“You say that like a compliment.”
He leaned into her touch, perhaps instinctively.
“Of course.” She offered up a delicate smile. “I want you to let me in again.”
“So you’re seducing me?”
“Always.” Her smile broadened. “There are times when I think I may enjoy your seduction most of all.”
“Mine, among so many others?” He sounded languid, unbeguiled.
She arched a brow. “Is that jealousy?”
“No. Disbelief.” His smile in reply was thin. “There is only so much to gain from me.”
“Nonsense, I have plenty. But I wouldn’t say no to more,” she said, rising to her feet.
She stepped in front of him, pairing their feet like corresponding pieces and matching her hips to his. He set his hands on her waist, gingerly. With the sense that he could retract them if necessary, only she doubted he would.
“Everyone has blind spots,” she said. “Things others can see that they can’t.”
She slid his dark hair from his forehead, brushing his temples, and he closed his eyes.
“Five minutes,” he finally said.
She leaned forward, touching her lips lightly to his in compensation.
“Five minutes,” she agreed, and his hands tightened on her hips, anchoring her in place.
Entering his mind with permission was both easier and more difficult than before. She opened her eyes to a lobby, somewhere sterile and glassily white. There was an empty receptionist desk, a lift. She pushed the button, waiting. The doors opened with a ding, revealing nothing. Parisa watched her own reflection from the elevator walls as she stepped inside, facing the buttons.
There were countless. She grimaced; unfortunate. She could guess a numeric floor （and then another and another and several into perpetuity, rapidly deteriorating her frothy five minutes） but this was not the way to find herself back where Dalton’s subconscious had brought her before.
Here he was neatly organized, which meant these were his accessible thoughts. He was the usual occupant in the lift, hitting buttons to access various levels of memory and thought.
She hit a random floor—2,037—and felt the lift lurch to use.
Then she pried the doors brutishly open, slipping through the narrowest possible crevice. Magic could keep her from falling, but she didn’t bother to secure her footing. The construction of this part of him was deliberate, the result of survival techniques and psychological coping mechanisms, like anyone’s mind. Cognitive thought looked different from person to person; Dalton’s was more organized than most, but it was still nothing more than a carefully manufactured illusion. If she intended to get where she was going, she would invariably have to fall.
She tipped backwards from the lift, closing her eyes to collapse into empty air. It would only feel like falling to her, registering more like a headache to Dalton. She would pulse somewhere behind his brow, mounting pressure below his sinuses. With his permission she would be met with fewer guards, less opposition, but as to whether she would find her destination— She slowed suddenly, paralyzed mid-fall, and opened her eyes.
“You’re back,” said the younger version of Dalton, rising greedily to his feet at the sight of her. She was suspended midair, Snow White in her invisible coffin, and he stroked two fingers over her cheeks, her lips. “I knew you would be.”
Parisa jerked out of stillness, falling onto the hard wooden floors of the castle where she had been before, and turned her head to find Dalton’s shoes beside her. He wore motorcycle boots with black jeans, like a caricature of his external academic, and she looked up, cataloguing him piece by piece. The crown jewel was a fitted t-shirt, so white and crisp it gleamed.
He knelt down beside her, observing her through narrowed eyes.
“What’s he doing?” asked Dalton.
“Nothing,” she said. “Research.”
“Not him,” Dalton said, waving a hand. “I know what he does. I meant him.”
She braced herself. “Atlas?”
Dalton rose to his feet, suddenly irritable. He was prickly, agitated by something.
“He’s coming,” he said. “I can feel him getting closer.”
“Who?”
Dalton glared at her. “You’re here for the wrong reasons.”
Parisa sat up on her elbows, watching him pace.
“What are the right reasons?”
“You want answers. I don’t have answers. I have questions, I have research unfinished, I WANT OUT,” Dalton’s spectral self suddenly shouted, pivoting to slam a fist into the castle wall.