“I told you.” This time, Dalton’s smile broadened. “I told you. Even knowing the truth, you would not say no.”
“Who did you kill?” Parisa asked him. “And how did you do it?”
He tugged the page from below her arm, glancing over it.
She sighed, remembering what he said about the intimacy of academia. He liked her most when she was vulnerable, didn’t he? When he had a piece of her that she had not wished to give up. Pleasure unadulterated, or knowledge unshared.
“Memory,” she said, and Dalton glanced up. “The experience of time through memory.”
He arched a brow.
“Time travel,” Parisa explained, “is simple, provided you are traveling through one person’s perception of time. Perhaps,” she demurred, agitated in anticipation of inevitable misunderstanding, “that might be considered less interesting to my unsubtle associates—”
“They study what they specialize in, as do you. Go on,” Dalton said.
“It’s not very complex,” she told him; surprised but not displeased by his dismissal. “Intelligent people respond more quickly to stimuli, therefore intelligent people experience time faster, and may be perceived to have more of it. Intelligence is, in some senses, also an illness—genius is frequently a side effect of mania. Perhaps some would have such an excess of time that they are experiencing it differently. Also, if time could be consumed differently, it could also be preserved. And if a person had an excess of time—”
“They could travel throughout their own experience of time differently,” Dalton concluded.
“Yes,” Parisa said, “in essence.”
He curled a hand around his mouth in thought, contemplating it.
“How would you measure intelligence? Or would it be magic, in this case?”
“Who did you kill?” asked Parisa.
“He was not well liked,” said Dalton, surprising her again. She had not expected an answer. “Not that it’s an excuse,” Dalton added.
“Was he dangerous?”
Dalton’s brow furrowed. “What?”
“Was he dangerous,” Parisa repeated. “To either you or the Society?”
“He—” Dalton blinked, retreating slightly. “The Society did not determine whether he lived or died.”
“Didn’t they? In a sense,” Parisa said. “They selected six candidates knowing that one would be eliminated. Don’t you think they have an idea which one they find expendable?”
Dalton blinked again.
And again.
His thoughts went cloudy and reformed; a different shape this time.
“How did you kill him?” Parisa asked.
“Knife,” said Dalton.
“Ambush?”
“Yes. A bit.”
“How Roman of you.”
“We were heavily intoxicated.” He scrubbed wearily at his jaw. “It is not easy, taking a life. Even when we knew it was required.”
Compulsory anything was not a concept Parisa enjoyed. “What if you had not done it?”
“What?”
“What if you had chosen not to kill someone,” Parisa repeated, clarifying as Dalton’s thoughts unraveled a second time. “Would the Society have stepped in?”
“He knew,” Dalton said, which was not an answer. “He knew it would be him.”
“So?”
“So he would have killed one of us instead, if he could have.” A pause. “Probably me.”
Ah, so that explained his fear, or at least part of it.
Parisa reached out, brushing Dalton’s hair from his forehead.
“Have me in your bed tonight,” she said. “I find I’m besieged by curiosity.”
His sheets were crisply white, cleanly tucked. She took great pleasure in unmaking them.
There were other times.
Once, she found him in the gardens. It was early, cold, and damp.
“The English,” she said, “over-romanticize their own dreary winters.”
“Anglophilia,” said Dalton, turning towards her. His cheeks were bright, spot lit by twin buds of cold, and she reached for him, taking his face between her hands to warm them.
“Careful,” he warned. “I may take this for tenderness.”
“You think I’m not tender? Seduction is not all lethality,” said Parisa impatiently. “Most people want only to be cared for. If I had no softness, I’d get nowhere at all.”
“And where do you want to go this morning?”