Marius turned to him, his jaw set. Cade saw the man was prepared for an argument, and sat down in the chair, hoping to remind him of their conversation the night before last.

“My men will need the Codex from you,” Marius said, his voice firm as stone.

Cade sat up a little straighter, shocked at the request. “Didn’t we already have this conversation?”

“That was before my soldiers needed it,” he said. “We don’t have the luxury of your stubbornness now.”

Cade gritted his teeth. “I’ll go with them,” he said.

Marius paused, and to Cade’s surprise, he realized that the idea had clearly not crossed the commander’s mind.

“And if you die?” he asked. “The Codex will return to one of your contenders, leaving my men stranded.”

Cade rubbed his eyes. He was too tired for this. “Let’s say your men took the Codex,” Cade said. “Say they come across a machine, or a gun out there. How will they know what it is?”

Marius waved his hand. “The Codex will tell them.”

Cade let out a soft laugh. “What would you do if you found a hellfire air-to-ground missile, fired using a Predator UAV? Would you haul it back?”

As Marius stared at him, the many hours Cade had spent playing Call of Duty had finally come in handy.

“Yes…,” he said with some hesitance. “A weapon is a weapon.”

Cade shook his head. “They’re shot from something similar to a plane. You know what planes are, right?”

Marius shook his head.

“Yeah, those weren’t around in Louis Le Prince’s time. It’s a flying machine. A giant metal bird that uses fires burning inside it to move a spinning fan. You would never be able to use that weapon without one. The best you could do is set it off yourselves accidentally while you carry it, and kill yourselves.”

Marius grimaced, but at the same time searched Cade’s eyes to see if he was telling the truth.

“Of course, it’s much more complicated than that,” Cade went on, meeting Marius’s gaze with as much confidence as he could muster. “I could tell you about drones and pilots, radio waves, control systems. But that’s the best I can explain it. And of course, the Codex won’t explain it that way, will it? You have no idea how complicated the machines of the future are. Even I don’t understand how they work exactly. How can you expect your men to?”

Marius sat upon the side of the bed, steepling his fingers and letting out a long sigh. “So what would you have me do, Cade?” he said, and for a moment Cade saw the flickers of the other man. The good man, who had helped them so much before.

“Send two of us,” he said. “If I die out there, another of my contenders will be ready to take my place.”

He regretted his words almost as soon as he had said them. Perhaps he should have pushed to go alone, but he had forgotten himself in that moment. Forgotten he was tricking his friends into summoning an atomic bomb to the keep.