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Ami had to be around somewhere. Evan had checked the logs, and she wasn't off-island, so it stood to reason that she had to be on it. He had started with the training fields and quickly abandoned them once he realized he had never actually seen her on them. From there he had gone to the cafeteria, to the common rooms--he'd even wandered aimlessly around the town.

When Ami hadn't magically appeared in any of those locations, Evan had started poking around the libraries. There were more of them than he had even been aware of prior to his search, and sure enough, that was where he spotted her familiar red braid, poring over some dusty tome.

"Ah, Ma'am," Evan said, his voice low--they were in a library, after all. "I heard about the show and tell you're putting on with the subjects we caught in the Haunted House. If it's all right with you--I mean, I know I'm not in Life division, but--I'd like to sit in. If I could. Please."

Evan steeled himself to hear all about the horrible demise of the cat that dared to bother Ami, recalling with startling clarity the minipet she had pinned to the wall and all of the various surgical instruments that had been sticking out of it. He realized that he could just as easily be that minipet and glanced towards the exit. His legs were much longer than Ami's; he could probably reach it before her.

He was surprised--and relieved--to hear that the cat hadn't died horribly, though he was none too pleased to be compared to it. He had been loyal to Ami, following her into the Haunted House and doing as she had asked without question. Granted, she had ordered him to, but all she ever had to do was ask.

Fortunately for Evan, he was smart enough not to say any of that. "I have questions about their physiology, Ma'am," he said instead. "Questions that only they can answer."

Evan had no idea what kind of game Ami was getting at. He hesitated before replying, "I want to know if there's any reliable way to kill them permanently. Not just here and there, not just with weaponization--anytime, anywhere."

It was hard not to be annoyed at the extreme condescension in Ami's voice regardless of how familiar it was. Evan took a deep breath to steady his nerves, though his lips still curled into a displeased frown.

"If that's what it takes, Ma'am," he replied, though he didn't really want to think of Ami as a demon. No matter how much he disappointed her, no matter how much she belittled him, she wasn't one of the real monsters, and there were no non-hostile situations where they were concerned. "What is it about them--about you creatures--that allows you to keep coming back, or keeps you from dying? Is it something inside of you that needs to be removed? Is it a specific process that needs to be interrupted?"

Evan was briefly stunned by what almost sounded like a compliment from Ami, but not so much so that he missed her dismissing him just like that, like there was no way to get the information he wanted and it wasn't worth the effort of pursuing.

"With all due respect, Ma'am," Evan said as Ami waved him off. "Didn't you capture those things so you could make them tell you what you want to know? Isn't this worth knowing?"

Evan would have been literally anywhere else at that moment than in a library getting chewed out by a woman a fraction of his size. He felt like he was in boot camp being called all sorts of names that he would just have to learn to shrug off, but Ami was only a little less likely to make him run laps afterwards.

Now, as then, he pressed on. "I wish you'd tell us so we were all on the same page," he replied. "It just seems like a waste of an opportunity to have them under your control and not get everything you can out of them."

"What's the point of having people come in to ask questions if they're not going to be answered?" Evan asked, growing frustrated with Ami and her secrets and the entire ******** Life division in general. In charge of information, but only at their discretion--it was bullshit.

"This is information that could help all of us," he reasoned. "It could save your life someday. Why doesn't that matter to you?"

Evan squinted hard at Ami; he wasn't about to tell her the truth, not all of it. "Because I tore one of those things to shreds not long before we caught it. There wasn't enough left of it to make dog food out of, and now it's sitting in the basement a hell of a lot more alive than I left it. There's no guarantee that someday it won't grow up to kill me--or you--unless we find a way to put it down for good. The same goes for all of them."