“Look at me,” Helly groaned into her hands. “I’m a complete and utter failure. I was supposed to be retired by fifty with the kind of scratch Pharmagene was paying me.”
Eede grunted as he sat next to her, clasping his hands together over his knees. “Well, I don’t really think you’re a failure for all that.”
Helly wiped snot and tears from her puffy face and gave the brisk air a huge snort before snapping, “What the hell do you mean? I press pills in a freezing cold cave!”
She had a point.
But Eede simply tilted his head and pressed his case forward.
“Would you really have been happy with that money knowing it came off the backs of disadvantaged floros? I mean, really, you’ve made a fantastic drug, but you don’t control how it gets into the people’s hands when you work at Pharmagene. Maybe Zion Diamine can sleep at night ripping the paychecks from every other Anterican out there, but can you?”
The woman went from looking shaken to looking like she was about to explode with grief. “The thing is, Eede, I really didn’t care about all that.” Helly’s confession ran free like water. “I didn’t say yes to Molly for charity. The first time she came up to me for help, I told her to fuck off. She was just a kid then. Then I got fired. What the hell. Sure, why not. I’ve got some revenge to enact. No big deal. And now, I wonder why I’m still here.”
Eede looked to Helly with soft eyes and his eyebrows pinched together empathically. “I know it may not feel like it, but being selfish is one of the most generous things you’ve ever done.”
Helly laughed dryly. “I really doubt that.”
“No, really, if you hadn’t decided to get back at Michael, at Zion, Pharmagene, then we really wouldn’t get very far with this hare-brained scheme of ours. I mean, THE creator of Solance herself? What kind of luck is that?”
Sighing deeply, Helly looked away, but listened intently and hung on his every word.
“You may think you showed up to the garden with empty seed bags with holes like a sieve, but on the way here to this musty hole in the ground? You’ve been planting tiny seeds in your wake.” His blue eyes sparkled and filled the whites edge to edge. “You’re no failure, Helly.”
She couldn’t pick the right thought to permit exit from her raw throat. She opted to let out a breath of hot air, letting it reverberate across the lab walls. She nodded her head in defeat and hunched over.
“Hey,” Eede cut through the silence. “Why don’t we get outta here and grab something to eat?”
The suggestion puzzled her, breaking her despair, if only for a moment long enough for her to respond curiously. “It’s nearly four AM, where are we gonna go?”
He chuckled warmly. “What, too good for gas station nachos? It’s either that or freezer venison again.”
“Gas station nachos it is,” she concluded.