“If I hadn’t tried to build an army, this wouldn’t have happened. I don’t even know how many people died back there, Oran. How many people did I get killed because I thought I could stand up to him? Because I thought I knew how to fight him?”

“Caledonia, stop.”

“I can’t. Oran, do you understand that hundreds of people just died and I’m the one who got them killed?!” She stopped. Her mouth falling open in horror, her own words echoing in her head: hundreds of people.

“Caledonia.” Oran’s voice was softer now. He rose from his knees, taking her face in his hands and leaning in to press his lips lightly to hers. When she didn’t immediately pull away, he deepened the kiss until her moment of panic subsided. “I want you to listen to me,” he said, smoothing his hands from her chin to her shoulders. “Nothing I’m about to say is going to make any of this go away. It won’t even make it better. I honestly don’t know that anything can.”

“Then what?” Caledonia had never felt the spiraling sensation in her chest, this feeling that she was falling, sinking, plummeting beneath the surface.

“I can give you something to hold on to,” he said, sitting back on his heels. There was no sympathy in Oran’s eyes. Only understanding. Whatever she was going through, he’d been there before, and he was offering her a way through. Not out.

“Tell me,” she said, missing the warmth of his touch on her shoulders.

“The decisions you make now will never be over,” he began, careful not to touch her while he spoke, aware that even if he understood what she was going through, he couldn’t inhabit it with her. She was on her own, but that didn’t mean she had to be alone. “The consequences are too big, too important to end in a moment. You will carry them with you until the day you die, and others will carry them longer than that. Because that’s what it means to change the world. It means making the kinds of choices that people remember.”

“The ones who survive.”

“Yes, the ones who survive. They aren’t the only ones who matter, but even if they don’t like how you fought, they will always know that you fought for them.”

There was something almost calming in that statement. It felt inevitable and perhaps even simple in the way the Bullet Seas had always seemed simple. You were either a Bullet or you weren’t. Fighting or dead.