Kay bit her lower lip nervously, so far beyond having second thoughts about telling Enn about the “treasure” of Eighfour – it would likely be closer to ninth or tenth thoughts by then, so many times had she decided and reconsidered – but as anxious as it made her to tell him about the nuke, it was not something she could back out of now. Besides, it was not just that she was telling an outsider about the nuke – which any hostile faction would be, as well – but also a matter of her simply not wanting to talk about the nuke [I]at all[/I]. There was an unspoken agreement in Eighfour to simply not speak of it to anyone, and even less speak out loud doubts about it... it was just this grim monument, visible from almost anywhere in the settlement, working as a reminder of the ultimate fate of their faction.
	“Why indeed,” she murmured, chuckling to herself as she absentmindedly scratched the scars on her right cheek. She sighed. “For lots of reasons, I guess, but the ‘right’ one is probably that it’s just fair that you know, if you’re going to stay there.”
	She also inwardly wondered how well-received he would be in Eighfour if he showed up. Her faction generally was not the “shoot first ask questions later”-kind of people, and they were known to be rather hospitable to visitors on occasion, welcoming opportunities to trade with small groups. If it had just been a matter of Enn wanting a place to hide until things calmed back down, Kay had no doubt that Eighfour would have accepted him, fed him and protected him for as long as it would have been reasonable, but... Enn had said it himself: a place “to serve and live in”. He wanted to stay there forever, which was not unheard of; Eighfour had taken in factionless before, or so she had been told. The problem was not with the concept of joining Eighfour itself, but rather a cold and practical one: what did Enn have to offer Eighfour? Would he be a scourer? A farmer? A tinkerer? Once again he had said it himself: he was a gun, and no one in Eighfour was “just a gun”.
	If it had been up to Kay he would have been taken in and given shelter for as long as he wanted, just as she would welcome any guests that did not seem too dangerous – which Enn, despite having aimed a rifle at her, did not strike her as – but she was just a kid in the larger scheme of things, with no particular influence in the faction.

	Shrugging off such concerns and postponing dealing with them to when she absolutely had to, she crossed her arms over her chest, not even realizing that doing so put her hands right next to her own gun in its holster, though at a wrong angle to draw it. “We’ve had the nuke since... well, since whenever. We’ve studied it, maintained it and guarded it, and if we had the materials I imagine we could even reproduce it, but we’ve never had any reason to [I]use[/I] it. That is, we don’t have any vehicle capable of delivering it elsewhere.”
	She threw back her head, groaning in annoyance. “No, I’m not saying it right... We don’t have the nuke for offense, we have it for defense. It’s something we’ve been passed down from past generations, that if someone threatens to destroy Eighfour, we tell them that we have a nuke and know how to detonate it.”
	She looked at him intently, her mismatched eyes wide open. “Eh, do you understand? What I’m saying is that if what you say is true and the Anderekians or Trenians find Eighfour and decide to attack it... with how much stronger than us they are, we’ll tell them about the nuke. And if they still attack, and it seems like we’ll definitely lose...” She averted her eyes once again, unhappily. “We’ll detonate it, vaporize Eighfour and probably incinerate most of this forest.”

	Still not looking at him, she finally asked demurely: “Is there any way to save Eighfour? If they’re searching the forest...” She shook her head. “I don’t want everyone to die.”