The Architect Codex

"Are you alright, Tobias? You've hardly said a word since we got here."

He looked up from his bowl, his salad having barely been touched. "Sorry—I guess I just got a lot on my mind."

The two of them sat in a dimly lit restaurant, a hole in the wall that didn't exactly exude a sense of sophistication. Gates had spied it while they'd been walking around and insisted on grabbing a table, looping her arm around his and dragging him over. There were only a few other diners other than themselves, and none that they recognized—usually this was a plus, meaning they had some time to be alone with each other for once.

But Gates had quickly caught onto his unusual lack of chattiness, and raised an eyebrow. "Still worried about the reassignment?"

He swallowed hard. "I guess you could say that."

< Understatement of the century. >

Tobias knew KT's attempt at humor was just a mask for her own worry. That paper had been proof that something beyond the natural was happening here. The 'no one is immune to mistakes' line had only just been said by her, and it was obviously in reference to Briggs' decision not to pursue the weapon. There was no way to predict what random set of numbers KT was going to rattle off, and as for the final part ...

It's often the hardest choices which are the right ones.

The wisdom his mother had imparted on him as a kid, the very words that had inspired him to bond with KT and put him on the path that led him to this moment ... that was no coincidence. He'd never told anyone about that—not KT, not Gates, no one.

So, who had given him the paper?

"You're doing it again."

He blinked a few times, Gates coming back into focus as she stared at him in concern. "Seriously, are you okay—?"

"Let me ask you a question," he cut her off, surprising her with his abrupt change of topic, " a totally hypothetical one—let's say that there was something you knew that no one else did. Something that proved, without a shadow of a doubt, that you were right about something—but you knew that no one else would ever believe you."

She sighed exasperatedly. "We're still on this?"

"Just humor me," he said. "You know that if you don't do anything, you could be jeopardizing everything—but if you're wrong and then do something, you're also jeopardizing everything. What's the right thing to do in that situation?"

"What do you mean?"

"Should you listen when you're told to stand by and do nothing, or should you act in spite of the fact?"

She pursed her lips. "This doesn't exactly sound hypothetical."

He crossed his arms and leaned back in his chair. Realizing that he wasn't going to let this go, Gates rolled her eyes and gave in.

"Okay, fine. As a gun-for-hire, money used to be my only concern—when the next job was, when the next paycheck was coming in, you get it." She leaned forward. "But when I saw just how far the IMC was willing to go to keep the people of the frontier under their thumb, something inside me snapped. I couldn't just think about myself anymore, I had to work and fight without thinking about whether or not I was getting paid—I had to do it because it was right."

She reached one arm over the table, and held her palm up. After a moment, he tentatively placed his hand in hers, and she held it tightly.

"What I'm trying to say is that sometimes doing the right thing isn't as obvious as you'd think it is, and sometimes it isn't as easy as we'd like it to be. Does that make sense?"