“It isn’t about whether they hate me.” He could hear the pathetic note in his own voice, the flatness of his platitudes. That kind of thing would never stand up against Ari.

“Isn’t it?”

“No, it’s—”

“Please.” Aristide took a step closer, back toward the road, one sturdy boot on the half-rotten wood. “Don’t you dare say justice.”

Even Cyril heard the answer in his silence.

“What’s that supposed to be, then? It’s just some way of salving hurts that we can never truly heal. If a murderer is hanged, what good does it do the victim?” He took another step, coming half across the bridge. “They wouldn’t have forgiven you in death. I’d rather you learned to live with your guilt. Perhaps that’s selfish, but I seem to have fewer scruples than you do, these days.”

“Hard-earned.” Cyril had come closer to Aristide, somehow. He didn’t remember leaving the safety of the verge.

“I wish you hadn’t. Earned them. We’d have been on our way five minutes ago.” Aristide came back to the near bank and considered Cyril for a long moment. When he spoke next, his diction lost the crisp edge of argument, and his blasé tone dropped into a different register: softer and more somber. The last of his Central City drawl fell away. Cyril remembered when he used to stutter, and the times the stutter faltered, fled. When he was very serious, or very scared.

“What’s keeping you here?” said Ari, and Cyril realized he was standing not two feet away: as close as he had come since Liso, when Cyril startled underneath the razor and drew blood.

“I just want—” But his thoughts fled, shying away, refusing order and exposure. To speak aloud was to commit himself to a course of action, or at least the promise of one. Indecision ached in his gut as badly as a boot.

“Cyril,” said Aristide. Horribly, he sounded … querulous. Almost afraid. At his sides, his hands curled into fists. “Cyril, don’t—”

“I want to do the right thing,” he said, all in a rush. “For once. And I thought … in prison I thought it was you. I thought you were the only thing that I could fix. Cordelia’s dead and the country’s in ruins, but you’re still here, and so am I.”

“Yes.” Breathless now, all pride gone.

Cyril couldn’t bear to look at him. “Is this the right thing?”

A shaky inhalation. “Is that rhetorical? Or would you really like my answer?”

“Really,” said Cyril. “I need someone to tell me.”

Moonless shadows shifted at his feet, and he saw the toes of Ari’s boots in the mud and melting snow. “I think the only justice in this world is what you make yourself. So do better this time. We’ll both do better.”

The words plucked a string in his memory. “Small lies.”