Page 21 of Red Scale Daddy
“No. You model outcomes until they start sounding obedient.”
Loklo makes a small sympathetic sound. “That was either deeply insightful or obnoxious as hell. Possibly both.”
Roma ignores him. Her attention is fixed on me with such intensity that I can feel it against my scales. “You are arguing from experience in chaos. I am arguing from expertise in prevention. These are not the same discipline.”
“Prevention ends when the universe gets a vote.”
“The universe does not vote.”
“Sure it does. Usually with a large rock at high speed.”
That pulls a laugh from the harness-wearing human, who kills it quickly when Roma looks at him.
I should stop. I know that. There is a point where pressing a wound stops being investigation and becomes cruelty. I have crossed that line plenty of times and waved cheerfully from the other side. But with her, the line feels different. Not softer. More dangerous. I want to see what happens when she stops reciting survival and starts admitting what survival costs her.
“What happens,” I ask, quieter now, “if your father is not where that signal says he is?”
Her face loses color under the heat of the bar.
Loklo mutters, “Dux.”
I do not look away.
Roma’s hand closes around the edge of her compad inside her coat. “He is.”
“What if he isn’t?”
“The checksum is his.”
“Could be copied.”
“It wasn’t.”
“Could be a trap.”
“I considered that.”
“But you’re going anyway.”
“Yes.”
“Because if you don’t, you have to live with not knowing.”
Her lips part, and for the first time since she came through my door, she looks twenty-one. Not young in the soft sense. Not innocent. Just briefly stripped of all the armor she built from grief and math and sleepless nights over schematics no sane person should have to understand.
Then the armor slams back into place.
“I am going because my father is alive,” she says. “I am going because no one else looked long enough. I am going because nine years of institutional cowardice, budgetary convenience, and sentimental surrender do not constitute evidence of death.”
“Fine,” I say. “Then what happens if you find him and he dies on the way out?”
The words land hard enough that Loklo stops breathing for a second beside me. Around us, the bar seems to recede. The music keeps playing. Glasses keep clinking. Someone coughs near the kitchen door. But the space between Roma and me narrows until it holds only that question and whatever it cuts open.
Her eyes shine. Not tears. She would probably rather stab me than cry in front of this room.
“I will get him out,” she says.
“That is not what I asked.”
