“I just wanted them to have this opportunity.”
“You don’t get to make this choice on your own, Jacob!”
“I thought we were on the same page.”
“I don’t think we are even on the same book.”
“You don’t know what it is like to grow up in the organization. My sisters and I had a guardian who would poison our tea! If D hadn’t figured out her scheme, we would all be dead!”
“Why would she, your guardian, do this?”
“Money, Jacob, why else? She was our “legal” guardian. With us gone, she would have the Snicket fortune on her hands.”
“I don’t understand.”
“Do you think all volunteers are good and noble, as we try to be? Do you think we are all the flawless chosen heroes to defend humankind’s knowledge?”
“Well, we are all humans, but that is our mission right? We are all fighting a noble fight.”
“Fighting a noble fight doesn’t make all of us noble. There’s much more about VFD than our noble fight. Not everyone joined like you, out of free will because you saw a cause that you wanted to fight for. Many of us had no choice. We joined to please our elders. Which means not everyone believes in what we are doing. But they still do, maybe because they enjoy it, or because they can’t stand the consequences of leaving. Some decided that if they have to stay, they could try changing the organization, for better or worse, or that they will gain whatever they can while in here.”
“Like your guardian, poisoning your tea.” A pause. “This is sick.”
“Not all guardians care about the wellbeing of their children.”
“Are you afraid ours will end up with bad guardians?”
“Of course I am. I know they are smart and we raised them in a loving home, so they know they deserve nothing less. But they’re so young, so vulnerable...”
“Hey, you and your sisters survived this, and our kids have your blood.”
E raised her eyes to the night sky. They survived, but they weren’t the same after it all. They all became a little colder, a little scared, a little suspicious. They didn’t smile like they did in their parents’s house anymore. They weren’t as close as they used to be. But J would never understand it. They really were on different books.