“Think about how to handle my problem,” Janus said, not stirring. The wind came through and rustled his tweed jacket. I wondered if Kat had packed that for him when she brought him over from England.
“I prefer head-on, personally,” I said.
He rolled his head toward me, just enough to give me a sidelong look. “Yes, without doubt, that is how you handle things. I am uncertain that it will yield positive results in this instance, though.”
“Couldn’t hurt,” I said.
“Oh, but it could,” Janus said, staring back at the grounds. “It could very much hurt.”
We stood there in silence, side by side, and I tried not to further invade the privacy of his thoughts by looking at him. “I don’t believe that whatever you’re hiding about what Omega did to Adelaide to reduce her powers will change the course of our war.”
“Then you are the only one,” he said tightly. “The benefit of being an empath is that you can feel the emotions of others. Their suspicion would be obvious even to the unskilled of my kind, let alone someone who has been dealing with this for several thousand years. They regard me as a liar. And perhaps they are right to.” He laughed without mirth. “After all, before I was attacked by Weissman and—sidelined, I think you would call it—I had promised you the truth about everything.”
“You told me the biggest truth,” I said.
“But perhaps not all of it,” he said, lowering his head. “Not every truth I know. Certainly, there are several thousand years of them to sort through, but I know things—little details, here and there—that might be of some use in our current circumstances.”
“We’ve been busy—” I said, starting to make excuses for him.
“There is no need,” he said, waving his hand in the air in an abrupt cutting motion. “The problem with being me—with being who I am, with sitting in the seats of power the way I have for most of my life is that you learn to control information. And being an empath has made me even more careful with what I learn.” He looked at me, and I saw a sadness in his eyes. “Controlling the flow of secrets, carefully spinning the truths I allowed out, making certain that they reached the correct ears—this has been part of my duty with Omega.”
“When we met,” I started, slowly, “I confronted you with your reputation for being two-faced. You told me that there were multiple variations of the truth.”
“A lie I tell myself to soften the truth, I think,” he said, and his shoulders slumped. “There are always multiple perspectives. What one person holds to be truth, another would dispute until the day they die. People are contrary, argumentative. In order to make someone ‘see the light’ and accept a truth, sometimes it must be presented in a different way. When someone believes something so strongly that it is almost conviction for them, depriving them of that falsehood and replacing it with the truth is not something done by simply shouting that truth at them. They will reject it out of hand. They will deny it at every juncture. They need to be smoothed. The way needs to be prepared. You must approach it … with a ready supply of half-truths to gradually move them to the position where their mind is open to the truth. The real truth.”
I blinked. “Uhm … okay, you lost me.”
He looked at me then sighed. “I am a liar who has spent most of his life in service of liars and thieves and murderers. I have lied to myself to justify my actions, and now I find myself in a most curious position, one I have not been in before, even when I was exiled from the good graces of the Primus and forced into retirement. I am no longer in the service of a liar and a murderer. Realizing that I am in a position where the truth is more than just a tool or a weapon is …” He sighed again. “… It is difficult to adjust to.”
I went through what he’d said then replayed the words again. “In essence, you’re saying that after a lifetime of hiding the truth from the evil people you worked for, you’re stumbling at telling the whole truth now, when you’re working for …” I bobbed my head a little, trying to find a way to soften the words and finding none, “… the good guys?”
“That’s … about it,” he said, and nodded slowly. “You are not a monster, Sienna. I have told you this before, and I believe that to my very bones.”
“Thank you,” I said. “I think? I’m not sure what it has to do with the matters at hand, but—”
“It has nothing to do with the matters at hand,” he said, “and everything to do with the reason I stormed out of the meeting just now.” He looked at me, focused his eyes on mine, and I could see the weary lines of age around his eyes, crow’s feet that had settled in the skin, making him look old, painfully old. “There is a way for you to be able to control your powers, of course. To make it so that your touch is innocuous to others, as harmless as the touch of anyone else.”