Marco went silent. This was...this was his Mom. Even after everything that had happened, she was still his mother, the one who'd looked after him, raised him, told him off for not doing his chores. And for all that Marco had lived through the war himself, knew just how much hell she had gone through, knew that she wasn't the same as when he was a kid and never would be, he still couldn't help but see her largely that way. She was his Mom, and she wasn't meant to be bloodthirsty, or crazed, or unhinged.

He'd always managed to convince himself that the rage and single-minded drive to kill Edriss even to the exclusion of actually saving herself that he's seen back when they rescued her was just a one off. She'd just experienced the pain of Edriss's Kandrona starvation. She'd just been under a lot of stress, that wasn't how she was normally.

Except now she'd done something violent and senseless, but without the excuse of having just lived through a Yeerk execution. And the idea that maybe she really was the enraged, violent woman that he'd seen on the Yeerk pier terrified him.

"Right," he said finally, his throat tight. What the hell was he supposed to say? That it was alright to go psycho on a prisoner just because she was impatient? That she shouldn't have done it? She was meant to tell him when he was wrong, not the other way around.

The silence dragged on.