I would have. Sometimes I wonder if he would have enlisted if I hadn't pushed. But he knew how much it meant to me, so he tried to help however he could. Even when he thought helping meant trying to distract me away from trying again.

['How rare it is in my own home town', Steve thinks, turning the words over as he remembers the way one of those leviathans cut through a Manhattan high rise like butter, and the way that memory slides into another battlefield, and another. He doesn't catch Dorian's last words.] Hmm?