Theo stared at Rex, his chest heaving, blood dripping from his chin onto the shattered pavement below. The raw, unhinged fury in his eyes flickered for a moment, replaced by something more desperate: a need for validation, for someone to acknowledge the horror of what they were witnessing.
"Then what is he?" Theo demanded, his voice cracking, raw with a plea that he refused to voice. "If he's not what I say he is, then what the fuck is he?"
Rex didn't answer immediately. He hung suspended in the air, backlit by the flickering, unstable reality of the temporal storm.
He looked at Theo with the flat, patient attention of a professor observing a student who had failed a fundamental theorem, the kind of look that wasn't angry but worse: it was disappointed in the student's lack of comprehension.
"He is the most effective person you have encountered in your life," Rex said.
The words were delivered with a terrifying, clinical calm. "Which is not the same thing as being good."
