He wanted to cry but he had long forgotten how. Sometimes his face would grow wet when he was sad, and he supposed that must be why, but he could never feel it in the moment. His eyes were terribly dry and burning at the corners. He was thirsty, but he couldn’t know it; he’d forgotten how that felt, too.
Silas kills people.
That was where it all fell apart. It was fine for them to blame Valek until ‘Silas Kills People.’ Fiz abhors killing, the Finest are all ‘family,’ and to him that meant that Valek enjoyed some degree of safety. They would assume that the san’layn had slipped, had accidentally murdered one of their own, they would correct him, and it would all go away. Then they could go together to find Screescraw and Little Hunk.
But Silas Kills People, and Madie tells dark jokes about carnival games that end in slaughter, and he knows for a fact that dead men are terribly hard to kill. Valek would survive many painful rounds of Silas’ killing games. Valek would suffer the unthinkable, Madie said. Madie hoped. Some of them didn’t like the idea of it, but none of them disagreed: Silas Kills People.
So he told them, and he ran, and he was caught. Now his eyes burned and his throat burned and his mind burned loudest of all. He could finally think again, but he kept that revelation to himself. They all said that they didn’t believe him but he’d seen the way Fiz had fled. He’d caught that horrified expression, wide eyed and pained. He could guess that the tremor in Tweed’s voice was doubt.
‘We don’t believe you,’ they’d said. ‘You didn’t kill him,’ they hoped. They were wrong. If he had never met them, they would have one less danger and one more friend.