He looked back out at the hills.
"And then a fat lottery kid sits down in my classroom radiating a dimensional frequency I've only seen on buried artifacts, dying on a countdown that bleeds into the local fabric like a broken radio, and I think, well. That's new."
"So I'm entertainment."
"You're potential." The word came out sharper than the rest. "There's a difference between watching a car crash and watching someone build an engine from scratch. Both are interesting. Only one of them ends with something worth having."
The road opened up as the hills fell away toward the coast again, water flashing silver-blue where the sun hit it. I let the Charger stretch its legs, needle climbing past eighty, and Vale didn't tell me to slow down.
"You could've just told me all this," I said. "Day one. Sat me down. Explained the graft, the patron, the Void Gate, the weapon. Would've saved everyone a lot of near-death experiences."
