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Melanite stopped, because--her voice was trembling, and out of the corner of his eye he could see her shoulders shaking. Where, here, was the greater moral right? He stopped, and he turned to her, and he put a hand on her shoulder again, leaning down so they were of a height. A momentary, cruel thought flashed through him, a if you’re weak enough to fear their punishment thought, but he had been afraid once, too, before he’d stopped feeling anything at all. She had done nothing to earn his ire, only what she was told. Astrophyllite was a child, and there were tears gathering at the corners of her gold eyes, and she was so painfully awkward, and he’d siblings, of course, and cousins, but none of them so much younger than he.

“I stopped being afraid of anything a long, long time ago,” he said, finally. “Do you know where we might stop and get a coffee and talk about this, Astrophyllite? I promise I will not send you back to General Natron without your quota.” She nodded, and pointed, and together they picked their way to a twenty-four hour coffee bar and a seat by the window. He bought a coffee, and a scone, and pushed the scone and a mug of hot cocoa across the table to her.

How to explain? Perhaps the simplest way: “When you take energy from someone,” he said, quietly, “you are taking years of their life. It is their life energy, their ability to live, that you take. And the people you say I ought to take from, they have nothing but their lives. Taking from them is taking the most valuable thing they own.” It was, to put it bluntly, immoral. Better to focus their attentions elsewhere. “They have no money with which to ease the pain which you bring them,” he told her, “no leisure to recover from what you do. It is cruel to them, a cruelty greater than any the… aliens… could inflict upon them. Do you understand?”

He set his hands on the table. “It is wiser, better, and kinder to take from those who have the resources to ease what you do,” he said. “They will give more energy, more readily. They may take a day of rest, or see a doctor. Would you drain a child, Astrophyllite? when you are little more than one yourself? It is the same thing you do when you drain a homeless man, draining a child.” He paused, and took a sip of his coffee, and met her gaze. “Do you understand?”

Melanite shuddered, all at once, from the top of his head to the tips of his fingers, and he reached across the space between them and carefully, meticulously, redid the buttons on Astrophyllite’s coat. “The people above you gave you bad orders,” he said, thinking: simplify. She was only young. Not malicious. Not cruel. That was not a crime worthy of punishment--especially not--his coffee burned in his throat, painfully acidic. “The people above you are--” His words caught in his throat and he stared at her for a moment, struggling to come up with the English word he wanted, but it evaded him. “--They are musor,” he said.

“I believe that you are trying to be good,” he said, tucking his hands around his coffee for something to do with them. He was flushed, uncomfortable--the bones rattled inside his chest, the dull vibration of a beehive disturbed. It took effort for him to speak calmly; he only managed it by staring fixedly into his coffee. “I believe that your General Avalon was right about you, and that you are going to be an asset to the Negaverse someday. It is not your fault that those responsible for you led you wrong, Astrophyllite.”

He pushed the cocoa back towards her. “Finish your cocoa. If you can show me where the, the upper-class go, I will help you meet your quota,” he said. “Provided you show me how.”