I stared at the bound woman who was prone on the ground, half-covered in my bugs. She was looking in my direction.
“It bugs me.
This is too easy. If the Nine were this easy to take out, we wouldn’t be in this situation.”
That too. None of the Nine would’ve stayed down this long unless they were playing possum.
“Sounds like a pretty thin justification for backing out,” Grue said.
Look. The burden of proof is not on Taylor here.
“Yeah,” Tattletale added.
This kind of social pressure wasn’t the sort of thing I was good at coping with. Just going by my recollection of how we’d planned many of our capers, I could usually trust some of the others to have my back when I was arguing a point.
Usually one of these two, in fact, but now they’re both against you. Welp.
Or I’d had some other motive or reason to go along with them.
“Why are you pushing so hard for this?” I asked.
They are being weirdly pushy. This behavior is unlike them. Especially unlike Brian.
“Did you forget what they did to me?” Grue asked, his voice cold.
…right.
Him specifically? I had forgotten, yes. But I could remember that scene, the emotions then, every feeling that I’d experienced afterward. Frustration, hate, pain, sympathy for the pain he must have experienced himself. I could remember the feeling of heartbreak, because someone I cared about was gone, in a sense.
And now he’s using what happened to him like a card to play to get someone to do what he wants, a guilt trip.
“No,” I replied.
“Where’s your anger, your outrage? Or don’t you care?”
Yeah, this is definitely one of Brian’s uglier chapters.
“I care! It’s-”
“Then end this.”
I shook my head, as if I could clear it. It wasn’t that I wasn’t thinking clearly, necessarily. It was that my thoughts kept hitting that dead-end where I couldn’t reach back for context about people, about Tattletale and Grue and the Nine. I was in the dark.
And Taylor doesn’t even know if they’re normally this pushy, for that matter.
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