Kane frowned at the ground, then he looked at Luke. He was smirking at him.
So he was gloating over having discovered the way the virus could be manipulated first. Of course, Kane didn't really care, but it did rankle him a little that the guy could still gloat after what had happened.
Luke held out one of the halves of the broken crystal.
Kane had seen the dust fall. He was being offered roughly half of the power they had left.
Well, maybe he cared a little bit. He couldn't just let Luke do everything, after all.
He stepped forward and took the crystal. Sure enough, there was a fine, blueish dust inside it, just like what he had seen fall.
The question wasn't whether they would discover the exact parameters. It was who would do it first, and if they would have time to do it before this whole thing got resolved.
Kane wasn't worried about it being a true apocalypse. After all, the Verteiders and the Lenoxes would be able to quickly shut this down and reestablish society. Kane was quite sure that it would be resolved soon enough, they just had to wait.
And if it wasn't? They would deal with that... well, never, he supposed. After all, it may take quite a while, but until it became absolutely necessary by some unforeseeable turn of events, Kane would not bring anyone else to the Compound.
Kane watched Luke talk to the two newcomers, and then he watched them fly off.
He had seen them before, he thought. Their names certainly weren't Arrogance and Pride, but they weren't important enough for him to remember them.
People with names like that were dangerous. Not because of what they could do, but because of what they could make other people do. Although they were highly logical people, even those of the Compound were influenced by superstition. It was just less visible, because they weren't the usual superstitions.
Things like this, while they might seem obvious and not very consequential, influenced people, though often in small ways.
And with enough influence one way or another, those people would tip over.
And those that were juggled by multiple influences? Those were the ones that broke.
It took a rare mind, and an exceptionally strong one, to resist those influences.
Kane was one of those minds.
Some people called it stubborn, but he didn't care. He knew what he was.
It was not a common thing for one's mind to be able to move as his did. And although he still wasn't sure whether he avoided or stood through the influence, he just knew that he hadn't broken.
Kane Verteider. The first in a century who hadn't succumbed. Although he had been brought up by the Lenox family, he hadn't broken. The Lenoxes were the black sheep of the senator's associate families. Through either a miracle or intense determination, they had remained small.
But "small" wasn't enough to stop them from running their facility. And to this day, Kane wasn't sure if that was a good thing or not. After all, the horrors he had experienced there were near unspeakable. Some quite literally were.
And every day, they moved on to the next.
Record, wipe, reset, and run another test. Like a piece of lab equipment.
Which he was.
The Lenoxes did the filthy experiments that the others refused to. In their eyes, the limits of morality was that something became wrong when it was no longer used to benefit the right people. No one else shared this sentiment, but that didn't stop them.
Testing for fears, testing for compatibility, testing for strength, testing for capacity.
They did all of it at the Lenox estate. Not a single thing was banned there.
Kane had heard and repeated the phrase, "For our greater good" thousands, maybe hundreds of thousands of times. Dozens had stacked up on dozens until he no longer cared about their meaning.
No, in his mind there had emerged a new supreme phrase, which he would use if he ever started his own branch, maybe even his own family. People like him often did, people who were juggled between families, though they rarely came back sound from Lenox.
This phrase was actually quite similar. But a very important word changed.
"For my greater good."