Tempest by Kelly Meding

had ever been able to answer for me—or me for myself.
    “We weren’t brave,” I said. Aaron could never understand what that final battle had been like. The cold and rain and smoke. The screaming and blood and the odor of charred human flesh. Fear so strong you thought you might explode from it, if it didn’t drown you first. “We ran and we hid. We were just trying to live.”
    “Because the Banes wanted you dead?”
    “Yeah.”
    He arched an eyebrow at me. “Because of something you couldn’t help being?”
    “I—” Well, shit, he had me there. My situation in Manhattan and his situation as a lab rat at Weatherfield weren’t anywhere close to the same—but we’d both acted in our own best interest. And survived.
    Not that I’d admit out loud to having that in common with him.
    “You what?” Aaron wasn’t done poking me yet.
    “We were at war,” I finally said, too stubborn to acknowledge the point he’d made. “Things happen in wartime that you just don’t do in real life.”
    “Uh-huh.” He didn’t say it, but “like what?” hung off the end of his sentence, and damn it if he wasn’t really good at baiting me, the bastard.
    If he wanted to hear about Manhattan, I’d tell him some of the fantastic details that still occasionally came to visit in my nightmares. Maybe then he’d shut the hell up. “I watched a Bane named Mayhem melt the face off my friend Mellie. Melted her skin and muscle down to her skull. She was twelve years old, and she died like that right in front of me.”
    Sweat kept beading on my forehead, and more broke out across my back and shoulders as Mellie’s scream shot through me like an icy wind. Even in the cold and rain, her skin had sizzled. I’d been close enough to smell it. Sometimes in my nightmares, I got caught in that blast and felt every fractured second of heat and fire and pain—and in those nightmares, it was Jinx who’d killed me.
    “What happened to Mayhem?” Aaron asked.
    Despite his cautious tone, I didn’t censor my withering retort. “We went out for ice cream sundaes on her dime, Aaron. What the hell do you think happened to her? I hit her with a small cyclone of wind and rocks and slammed her headfirst into an old metal sculpture. Broke her neck.”
    Aaron looked away, and something in his demeanor changed. The smug challenge he’d started the conversation with disappeared, and he just looked . . . well, sad. It kind of freaked me out. I didn’t want his sympathy, his pity, or his condescension, and I was so over this conversation anyway—
    “You killed her,” he said. Not a question, either.
    If he’d said it any other way, I’d have probably walked across the cabin and punched him in the eye for drawing a comparison between the life I’d taken and the lives he’d taken. But it wasn’t an accusation. Just a statement. So, instead of hitting him, I sat still and glared across the space between us.
    “Yeah,” I said. “I killed her.”
    I might be tangentially responsible for six of us dying back in January right after our powers came back, but Alice “Mayhem” Stiles was the only life I’d ever deliberately taken.
    So far.
    “You were only thirteen,” Aaron said.
    I shrugged. “It was war.”
    He watched me like he expected more, but I had nothing left to say on the topic. We were done talking about Manhattan unless it had something to do with city maps or the ex-Banes we were preparing to hunt. No more “This Was Your Life, Ethan” today. Aaron wasn’t very good at keeping his thoughts off his face—and I was mildly curious whose quirk that was—because he shifted between curious, concerned and . . . upset? Nah. But something, and his intent silence was getting annoying.
    I wrote the conversation off as over and reached for my tablet.
    “I get it,” he said.
    “Get what?”
    Instead of explaining what he thought he got, Aaron picked up his own tablet and started reading. The jerk.
    And like the first three