"It's time to leave, Duke," I warn the idiot for the third time.

"Answer my question, and I'll leave."

"What if I shoot you?"

"You can't shoot me like this," he says, taking the gun out of my hand effortlessly with two simple moves.

"See?" he goes on. "You have to hold it like this. There. Try again."

He gives the gun back to me. I point it at him again.

"Much better." He nods approvingly. "Now you stand a chance. Also, I could only take it out of your hand if I broke your thumb. Which I obviously won't, just saying."

"Okay," I sigh. "Back to square one. What if I shoot you?"

"Well, the nurse room would require a major makeover because you're targeting my head, and, believe or not, the brain is quite oily, so it's not nearly as easy to clean up as blood."

I put the gun down with a disappointed grin. He shows me again how to hold it before he puts it away.

"So," he says, sitting back on the bed. "You guarded us two hundred and forty-nine times against death. And then they told us that you had died in a simple car accident, leaving us confused and mourning. What happened?"

"Nothing," I tell him.

"I guess you know it's not a good enough answer for me. I deserve more."

"I owe you nothing," I snap, losing my patience.

"You promised to look after those who were yours."

"Gabriel promised that."

"I always felt that I was yours," he goes on, without letting me disturb his thoughts. "A little more than anyone else, I'm afraid."

It sounds more or less like a confession. Okay, maybe not, but it's still the closest thing to a confession I've ever got. And, to be honest, probably the closest thing I'll ever get in the future, too.

I tap my forehead three times, and I breathe out.

Then, instead of freaking out even more, I concentrate on the calculations running in the background of my mind. There is a 64% chance that Tessa wakes up and climbs up to the windowsill before I get back to the classroom if I allow Duke to ramble on.

"You've never lost a man," he says.

Ignoring him doesn't seem to be a valid option. Reacting to the inaccurate piece of information he just disclosed about my imaginary ownership of him isn't, either. So I decide to answer his original question.

"And I never wanted to," I inform him.

"Is that why you left?" he asks, sounding a bit surprised.

I nod. He shakes his head.

"I don't get it. Shit happens, you know. If you lost one or two of us, you'd still be the most successful tactical controller in human history, by far."

"No, I wouldn't," I tell him.

"Why? After three years without casualties? You'd certainly be the best in the whole world even if someone died under your command."

"No, I wouldn't," I repeat.

The idiot can't understand it without an explanation, of course.

"I'm not discussing the effectiveness rate. I wouldn't be because I highly doubt that I would have survived it."

He shuts up finally.

"I became more and more anxious," I tell him. "I always calculate everything, you know, and the numbers didn't look good for the two hundred and fiftieth mission. I knew that I would fail, sooner or later."

"You've never failed. Never. If any of us had died, it would have been our fault."

"Here's the thing, Duke. Your fail is my fail too. My duty was to guard your life, no matter what you did. When you did something stupid, it never caught me unprepared because I calculated that, too. I saw it coming. How else could I have been the hand that leads you to safety with a 100% success rate, huh? It was my duty to outsmart your dumb moves, too."

"How is that even possible?" he asks.

"There were thousands of calculations running simultaneously in every second."

He stares at me as if I was claiming that I wrangled the Loch Ness Monster with my bare hands.

"If it would be easy, everyone could do it, right?" I explain to him. "I knew everything about you. Your strengths. Your weaknesses. Your dreams. Your deepest fears. Everything that could affect the outcome of a fight. You were my lambs. And I wasn't prepared to lose any of you."

"Come on. No one would have held you responsible if—"

"No one," I cut in. "Only me."

He shakes his head again.

"I told you." I shrug. "It's the only thing I'm good at. It's my special interest. It makes me who I am. It's me."

His brain still refuses to grasp the concept. Duke has a very neurotypical brain. It's just a fact, not a judgment. But it forces me to be uncomfortably specific to get the message through.

"Losing any of my lambs is incompatible with my existence. And I was afraid that not only figuratively, but literally."

I give him a few seconds for my words to sink in.

When he nods, I nod back, but I'm still not sure he can understand how I felt during missions. Like a computer under a constant overload attack.

"But it also means," he starts tentatively, "that you still can't stop protecting Mint, no matter what he did."

"Yeah," I admit. "That's what I told you, right? And the same goes for you. All I care about is your safety. Not the virus, not the Agency, not good or evil. Your life only. That's who I am."

Duke seems to count to ten before he opens his mouth.

"Noted," he says.

I sincerely respect his self-restraint. Still, in the back of my mind, I register the fact that there is a 12% chance that he agrees with me, a 17% that he's too confused to argue, and a 71% that he thinks that I'm inflexible, but he can convince me later.

"Now I know why you left," he says. "But I still don't know how."

"One question," I remind him. "You had one question."

"I happen to have a small problem with the Agency too, so I may or may not need your advice on how it's done."

"A small problem called Mint. I see. They won't be happy when they realize he's alive."

"Right. How did you deal with Mr. Toe? He's not someone I'd call easily convincible."

"I know things about him," I inform Duke, tapping my fingers impatiently on the medical cabinet. All I can think about is Tessa and the windowsill at the moment. I notice myself slightly rocking back and forth, so I need to be very fast.

"How come?" he asks. "Have you met?"

"Of course not. I was a bit misleading, sorry. I have no idea who he is. I just guessed things about him, and I guessed right."

"You're fucking terrifying. What about me? You just look at me and know things?"

"I do." I nod for emphasis. "But I do about everybody else too, so you don't need to be ashamed. Everyone has strange thoughts and strange desires. For example, when you imagine—"

"Thank you," he interrupts me. "No more details, thank you."

"See, that's how it's done. Goodbye, Duke, be well.

"What?!"

"Well, that's how I did it with Mr. Toe," I tell him.

"So you're just bluffing."

"No, I'm not." I shrug. "Everyone has strange desires. And everyone is scared of them being named."

"I doubt it would work if I did the same."

"Of course it wouldn't," I agree. "You look like you care. Like you wouldn't reveal a terrible secret in broad daylight. But I'm terrifying, like you said. You never know what to expect from me, because I'm crazy."

"You're not."

His voice is as muffled as if something got stuck in his throat.

"You're not," he repeats. "And if you need anything—"

"I actually do, Duke," I point out. "I need you to be gone in two seconds, before Tessa—"

"Absolutely anything," he says, looking me uncomfortably deep in the eyes, "anywhere, anyhow, just know that I'll be there for you."

I tap my forehead again. This conversation has a steady place amongst the five most distressing moments of my life. So I decide not to answer. I turn around and flee instead.

I arrive back to the classroom just in time to catch Tessa falling from the windowsill.