I guess I should have expected something like this the second I heard they found the Exhuman. We were in the dungeons under the castle, after all, but still, as the literal god of this little kingdom, the force which brought life to each golem, whose powers reached miles in all directions, whose seemingly-limitless capacity was manifest by the orb still clutched in AEGIS' non-functioning arms, I didn't expect this.

He was sitting alone in a cell with a rare shaft of light hitting the floor next to him, as though he had been sitting in it until it, too, had abandoned him. Illuminated from the side, and from where our lights landed on him, looking haggard and thin, he looked like he'd been in here alone and sleepless since Eryendria had erupted from the ground a couple days ago.

My team stood at a respectful distance, nobody seeming to want to go too close. Tem was back with us, but moving slowly as though she hadn't slept in long time, and AEGIS was still simply offline. I took a deep breath and walked into the barred cell, kneeling to be at eye-level with the boy in the hospital gown in the wheelchair.

"Hi," I said experimentally. The boy blinked slowly at me. "Can you hear me?"

"Yeah," he said in a hoarse voice. "You are here to kill me?"

"I guess so," I said. "We're XPCA, and you made a pretty huge mess out there. When you made the city, did you...do anything with the people who were living there?"

He shook his head.

"So they're alive?"

He shook his head again. "They're all buried underground. With the old city."

"And you're sure they're dead, then?"

He nodded. He didn't look happy about it.

I sat down, my back already tired from the weight of the news. "Why'd you do it?" I had to ask the one question at least.

He looked me in the eyes, guilty and sad and beaten. He was just a fucking kid. I remembered each life I'd taken during my event, without any control over it, all the XPCA who'd stupidly thrown themselves to their deaths at me. I had turned Exhuman, and then people had died, and I spent months reliving those moments. The look on my face when I did, I realized, was maybe the same one he wore now.

"I'm gonna die," he said, simply. "I've been in the hospital this whole time. I couldn't go to school after second grade."

I looked down and saw the telltale bruising of an IV being inexpertly administered on the inside of his small arms.

"I was never gonna get better. I heard the doctor tell my parents. They were gonna do what they could, and make me comfortable, and all that. That was so many years ago."

I frowned. How many years ago could it possibly have been? The kid didn't have more than a dozen of them on him.

"I think they got scared. Mom would cry and say I'd get better and Dad would yell at her and the doctors and then they stopped coming as much, and then they stopped at all. I was lonely and sad at first, but I thought, maybe, if seeing me made them unhappy, then when they weren't around me, maybe they'd be happy, and that thought made me really happy, even though I was still sad."

I heard a noise that sounded halfway between a choke and a gasp and turned back to see Tem of all people excusing herself, pushing out of the group with her face in her elbow. Not...who I expected to be choking up here, although I was definitely feeling a ball of emotions churning in my throat.

"Is she okay? Did I say something bad?" the Exhuman asked, looking even more guilty.

"No. She's fine." I mean, not in a general sense. "Please continue."

"Well...I don't have a lot more to say. I had a mobile, so I could call my parents if I needed anything they said, but I wasn't gonna. There was another girl who was there for a while and we were really good friends, her name was Paige, and she played some mobile games with her friends and they invited me."

His voice changed, almost a hint of excitement now, all the reluctance gone out of him. "It was so great! It was just like being outside again, and with friends! I could run and jump and go wherever I wanted! And I saw so many things, I saw the sky, and dragon knights, and I met Elis and his party, and they helped me do so much!"

"Who's Elis?"

"You don't know who Elis is?" he asked, looking confused.

"Elis is like the protagonist of Kingdom Blade, sorta," Lia clarified, her voice a little robotic-sounding from distortion on the comms. "I think they just exist for merchandising basically, he and his party are always showing up to save your character or step up and do something heroic...so they can make an anime after him, write books about him, sell Elis action figures, that kind of stuff. 'Elis, Altaura's Hope'."

"Ah, yeah, of course I know Elis," I said to the boy. "He's a big hero, isn't he?"

"Yeah! The best hero! Elis is so strong he can beat anyone!"

The boy's enthusiastic smile wavered on his face.

"Or, that's what I thought," he said. "I never told anybody, but I found out that I could make people and they'd talk to me and stuff. Sometimes I was lonely and I just made a Mom and Dad and they'd sit with me for a while. Or after she left, I'd make Paige, and she'd talk to me just like she used to."

I didn't ask, but if Paige was in the same kind of ward as this boy, her condition was quite possibly as poor. She might not have simply 'left'.

I did ask, however what his name was.

"Huh? I'm Ethan."

Great. "Nice to meet you, I'm Athan, actually."

"That's a funny name."

"You were saying about making people?"

He talked about how he'd brought Elis to life as well, back to somber and defeated again, even as he spoke about the hero of his life. Elis was strong and sure and capable, and in fiction, could do anything he set his mind to. He called on Elis again and again, and true to his goody-two-shoes heroic protagonist status, Elis swore to find a cure for Ethan no matter what it took, no matter the odds, all the flowery dramatic prose that the bedridden child could dream of hearing.

"But he never did," Ethan finished sadly. "I thought, what was so wrong with me that even Elis couldn't fix it, but I knew that couldn't be, nothing could stop Elis, no matter what. So I thought about it a lot and talked to Elis and we thought, the problem must be because this world was so strange. None of his friends were here, and there were so many things Elis didn't know, so maybe that's why his magic didn't work right. He was gonna bring me to Eryendria and put me in the healing waters of the Font of Tears and pray to Altaura with all his heart."

I already saw where this was going. The Elis-golem was no more capable of bringing the boy to the magical video game world than he was of curing a degenerative illness. With the two of them putting their minds together, it was only a matter of time before Elis pushed Ethan into making the world here. As Ethan explained all of this, I just had one question.

"So why are you locked up in a dungeon?"

"Huh?"

"Why aren't you with Elis, getting helped and healed and stuff?"

"Isn't this what makes sense?"

He lost me in child-logic. "Uh, maybe, but can you explain it to me anyway?"

"I killed thousands of people. I'm a bad person. Bad people go to jail."

"I...see."

"I told Elis and he was so mad at me, he said I'd betrayed him, and all the silver knights. He said I was a demon in human form and he should strike me down on the spot." The shaft of light caught on streaks from the corners of Ethan's eyes. "I thought...I thought yeah, Elis is always right. What was the point in me living after all that, if so many people had to die to do it. But when I told him he was right and he should just do it already, and I was tired of being sick and making everyone sad, he said no."

"He said no?"

"He said that...being willing to die demonstrated that I wasn't wholly, irredeemably evil, that he would have me put away and would venture across the earth to find a cure for the demon inside me. He put me here, and said he would be back, and left."

The boy's face grew dark. "But he lied. He left, and he can't come back. I know because I can feel what all the people I make do. And I know that I'm a bad person. When he said he was going to kill me, I realized, that was the right thing, that was what I was waiting for this whole time. If I just stopped living, Mom would never have to cry again and Dad would never have to yell at anyone. I wouldn't hurt anyone anymore. And then he said no, and I've just sat here ever since, just like being back in the hospital again."

"He's a liar," Ethan said finally, his expression growing even colder. The boy had lost everything, threw away everything he had left for Elis, and then lost him too.

Why was it, I had to wonder, that it felt like every single Exhuman was fundamentally broken in some way? I looked around at the faces of my peers and realized that wasn't exactly true. Tower, as far as I knew, didn't have problems with his life or a particularly traumatic Exhuman event. Tem had an incredibly messed up life and event. Jack had a normal life, a family even, all taken away by his event, not dissimilar to me.

Maybe it was just because I had Moon on the brain recently, and her tragic upbringing hit a lot of the same notes as this kid's. A life marked with loss, feeling like his life shouldn't even be, wanting nobody to have to worry about him, now or ever. Those were the exact same conclusions Moon had drawn about her own life. What did she think of this child and his tragedies? Did she see herself in him, or just an Exhuman who was dangerous?

I stole a glance at her and saw her face as passive as ever, but hate behind her eyes. It was really sad that it didn't tell me anything. She might hate him, or she might hate the her she sees in him.

"Thank you for answering my questions," I said. "I'm going to go talk with my friends for a few minutes, okay?"

Ethan's eyebrows creased. "I thought you were going to kill me?"

"I mean…"

"You killed those other children. You killed a church full of men and women and kids and priests. You killed Vytar and Erwin and Ralleforth. But you won't kill me too?"

"Look, Ethan, those were all just fake people, you know that? You made them, they weren't real."

"So?"

"So there's a lot more to think about before you kill a real person, no matter what. Especially a child, and especially if they might just be lost, or confused, or hurt right now."

He gave me one moment where he looked searchingly into my eyes before he gave up and spoke. "You're a liar too," he said and then turned his chair around to face the wall. It was obvious by his tone that he didn't think there was any worse insult you could give a person.

"What do you guys think?" I asked the others.

"I think you came here to kill an Exhuman," Taglock responded immediately over comms, uninvited.

"That was our mission," Karu confirmed. "And I can confirm that even the youngest of children are often the most sadistic and dangerous Exhumans. Do not let his age dissuade you."

"Does he look sadistic to you?" Tower asked.

"No," she answered stiffly. "But he is, by his own admission dangerous and knowingly killed thousands to pursue his own delusion."

"Killing Exhumans isn't always about if they're bad people or not," Lia said, sounding of two minds through the static of the comms. "Some...like the policy against Code-X...are just put down because they're too dangerous period."

"And if the Exhuman in question were your brother, would that affect your argument?" Jack said.

"Or Saga," I added.

"Of course I don't think either of them should die. I'm just...just explaining policy."

"Chariot, there is no place for discussion of this nature. You have your objective in sight, you are hereby ordered to execute him," Cosette swung into the conversation with authority. "Have Karu do it if you are uncomfortable with executing a child, but people are fighting and dying right now because of this boy, and we didn't send all of you in there so you could do nothing."

"With all due respect," I said "that was before we learned who and what he was. He's not a Code-X, so New Eden is still an option for him."

"Maybe if those people were still alive, but they aren't. You can't just wipe a city off the map and walk out because you had a bad childhood. This is direct order, Chariot. Kill that Exhuman, or order one of your team to do so."

"I don't see a problem with talking about it first," I said. "Give the murderer a clean conscience at least if we can come to an agreement it's necessary."

"I remind you again, while you're talking, good men and women are fighting and dying above you. Those golems are proving incredibly resilient to the general armed forces, and have come out in the thousands."

"Then back up!" I shouted. "They can't leave the city, just stop the push and wait a damn minute."

"No, Chariot, you just need to act faster. Karu, this is a direct order from a superior officer, you are hereby--"

She just stopped talking. After a tentative moment, Karu replied. "Hello? Say again Papa-Foxtrot-Central, no copy."

Silence continued on the line. Either something had happened to her, or to her connection. I had my suspicions of a couple of girls who might be able to do that kind of thing, but one was offline right now and the other was somewhere relatively nearby, where I could not confirm nor deny her actions in this matter.

"I think I can say with reasonable confidence that the impending order given to Karu was going to be to listen to whatever her team lead told her to do," Jack said with a smile.

"Yes, indeed," Karu replied frowning. "So tell me, team lead, what do I do?"

I didn't know. In my head, I knew people were dying up there, men and women with lives and families, who were healthy and active and serving their country with dignity. It seemed like there was no comparison to weigh all their lives against one Exhuman child who was already dying.

But the problem was, he was right here, in front of me, very much a person, and they were an abstraction in the distance. People went to war and died, but a tragedy could only occur at home.

And him, his death, I felt, honestly, would be a tragedy. He seemed like he was just on the verge of some great realizations that might make his brief life a little more complete. He knew tragedy and suffering, and had accepted them without anger or hate. Now all that he had left from his pain was to grow from it, and I thought it extremely unfair that we'd be sent in to cut that off. He had been allowed to suffer without anyone caring, but the moment he tried to change...

He'd met and lost his heroes. He wasn't going to go flipping cities over anymore. Yes, he was still dangerous as an Exhuman, but not in the cataclysmic sense that people seemed to be worried about, at least, not that I could tell.

"I don't...think he's as dangerous as people make him out to be," I said.

"Yeah, I get that sense," Tower agreed.

"Hey, Ethan?" I called out. "When you built this city and hurt all those people…"

I hesitated, looking for how to finish the sentence, and he didn't pause to correct me.

"Killed them, you mean."

"...yeah. Sorry. How did that make you feel? Would you ever do that again?"

"I felt lower than the bottom of the ocean. I only did it because Elis told me to. I never wanted to hurt those people. Kill those people," he corrected himself. "Elis lied."

"Karu, you're a pretty cynical barometer of righteousness, what do you think?"

"I think, I object to being referred to as such."

"Regardless, what do you think?"

She sighed. "The child committed great sin, yet seems repentant. He has to pay for what he has done. Blaming others' lies or one's own past failings is not an excuse, or else nobody would ever be accountable for anything."

She frowned sharply. "But as to whether the punishment should be the forfeiture of his life into death, or into a lifetime of service to others, it matters little to me except that one is easy to enforce, and the other takes a lifetime of concerted effort. A lifetime this child does not have. For this reason, and to maintain order in the ranks, I would personally execute him without hesitation."

Not really what I wanted to hear, but definitely the honed thoughts of one who had given this type of scenario a lot of thought in the past. In other words, she thought his was not a life worth living.

Still, I disagreed. Maybe his time remaining was short, but the same could be said of any of us. If I died in a month on a random mission, would that mean I wouldn't be worth anything, by Karu's logic?

When I asked her that she just shook her head, her mane dancing in the dark over her visor. "Nobody can know when you will die but God, Ashton. Any medical professional could give a reasonable estimate for this child. The two are not the same."

I felt like that didn't change the validity of my argument, but I also felt like pushing Karu into a corner over her beliefs was both insensitive, and asking for trouble. If she disagreed with me, we'd fight over it, and if I by some miracle convinced her, she'd have a crisis of faith to look into, neither of which I wanted. But what I did determine by asking her was my own opinion, strongly solidified by her dissent.

"He should live," I said simply. "He should be able to spend the rest of his days as happily as he is able, enjoying what he can of this Earth while he's on it, don't you think?"

"It's your call," Lia said. "I mean, it's not, but Cosette sorta completely randomly accidentally dropped off the comms somehow, so now it is."

"How unfortunate that all attempts to reconnect, even from a variety of systems have failed," said Taglock with obvious amusement.

"If he's not dangerous, then let's not cut his life any shorter than it already is," I said, feeling a sense of relief. "Cosette's already made clear that he isn't welcome in New Eden, so I guess our option is just to smuggle him out. She doesn't know anything about--"

To my surprise, Moon stepped forward, placing herself at my side next to Ethan, braving the eyes of the entire group, and faced me. Her eyes were darting to those of the others staring at her and she was visible uncomfortable but that didn't stop her from speaking.

"Is this your resolve?" she asked. "To protect others? Is it as frail as this? I thought you said it was everything to you."

"I'm sorry, if you have something to say, go for it. I didn't try to pull you into the discussion because I thought you don't like attention," I replied, walking a few steps back towards the others to let her have the stage if she wanted it.

"And I told you already, though you do not seem to wish to listen, I and my feelings are not worth your effort. My feelings are unimportant. What matters is protecting others."

So saying, she turned and faced the boy, still in his wheelchair, with his back facing towards us, silent tears still on his cheeks still as he listened to us bicker over his fate.

And then with practiced ease, before I even knew what was going on, she drew her sidearm from her hip holster, chambered a round, and fired a shot into the back of Ethan's head, throwing his small body forward to the dusty ground in an explosion of red which flecked across her unflinching face.

She took a step forward and fired twice more before holstering her weapon.