All of them, that is, but Dalton.
“I told you,” he said, finding her alone in the reading room one night.
She allowed him to think he’d surprised her. “Hm?” she said, playing at startled.
He slid a chair over to sit beside her at the table. “Is this al-Biruni’s manuscript?”
“Yes.”
“Are you studying reaction time?” It was Biruni who had first begun experimenting with mental chronometry, which in this case was the lag between stimulus and response; how long it took for the eyes to see something and the brain to react.
“How do you know what I’m studying?” Parisa asked, though she didn’t need to.
Because they both knew he could not take his eyes off her, of course.
“I can see you’re working a theory,” he said. “I thought perhaps you might want to discuss it.”
She permitted a half-smile. “Should we whisper about differential psychology? How salacious.”
“There is an intimacy to intensive study that even I find unsettling,” he said, shifting towards her. “The expression of an unformed thought.”
“Who says my thoughts remain unformed?”
“You share nothing with any of the others,” he noted. “And I advised you to find an ally.”
She brushed his knee with hers. “And haven’t I found one?”
“Not me.” He looked wryly amused, though he didn’t pull away. “I told you, it can’t be me.”
“What makes you think I need an ally? Or that I would allow myself to be killed?”
Dalton glanced around, though it was unlikely they’d be overheard. Parisa could feel no other active cognition in the house, except perhaps for Nico. He had a somewhat frequent visitor, a telepathic one of sorts, though he was never fully conscious when it happened.
“Still,” Dalton said. An appeal; believe me, listen to me.
Crave me, fuck me, love me.
“What is it about me? You don’t trust me, clearly,” Parisa observed. “I don’t even think you’d want to trust me if you could.”
He gave her a curt, telling smile. “I do not want to, no.”
“Have I seduced you, then?”
“I think conventionally you have.”
“And unconventionally?”
Her hair had slipped over one shoulder, catching his eye.
“You torment me a bit,” he said.
“Because you think I might not want you?”
“Because I think you might,” he said, “and that would be disastrous. Calamitous.”
“Having me, you mean?” It would fit the archetype of her. Seduce and destroy. The world was filled with poets who thought a woman’s love had unmade them.
“No.” His lips twitched ironically. “Because you would have me.”
“How bold of you.” Unlikely, too. She had yet to identify his nature. Was he humble or boasting? Had he been recklessly led astray, or was she the one being led somewhere with intention? The idea he might be toying with her precisely the way she toyed with him was brutally intoxicating, and she twisted to face him. “What would happen if I wanted you?”
“You would have me.”
“And?”
“And nothing. That’s it.”
“Do I not have you now?”
“If you did, wouldn’t you find it dull?”
“So you’re playing a game, then.”
“I would never insult you with a game.” He glanced down. “What is your theory?”
“Who did you kill?” she asked.
There was a brief stalemate between them; tension unsettled.
“The others,” Dalton observed, “have suggested we focus on the mechanics of time. Loops.”
Parisa shrugged. “I have no need to rebuild the universe like blocks.”
“Why not? Isn’t that power?”
“Why, simply because no one else has done it? I don’t need a new world.”
“Because you want this one?”
“Because,” Parisa said impatiently, “the power it would take to create one would only destroy countless things in its path. Magic has costs. Didn’t you say it yourself?”
“So you agree, then.”
“With what?”
“The Society’s rules. Its elimination process.”
“Its murder game, you mean,” corrected Parisa, “which is itself insulting.”
“And yet you remain, don’t you?”
Unwillingly, she felt her eyes travel askance to her notes.