"Fuck… Fuck!"
"There was nothing you could have done, Miss Liza."
"There's always something I could have done, Zero!"
The only sound to accompany Liza's weakening voice was the fading siren that signaled the end of an otherwise tiring battle. For Riley, however, it could not even be called an insignificant event — he was used to dealing with death in the billions already.
The number of lives he has taken, directly or indirectly, could perhaps even number to a trillion already; but none he could really say was intimate. After all, cut off the celestial tree, and you take everything away with it. He had been obsessing with turning everything into nothing, that sometimes he forgets just how beautiful it was to see death in person.
To see the hope fade not only in their eyes, but those they leave behind.
