The Tina Decision

Story so far

With the castle pinned and time running out, Carl sends message after increasingly angry message demanding Tina be brought out. Kiwi answers flatly that it is too dangerous, that Tina is just a child, and that Carl has already ordered the gnome and changeling children to stay out of the battle. Carl admits she is right and that he has been deliberately ignoring the issue — he had Louis put Bonnie and Skarn off the Party Planner for exactly this reason.

He composes an override — 'Kiwi, she will be fine. We've buffed her up. We'll all die if she doesn't come out' — and then sits with pulse blasts peppering the shield around him, contemplating what it means to give such an order. He thinks of his brother Asher, of Asher's mother hugging him after poisoning their father, of Donut sobbing at the end of the Butcher's Masquerade. She's a child, too. Then he realizes survival has more than one meaning, deletes the message, and decides it is Kiwi's call. Before he can finish the replacement order, Donut bellows GET TINA OUT HERE RIGHT NOW into Warlord chat and the doors fly open — the moral victory undone in a single line, by the one person Carl cannot overrule.

Role

The chapter's moral pivot: Carl chooses not to conscript a child, and Donut does it anyway.

Relationships