[It's not that Ben hasn't recognized what this is; he's too intimately familiar with the slow motion fray, the sudden threshold and the abrupt snap that happens once he's hit it. He knows what happens next and maybe he didn't kill Robert Kozak, maybe enough people believe him that he might slide sideways out of it, but he remembers Doyle's visions and he knows what has happened in the past.
He will kill someone. He knows this, and then everything will be justified, and then he will be decommissioned or worse; this is how it happens, this is the part Zack never understood. How staying around people, how not retreating, can only end in one way.
But he can't retreat here. He has to find a different way, or he'll disappoint everyone, and he will be even less safe than he is now. So, too, may they be.]
I used to leave the cities. There were numerous abandoned buildings and settlements to be found, and I am trained in basic survival.
It would just... so many people. None of them like me, all of them afraid if they found out. They always did.
But there's nowhere to go, here. [So he's retreated behind the one thing he's been taught is safe his entire life, that he carries with him, so coded into his logic that he hasn't even noticed that it's the same thing that keeps him ostracized: Manticore's training.[
[ Spam ]
He will kill someone. He knows this, and then everything will be justified, and then he will be decommissioned or worse; this is how it happens, this is the part Zack never understood. How staying around people, how not retreating, can only end in one way.
But he can't retreat here. He has to find a different way, or he'll disappoint everyone, and he will be even less safe than he is now. So, too, may they be.]
I used to leave the cities. There were numerous abandoned buildings and settlements to be found, and I am trained in basic survival.
It would just... so many people. None of them like me, all of them afraid if they found out. They always did.
But there's nowhere to go, here. [So he's retreated behind the one thing he's been taught is safe his entire life, that he carries with him, so coded into his logic that he hasn't even noticed that it's the same thing that keeps him ostracized: Manticore's training.[