The statement landed between them with a strange force. Harland stared at him, apparently startled that a muddy child would challenge the entire story he had been telling himself for years. Outside, the storm struck the building, and the sound reached the room as a distant shudder.
"You think I'm here to hurt people?" Harland asked.
Eli looked at the remote in the man's hand. "I think you locked them inside."
Harland glanced down at the device, then closed his fingers around it. "I wanted them to understand how it feels when someone takes away a place you thought was yours. I wanted them frightened enough that the county would shut this place down. Once they were gone, the building would be empty. I wouldn't have to look at their machines and their parties every time I came over the ridge."
"There were sixty-three people upstairs," Eli said. "They've been climbing out of windows in a storm. One of them has a bad knee. Somebody could have died."
"I planned for them to leave."
"You locked the doors."
"The suppression system would have forced them out. The windows were always an option."
Eli stared at him. "You don't get to call it safe because you imagined they'd do what you wanted."
Harland's expression hardened again. "You don't know the first thing about engineering."
"I know people have to breathe. I know you don't turn a building's safety systems into a threat. And I know my uncle would never tell anybody that an unknown release in a crowded building is harmless."
There was a pause.
Harland looked toward the industrial cylinders in the corner. "They're for fire suppression," he said. "The agent wasn't supposed to kill anybody. I calculated the levels."
"You can't know how everyone would react," Eli said. "What if someone couldn't get out? What if the building stayed sealed?"
Harland opened his mouth, then closed it. He had spent years arranging his grievance into a story where everyone else deserved what happened and he remained the injured party. The simple questions of a twelve-year-old did not fit inside that story. They were questions about people rather than property, and Harland seemed almost offended by the change in subject.
"I didn't want anybody dead," he said, more quietly.
"Then help me keep it that way."
Eli looked again at the remote. Harland followed his gaze.
"What's that for?" Eli asked.
"A backup."
"For the corridor?"
Harland's silence told Eli enough. The old service passage had been altered to frighten or trap anybody who tried to use it, and the device in Harland's hand could still make that danger immediate. Eli did not need to know exactly how it worked to understand that nobody should be carrying it near a building full of evacuees.
"There are still people inside," Eli said. "If you really mean what you said, you can let them leave without doing anything else."
Harland looked toward the staircase. The sounds above were faint now, the evacuation nearly finished. He had imagined, perhaps for years, a confrontation in which Ronan Vale would recognize him, hear his accusations, and finally understand the weight of his resentment. Instead, his plan had brought him into a concrete room with a wet child who wanted nothing from him except that he stop putting people in danger.