He reached up instinctively to touch her wrist when she wrote his name. Oliver. He felt a fresh pang of regret at the loss, renewed now that he knew exactly what the man had done, who he had been. "You're right on all counts. It could be any number of things. But this does make me realize that, if they have the Plague, if it's artificial, if they're spreading it on purpose, then they must have a cure. They have to have a countermeasure. Even a complete nihilist would ensure that their plan worked before throwing away the only means to undo the damage. If we can figure this out in time we could even save Thomas before it's too late."<br/><br/>Carson's eyes fell once more to Oliver's name, and he reached out to touch her wrist, careful and gentle. "You know that wasn't your fault, right?" he asked her quietly. "What happened to him. There was nothing you could have done. I know it's easy to shoulder the blame, to take the burden onto yourself." He paused and withdrew, but didn't move away from her entirely. His hands folded on the table, then smoothed down flat over the grain, feeling each groove and bump. "Almost eight years ago now, I lost my mother. She was a Strider, like I told you. As she got older she stopped traveling and settled in Safeco. She kept it safe up until the raiders began to wipe out every organized settlement in the region. Safeco was the best defended, and the last to fall."<br/><br/>He glanced at her and smiled, bitter and sad. "We fought for six straight days up on the walls. Wave after wave of mindless, howling monsters. Enslaved mutants. Drugged-up berserkers. Hundreds came, hundreds died. On the seventh day they finally overran the walls. They flooded into the settlement, killing everyone. We were ready for it, we'd set up an escape route, and fell back to it. But my mother had taken a shot to the stomach. A single round, right in the gut. She knew it was fatal. And I had to leave her there. Alone in the mouth of the emergency escape route. It's everything I can do every day to remind myself that it wasn't my fault. I didn't shoot her. I couldn't take out the bullet. I couldn't perform the operation she'd have needed to survive." He trailed off and sighed, looking up at the rifle where it lay on the far side of the table. His mother's rifle. "I guess the point is, you're not alone in fighting off that sense of guilt. I know how it feels. And I'm sorry."