Arcade shook his head, bringing himself back to the present. It seemed so long ago that all of it had happened. Rose's presence seemed very…normal, despite the inherent abnormalities of their various misadventures. Everything—every abandoned vault they had explored, every troubled town they'd tried to help, and every desperate traveler they'd healed—had brought them so much closer in such a short time. In fact, he realized, Rose was probably his best friend.
And now they were headed to a Legion camp.
Well, thought Arcade, if it has to happen, it might as well be with someone I trust.
Trust.
Trust was a difficult concept for Arcade.
Even this "best friend" of his was completely in the dark about his past unsavory associations.
It wasn't that he didn't want to tell her. At some point, he realized, he must. What was preventing him from doing so was a combination of fear that she might respond poorly…and the very slight, quiet voice in the back of his head that worried he might be betrayed. After all, Rose had just been admitted to the Followers not three weeks earlier: her sense of duty to the cause might outweigh her loyalty to him, he realized, and who could blame her? By the Followers' reckoning, he was a dangerous man. His knowledge that he was nothing like his father, as well as the knowledge that his father was only nominally like the Enclave, didn't really mean anything. He had no proof that he wasn't operating on some secret agenda—after all, he thought with a grimace, you can't prove a negative. And the Enclave was pretty much everything the Followers had aimed to avoid.
Still. He hoped that Rose was smart enough to realize what kind of a man he really was.
Even if he wasn't.
Suddenly, Arcade felt absolutely awful. How was it fair of him to reward her willingness to place her life in his hands by not trusting her enough to tell her who he was (or, rather, who he wasn't)? After all, it had been said that if you can't trust, you can't be trusted. Well, someone had said that, anyway.
But maybe—just maybe—on the way to a Legion camp was not necessarily the right time to speak up.
However, there was something else on his mind of equal importance that he felt he could address: Why the hell were they listening to Vulpes Inculta and going to see Caesar?