"It's not like you have a choice, master," Kael said. "This is the best option for now."
Noah looked at him for a moment.
Then the wry smile came — small and crooked, pulled more to one side than the other, the smile of someone who had been told something they already knew and needed to hear anyway.
"Yeah," he said. "You're right."
He let the ceiling have his gaze again, his arms still loose at his sides, the room quiet around them.
The honest answer to the question of when he could tell them — when the story he gave his mother could be the real one rather than a constructed one — was tied to something he hadn't resolved yet.
The system itself. Its nature, its origin, the question of what it was and where it had come from and why it had appeared in his life at the specific moment it had.
He didn't know.
That was the simple truth sitting at the center of everything.
