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Life—the way it really is—is a battle not between Bad and Good, but between Bad and Worse.
“We could be dead,” said Eli. “That’s a risk everyone takes by living.”
The moments that define lives aren’t always obvious. They don’t always scream LEDGE, and nine times out of ten there’s no rope to duck under, no line to cross, no blood pact, no official letter on fancy paper. They aren’t always protracted, heavy with meaning. Between one sip and the next, Victor made the biggest mistake of his life, and it was made of nothing more than one line. Three small words. “I’ll go first.”
Eli, who believed in God and had a monster inside just like Victor, but knew how to hide it better.
The worst part of going numb was that it took away everything but this, the smothering need to hurt, to break, to kill, pouring over him like a thick blanket of syrup until he panicked and brought the physical sensations back.
The calm troubled him; the fact that the physical absence of pain could elicit such a mental absence of panic was at once unnerving and rather fascinating.
He rebuttoned his shirt, and the scars vanished again, from view but not from memory.
The absence of pain led to an absence of fear, and the absence of fear led to a disregard for consequence.
Plenty of humans were monstrous, and plenty of monsters knew how to play at being human.
All those things had been dead—or at least dulled to the point of uselessness—for years. But he’d trained his mind to reconstruct those feelings from memory as best he could, and assemble them into a kind of code. Nothing so elaborate as Eli’s set of rules, just a simple wish to avoid killing bystanders, if possible. It didn’t feel wrong, resting his finger on the trigger, but his mind provided the word wrong. He lowered the gun a fraction, knowing that sacrificing a kill shot would also sacrifice the certitude of their escape.
“When no one understands, that’s usually a good sign that you’re wrong.”
