Chapter 418: 418. Seems Like The Four Of Them Are Still At It (But Then Something Happened)

"So even nature speaks for him, huh...?" Mireya didn’t believe that Rex had a strong case, and she was slowly starting to lose this argument.

Her skepticism was mounting, and she found herself grasping for counterpoints, but each time she opened her mouth, the evidence seemed to slip further from her grasp. Perhaps it was time to rethink her strategy and approach the discussion from a different angle.

"But still... The nature taking his side doesn’t mean what he did was right," Mireya said. "He needs at least some reprimand."

"No," Nerith said. "It doesn’t."

"I’m not saying it means that." She paused. "I’m saying it means something."

"You need to know that what I’m saying is about the information I have that you don’t, and when I combine it with what I’ve seen from him directly, the picture I get is not the picture you’re describing."

"What picture do you get?" Mireya said.

Nerith considered this for a moment. "Someone who knows what he is and what he’s doing and doesn’t apologize for either," she said.

"Someone who operates with a specific kind of honesty about his own nature that most people don’t have, including people who consider themselves good." She paused. "I’ve read people through the Nature channel for years."

"The truly dangerous individuals have a distinct way of presenting themselves. He does not exhibit that quality."

"He killed nine people in a canyon this afternoon," Mireya said. "There’s no way nature couldn’t sense that at all...!"

"I know," Nerith said. "I read the stone when we came through, and I know what happened."

She met Mireya’s gaze. "I’m not telling you to be comfortable with it."

"I’m sharing my knowledge, which differs from yours, and when combined, they create a more complete picture than either one alone."

"Your picture has him as something that nature itself endorses," Mireya said. "That’s not a more complete picture!"

"That’s a justification!" Mireya gritted her teeth. "Why do you even have to choose to side with the likes of a murderer?!"

"Don’t call him a murderer!" Talyra shouted. "What he did could be seen as justice if you consider it from a different perspective, like that of the reincarnators who were killed by them!"

"Justice is not about—" Talyra’s words were interrupted when Aisella stepped in to calm her down. "Jeez..."

Mireya ignored both of them but focused on Nerith, who could at least still convey the truth with the help of nature.

"My perspective sees him as something that the deep substrate of a canyon acknowledges as part of the larger equation," Nerith said. "This is not a justification; it’s an observation."

"I’m simply conveying what I perceive."

Mireya was quiet for a moment. Nerith was indeed on Rex’s side; even nature seemed to agree with him.

"You’re all very certain about him," she said.

"Yes," Talyra said.

"Three days," Mireya said. "We’ve known him for three days on this expedition."

"Aisella and I have known him longer than three days," Talyra said. "Heck, we even talk a lot since the first we met in that class."

"From the island and academy," Mireya said. "That amounts to even fewer days, not a month."

"Days isn’t the unit that matters," Talyra said. "Conditions are the unit."

"I’ve observed him in a greater variety of conditions over a shorter period than I have seen most people in years." She looked at Mireya steadily. "I know what I’ve seen."

Mireya looked at the three of them for a long moment.

"You all trust him completely," she said.

"Yes," Talyra said.

"That doesn’t concern any of you."

"It would concern me," Aisella said, "if the trust wasn’t based on anything."

"It’s based on what he’s done consistently since this expedition started." She paused. "If that changes, my assessment changes. But it hasn’t changed yet."

"What if it does change," Mireya said. "What if he does something that changes your assessment."

"How far would it have to go before you’d say it out loud the way I did tonight."

Talyra was quiet for a moment. Then she said, "That’s a fair question."

"I know it is," Mireya said.

"If he did something that put people in this group at risk without a reason that held up to examination," Talyra said, "I’d say it. In front of whoever needed to hear it."

She paused. "But that hasn’t happened."

"What happened tonight was not Rex putting the group at risk. It was Rex taking a risk himself so the group wasn’t."

Mireya said nothing to that immediately.

"You’re all done with this," Mireya said. "I can see that."

"We’re not done," Aisella said. "We’re just at the point where continuing isn’t going to produce anything new."

"That’s a way of saying the same thing," Mireya said.

"Then accept it as that," Aisella said, without sharpness. "You’ve said what you had to say."

"We’ve said what we had to say. There isn’t a version of this conversation that ends with you being satisfied."

"Because you won’t take it seriously."

Nerith made a sound. "Ggghh..."

It was a small sound, reminiscent of what someone might make after holding back emotions for an extended period. A comment had finally made it harder to keep those feelings suppressed.

It was too soft to qualify as a word, yet it was more than mere silence. The sound didn’t reach the volume of a spoken word, but it carried significance beyond nothingness.

Aisella heard it and looked at her.

Nerith’s jaw was tight. The leaves were exhibiting the motion that Aisella had learned to watch for: the fine, involuntary trembling at the edges, which indicated that something was close to the surface that Nerith had not intended to allow.

"Nerith," Aisella said.

"I’m fine," Nerith said, and the control in her voice was the kind that required active maintenance.

"You don’t have to—"

"I said I’m fine," Nerith said.

She was avoiding Mireya’s gaze, focused instead on the floor. Her hands were clenched tightly, and the leaves continued their subtle, involuntary tremble. The amber warmth that Aisella usually associated with her settled state was noticeably absent.

Mireya was watching her. Something in Mireya’s expression had shifted.

"Nerith," Mireya said.

"Don’t," Talyra said.

"I wasn’t going to—"

"I know what you were going to do," Talyra said. "You were going to say something to walk it back, and it’s going to come out wrong, and it’s going to make it worse."

She looked at Mireya steadily. "So don’t."

Mireya closed her mouth.

Aisella had already turned to her, so she was closer to Nerith’s side. She didn’t touch her, but she just moved closer and left the space between them smaller than it had been.

"You know what I keep thinking about," Nerith said, and her voice was very quiet, with the flat quality of someone who has decided to say a thing rather than not say it. "I keep thinking about the gorge."

Nobody said anything.

"He came back for me," Nerith said. "At the gorge, and he didn’t have to..."

"By any reasonable calculation that day I was not his priority... he had other things to manage and other people to consider, and I was not in the column that required his attention." She paused. "And he came back anyway."

"I know that," Mireya said.

"You keep saying that," Nerith said. "Like please...! I already know that!"

"I know that he saved me, and I know he saved you from that canyon as well." Her voice had not risen, but something in it had tightened. "And then you spend an entire evening in front of me telling me that the person who did those things is someone I should be afraid of."

"That the people who trust him are the people who can’t see him clearly." She stopped for a moment.

When she continued, the control was still there, but it was thinner. "Do you know what that feels like to hear?!"

"From someone who was not there for the gorge. From someone who was on the ground for most of what happened in the canyon."

"I wasn’t trying to—"

"I know you weren’t trying to," Nerith said. "That’s not the point."

"The point is that you have been sitting here for an hour telling everyone that everything I read, everything we know, everything we saw is less reliable than what you saw from the floor of a canyon after a direct electrical hit." Her voice wavered slightly on the last sentence—soft, not dramatic, just present. "And I have been trying to explain, and you keep—you keep not hearing it!

"And I don’t know what else I have to say."

The hallway was quiet.

Talyra focused intently on the surface between her hands. Aisella’s gaze was fixed on Nerith, who had turned her face slightly away and was blinking at something near the wall, her expression carefully controlled as if she were managing her reaction.

"Nerith," Mireya said.

Her voice had lost the hardness that it had carried for the past hour. What lay beneath was not softness, exactly, but a different quality—more uncertain, less constructed.

Nerith turned slowly, her composure faltering as she met Mireya’s gaze. The tension in the air shifted, forming a fragile bridge between them, as if the unspoken words were finally on the verge of being spoken.

"I wasn’t trying to say your read doesn’t matter," Mireya said.

"Then what were you trying to say?" Nerith asked, still not meeting her gaze and focusing instead on the wall.