Very gentle hairpetting.

"It's okay, you're okay. Shouldn't have--?"

"Told you. Made you keep my secret."

"You don't need to be sorry for that."

(He wants so badly to offer her a place on a different team and he very extremely cannot do that, not until he's absolutely completely sure which he just isn't, but --)

"If I want to do anything to affect the world at all," Inaaya says, "I have to be part of the cult, I don't have another way, and-- you've seen it, you have to have seen it, you work for us-- The things we do to people.

The street fights are one thing but people on Bangkok Nectar go home and hurt their wives or their children or their employees and-- LA Nectar is worse, you have to have seen it--"

"It eats people," he says, very softly, this might be the wrong answer but he doesn't have anything else to say--

"You've seen it too.

They're not-- I mean, the kinds of people who are on Nectar were like that before, right. There's a reason it's-- Nazis and Stalinists and robber barons who take LA Nectar."

"But we're making the worst people better at achieving their goals and to do it we're... torturing people, killing innocents..."

Well okay he's committed now, fuck he really hopes this is not going to get him killed --

"Yeah. I have. Of course I have. There was someone, she started out -- like us, the first thing she said to me was that of course you couldn't trust doctors but she'd like to hope people could trust their friends -- and now she keeps rhapsodizing about how she'll crush the weak and undeserving -- and --"

How long has it been since he talked about Lacie? And it's not actually true that my family is drunks, he almost says, and doesn't.

"Yes," Inaaya says, "and it's not-- right. None of the things we're doing are right. There are people. The homeless people they torture to feed the Mouth are people and they shouldn't--"

"It's not," he agrees, and hopes against hope he is not going to die for it.

"--what's it like in LA?"

Fuck he doesn't know how to answer that. "I don't spend much time there and that's on purpose," he says instead. "It's -- I mean, it's the kind of place you get if you put several dozen of the kind of people who take LA nectar in an organization together and let them backstab each other as much as they want --"

"Walker's more -- goal oriented, less into backstabbing for the sake of backstabbing," thank you Mariam for telling him this it was extremely helpful, "but it's still not. Good."

"Why are you working for him at all?"

His first thought is to talk about Lev and imply he's actually talking about himself but that's enough of the wrong kind of lie that it makes him feel sick to tell it.

"....when I was sixteen I would have gone approximately anywhere to get away from my family. And there was somewhere that would pay me to go to college and study things that mattered," he says instead.

"James," Inaaya says, "I'm going to tell you something that's probably going to get me killed."

"...okay," Mordred says, because what the fuck else can you say.

"Savitree... isn't evil."

Blink.

Everything he knows about Bangkok nectar -- but on the other hand Trammel writing in his horrifying skin book that Savitree is a blasphemer, and everything he knows about Inaaya, and the way the Emporium acts compared to how he saw people in LA acting --

"How... so?" Which is if not the right response at least not the wrong one.

"I... really can't tell you that."

"If your boss finds out even this much."

Ha. Yeah. The amount that Mordred could or will convey information to Walker is exactly precisely zero but Inaaya hardly knows that. "That's extremely fair."

"I love you. Please come work for Savitree."

"I love you. I -- have people I don't know if I can uproot, I don't know anything about Savitree --"

"We can figure something out, you can spy on Walker for her or something-- she has a lot of money--"

"It's just. It's wrong, you know it's wrong."

"And-- Savitree is doing something about it."

He wants to believe her. He wants so, so badly to believe her. Zoe would kill him if he just straight-up believed her. "I. Thank you. I love you. I'll -- talk to Gale about it."

"Okay."

"Joan's going to kill me."

"Please be safe," he says very quietly into her shoulder.

(It doesn't really sound like she means it literally but the possibility is extremely salient to Mordred.)