Is this the point I stop being the kid and become a shitty adult? Make my first horrible decision, that betrays the others just by saying it out loud?

He looked back at Blackforest.

He could go back. Into that room where he had an extended family, but nobody he was close to. If he wanted he could have a relationship with Blackforest, maybe. He’d be treated like a child by Engel and he’d pretend to be an adult. He’d be comfortable, insofar as it was possible to be comfortable when his body broke at the slightest pressure, leaking fluids everywhere.

His feelings bottled up, boxed up, locked in a vault, and sunk to the bottom of an ocean of yellow yolk, where they could fester and poison the fluids around them.

He couldn’t.

“You have to dig less if you’re digging into Case Fifty-Threes,” he said. “Everything’s closer to the surface. Bigger. It has more real estate.”

“We’re not going to do that,” Sveta said. “No way, no how.”

“You might have to,” Egg said. “You can get them on board if you give them what they really want.”

Sveta shook her head.

“What do they want?” Slician asked.

“A fix,” Weld said, metal eyes locked with Egg’s eggshell orbs, that leaked beads of yellow where eyelid merged into the orb’s surface and broke by small fractions.

“We can’t guarantee a fix,” Faultline said.

“It’d be unfair to even suggest there might be one,” Sveta added.

“You took the potential fix from us when you killed Doctor Mother. Worse than that,” Egg said, and his voice was hard, “you took hope from us. That we might get her to say something or do something that gives us that fix.”

“There was never going to be a fix,” Weld said. “That’s not the way this works.”

“We need hope,” Egg said. “You took it from us, you could give it back to us if you really wanted.”

“How?” Sveta asked.

“Lie. Give us something. Give us anything. We have to fight Titans, we’re going through this testing. Maybe we end up making sacrifices. If a nucleus of yolk inside me gets popped and my brain goes with it, I could donate my body to science, to be used as a tool, but you have to fucking give me something to get that from me.”

“I don’t think we could do that,” Weld said.

“Then fuck you, then,” Egg snarled.

He looked back at Blackforest, worried for a second, but she looked a bit angry too.

If he pushed for a lie, would she back it up, saying it was the truth? If it was a necessary lie that would help keep all of these scared Case Fifty-Threes afloat?

“These two were talking about hacking the system from the inside. From the dream,” Faultline said. “Maybe that’s a fix.”