Playing God (Helford #2)

(7) Why

I didn’t let myself think much about my mission until I was boarding the private passenger plane to Barcelona on the guise of heading to the city on holiday. The plane was nice, fancy—I have been spoiled with very nice residences and other things due to my loyalty to Helford and the Underground, and I have the decency to be ashamed of it—and I would be the only passenger today, reassuring me that I wouldn’t have to watch my facial expressions, or at least not to someone close enough to notice the little flashes in my eyes that might give me away.

What Meade had said to me that night on my doubts of Woodburn’s truth had been haunting me since the moment that the words hit the open air. I was second guessing every move that I made, every word I spoke to a superior or even a peer.

Was I looking at this situation too closely, reading too much into it? Did I look for things that could be considered suspicious and run with possible conspiracy theories when there wasn’t anything to be seen?

I justified the realization because of my past. I felt as though I had reason to read into things because I hadn’t opened my eyes wide enough to see Helford’s blatant inconsistencies. I can’t say that my views of the things in question were logical, but I had accepted that I probably wouldn’t be able to see it differently.

Helford has cemented a lot of things in my cognitive behavior that I feel like I would never again fully think as I had when I was myself before I went to them. They had taught me the way they had wanted me to think and I thought in that manner accordingly. It could be easily seen over mine and Meade’s clash how we had been conditioned differently, in a different class.

I was taught to execute instinctual inklings as if they had been drawn up on the battle field. When I got a gut feeling, I took it seriously when most people would brush it off as a false judgment or an inexplicably bad call. Instinct was law for me, and I believed my feelings when I considered to myself things such as this.

I knew something was wrong. Something was off about all of this—I had an uncanny knot in my stomach from the moment the casket opened that knew I was missing something important. It would be on the back of my mind without fault until the pieces fell into place.

Meade and I had different conditioning, different training, but I felt, for an unknown reason, that he could be trusted. Despite my better judgment, I had opened up to him, allowed him to hear my inner thoughts and terrors. I hadn’t opened up to anyone but Woodburn for the longest time, but I confessed my sins to Meade the first night that I knew him.

I could see his smirk as he asked me how far I would go on a first date. I think I met the emotional equivalent of a nightwalker.

I don’t know what made me want to open up to him, really. I never opened up to most people. But I met Meade and proceeded to explain to him when he asked me who I kept alive and why.

I had told him my biggest regret and that I would give anything to have Rian back. I hadn’t told anyone but Woodburn about that, and I had never planned to.

I can’t understand what it was that made me so stupid about Meade.

Five years. It had been five years since I left Helford, a number that was a large chunk of my young life, but it felt as though it had merely been five days ago. Along my way to where I was here over the years, I had met many people who had left Helford, and many who were still among the ranks like Woodburn and Meade. Meade was definitely not the first I had met, but he was the only one I had spoken to like we had known and trusted each other for years.

I met a lot of people, and I watched them go, all over the course of five years. I could only guess as to why my trust in them, in the wayward souls I met along the way, had so dramatically changed.