“And in exchange?” Parisa prompted.
Dalton’s shoulders gave his customary indication of tension at the sound of her voice. It was a reflex born from a need to not look so quickly, fighting eagerness, which ultimately manifested like a tic of hesitation.
“You are beholden to the Society as it is beholden to you,” he said without expression, before returning his attention to the details of Viviana’s undiagnosed medeian status.
Parisa left the remainder of her questions for when they were alone. When she found him, Dalton was sitting in the reading room over a single book, toying with something out of her sight; invisible. Whatever it was he was doing, it was causing him intense strain. She watched the fight go out of him at the realization of her presence and stepped forward to reach him, smoothing a bead of sweat from his brow.
“What is it?” she murmured.
He glanced blearily up at her from a distance, traversing miles of thought.
“Do you know why he wants you?” he asked.
It was a question that had been plaguing Parisa since Libby’s disappearance, if not earlier.
“No,” she said.
“I do.” He leaned his cheek against her hand, closing his eyes. “It’s because you know how to starve.”
They sat in silence as Parisa considered the implications of this. After all, was there a way to starve properly?
Yes. Conservation done well was to survive when others would perish.
Longevity, she thought in silence.
Then she stroked the back of Dalton’s neck, smoothing the tension from his vertebrae.
“You saw something,” she said. “In Libby’s… in that thing.”
It had been haunting her a bit from night to night. First the image of Libby on the floor, bleeding out, contorted. Then what Dalton had done, launching the corpse upright, making it dance.
An animation, he said. For which he was briefly the puppeteer.
“What is it?” she asked him again, and in the moment Dalton’s eyes met hers, she thought she caught a glimpse of the familiar. Not the man in her bed from time to time, but the one she sought like firelight, drawn to him like a flame.
“Only one person could have made that animation,” Dalton said.
“Who?”
She knew the answer before he said it.
“Me.”
There was no point asking what he remembered. If that animation had ever been his creation, he clearly didn’t know. Whether Dalton was indeed some god descending from machines was outside his existing mind’s jurisdiction, and now he was pleading with her in silence. Begging for her to take away the guilt unearned.
Parisa slid the contents of the desk aside, replacing them with herself, and Dalton leaned forward to breathe her in, a wrench from his throat like a silent sob to bury in the fabric of her dress.
This was the difference between life and longevity; somewhere between a car crash and a splintered soul.
“I’ll get you out,” Parisa whispered to him. To some distant him, to his little fractures. The solution dawned like clarity in her mind.
If he was in pieces, she would take whatever rubble remained for herself.
REINA
“HELP ME with something.”
Nico looked up from a long distance. As far as Reina could tell, the introduction of a new subject hadn’t distracted him or eased his guilt, but something had. He was less aimless now, more determined, properly sleeping again. Impatiently waiting, but waiting nonetheless.
“Help you with what?” he asked. “I have a theory.”
She sat across from him in the grass, which protested as it always did. For once, she was glad to hear it. It served as a confirmation of sorts.
“Okay. About what?”
“I was thinking about what Callum said about sentience. Naturalism,” Reina said, gesturing wordlessly to the whispers of MotherMotherMother that ached below her palms in tiny, willowy blades. “And about that medeian, her specialty of longevity.”
“What about it?” Nico wasn’t leaping to curiosity, but he was interested enough.
“Life,” Reina posited, “must be an element. I can’t use it, but maybe someone could.” She fixed him with a careful glance. “You could.”
“Could what?” He looked startled. She sighed, “Use it.”
“Use it?” he echoed.
“Yes.” Maybe there was a better way to explain it. Maybe not. “Maybe you could manipulate it, shape it, like any other force. Like gravity.” She paused. “Possibly you could even create it.”