“Yes,” she said. “I may have put us somewhere you couldn’t actually harm me, but you beat me nonetheless. You broke me, didn’t you? So you’ve won.”
But he could feel the triumph radiating from her; it was sickening and putrid, rancid and rotting. She was overripe with it, devolving to decay. She was deadness taking root in fertile soil, resurrecting in the abundance of his loss.
He had genuinely broken her, that much was undeniable. Her death, even in noncorporeal form, had been real. But still, there was no question she’d let him find the pieces to break, knowing he would do it. Nothing she had revealed to him was a lie, but in taking advantage of her weakness, he’d revealed far more of himself. She, after all, understood thought: specifically, that something, once planted, could never be forgotten.
Now Callum’s mistake was obvious: he had thought to prove himself strong, but nobody wanted strength. Not like his. Strength was for machines and monsters; the others could not relate to faultlessness or perfection. Humans wanted humanity, and that meant he would have to show evidence of weakness. He could see Tristan failing to meet his eye and knew it, that Parisa had beaten him, but this was only a single round. For his next trick, he would have to let the smokescreen of what he’d been today disappear.
“Callum, then,” said Dalton, turning to the others. “Would anyone like to review what we saw?”
“No,” said Reina flatly; speaking, for once, for all the others. She turned to Parisa with something like sympathy, which Callum observed with a grimace.
He would have to make them believe he could be weak. Perhaps only one person would be willing to believe it of him, but Parisa had already proven that to be considerable enough.
There was no stopping what one person could believe.
TRISTAN
IT HAD STARTED with a question.
“What do you think we should do?” Tristan had asked, summoning the bottle of absinthe and raising it to his lips.
He should have known Parisa would have an answer. For every question, but specifically that one. She would not have come to him empty-handed.
“I say,” she replied, cleverly undoing one of the buttons of his shirt, “we should make our own rules.”
That night was a blur to consider in retrospect, which was something Tristan wished he could have said at the time. Unfortunately he had been perfectly clear-eyed and conscious when he slid his tongue between Libby’s lips, knowing both who she was and what he ought to have been—which was, ideally, able to prevent himself from stumbling into depravity and, quite probably, doom. Regrettably, he wasn’t.
Parisa may have been the reason this all started—cleverly, and with what Tristan assumed to be centuries of atavistic female guile—but he had made no attempts to stop, and there was no recovering from what he now understood he craved.
And truly, it was a craving, nothing so intentional as wanting. Some chemical reaction was responsible, or demonic possession, or some tragic malformation that other people wrote books about surviving. The absinthe had certainly encouraged him, spreading like warmth through his limbs, but whatever it was Tristan suffered, he was faintly aware he’d been suffering it already. The symptoms preempted the condition, or perhaps the condition had existed （blindly, deafly, and dumbly） all along.
That Libby Rhodes was primarily a physicist was never to be discounted. Even now, her touch rumbled through his bones like the tremors of the earth itself.
Not that she seemed to be fixating much on what had passed between them.
“Electrons,” Libby said without preamble, startling Tristan. He had recently begun trying to fiddle with the dials of his magic while listening to music, or otherwise disabling or distracting one of his senses. At the moment, he had been filling his ear canals with ambient noise while thinking about the taste of her mouth.
“Sorry, what?” he said, relieved that only Parisa could read his mind. （Fortunately, she was not in the room.）
“How small can you see?” asked Libby.
That wasn’t much clearer. “What?”
“Well, you seem to be able to focus on the components of things,” she said, still not addressing any of the more obvious things, like how they had slept together somewhat recently.
He had woken up in bed with her—with her, not Parisa—and had expected to find something more similar to the usual Libby Rhodes. Apprehension, regret, guilt, any of the above. Instead he’d awoken to Libby reading a manuscript, glancing at him as he sat up with difficulty.
“We don’t need to talk about it,” had been the first words out of her mouth. “In fact I’d prefer if we didn’t.”