you don’t matter.”
Joe removed the slips of paper they’d gotten from Sergeant Ortega. “This is a different kind of currency, and down on the level of reality and sense, it’s worth a lot more than the secrets the people on this base are holding.”
He handed them to Benny.
“I told them that you had information about where Dr. McReady might be. They want that information very badly. They think that it’s your obligation to simply hand it over. If you do, they’ll kick you right back onto the other side of the trench. Don’t let them. This is your world. It was always yours. We didn’t have the right to break it, and we shouldn’t be allowed to keep any more secrets.”
The four of them stood there in front of Joe Ledger, weighing his words, reading the implications. Grimm licked his jowls and watched them.
Finally Benny said, “The Reaper Plague was no accident, was it?”
“No,” said Joe in a ghost of a voice. “We made the monster and we let it out of its cage.”
“Deliberately?” asked Nix, aghast.
His eyes were filled with great sorrow. “You ever heard of Friedrich Nietzsche?”
Nix nodded and in a small voice said, “I was just thinking about that earlier. ‘Battle not with monsters, lest ye become a monster, and if you gaze into the abyss, the abyss gazes also into you.’?”
“Exactly,” said Joe. “We stared into the abyss so long we liked what we saw. God forgive us all.”
58
JOE TURNED AND WALKED INTO the hangar. Grimm was right at his heels. Riot and Lilah exchanged a glance, then followed. Benny paused, touching Nix’s arm. He didn’t like the wild look in her eyes.
“You okay?”
“Oh, sure,” she said tightly. “I’m just fine. I shouldn’t even be surprised. After everything that’s gone on with Charlie and the Hammer, Preacher Jack, Mother Rose, Saint John . . . I don’t know why I don’t just give up on believing in people.”
“I know why,” said Benny.
She gave him a long, cold look. “Oh really? Why?”
“Because we’re people. Your mom was a good person who never hurt anyone. Tom died trying to help people. That guy George who spent all those years taking care of Lilah and her sister. The Greenman. Guys like Solomon Jones and Sally Two-Knives and everyone who helped destroy Gameland . . . they’re people. Eve is a person. So is Riot, and she was raised to be a monster. She left all that behind, and for the last few years she’s done nothing but risk her life to help people. They’re good people, and that’s what I believe in, Nix. That goodness exists and that it’s powerful. And I think that’s what you believe in too.”
She closed her eyes and leaned her forehead against his chest. “But there are so many of them. Look at what they’ve done. They destroyed the whole world. . . .”
“No,” Benny said softly. He hooked a finger under her chin and gently raised her face. “Not the whole world. And not the best of it.”
Nix’s mouth trembled and she hung there at the edge of tears, pinned to the moment by the enormity of Joe’s words.
“I can’t live in a world like this,” she said. “I can’t live if everything’s broken and there’s only pain.”
“No,” agreed Benny, “neither can I. So let’s live in a better world than that.”