Parisa Kamali entered the warm bronze lobby of her tasteful Manhattan hotel on a cloud of buoyancy and birdsong, and also, pigs were fluttering down Fifth Avenue and somewhere (surely Atlas Blakely knew where) hell was a balmy sixty-eight. Read: Parisa was in a mood, tediously hovering in the realm of malcontent most closely associated with hunger or men who do not arrive where they are meant to. In this case, a little bit of both.
It had been one month to the day since Parisa had stepped outside the walls of the Alexandrian Society’s manor house. Somehow, despite this very reasonable timeframe, she had not yet been apologized to, groveled before, or otherwise in receipt of what she considered to be even marginally her due. Which was why, perhaps, upon sensing the presence of three to four greatly aspirational assassins folded within the hotel she’d selected on the basis of its exquisite styling, she felt a stirring in her veins most comparable to arousal.
She’d been very well-behaved, after all. Very good, very quiet, lurking politely in the shadows and hardly making anyone cry for purposes of sport—which was precisely the sort of subtlety she’d recently been accused of failing to possess.
“You’ll be bored, you know” had been Atlas Blakely’s parting attempt at psychological pugilism in the days before Parisa exited the Society’s transport wards (destination: Osaka, per the Reina Mori terms of their cohort’s strategic defense). Atlas had paused her as she’d been traversing the library to the gardens, biding her time with idleness until their contracted period of independent study ran its course. By then, two days before departure, her things had been packed for nearly a week.
“In case it has escaped your notice, outside this house is only more of the same,” Atlas courteously reminded her. “The world is exactly the same series of disappointments as it was before I brought you here.”
It was meaningful, most likely, the order in which he spoke his words; the implication that Parisa was one of his chosen flock and not, more flatteringly, a person of free will and/or meaningful institutional value. “I’m quite capable of keeping myself entertained,” Parisa replied. “Or do you really think I’d go back into the world without a very, very interesting agenda?”
Atlas paused for a moment then, and Parisa wondered if he knew already which of his trinkets she planned to steal, like rifling through the house’s silver. Would he have guessed that Dalton planned to join her despite her insistence to the contrary?
Perhaps he did. “You do know I am capable of finding you,” Atlas murmured to her.
“How fascinating,” she replied, adding a fashionably sardonic, “whereas I would clearly have great trouble finding you.” She gestured around the walls of the house that they both understood him to be incapable of abandoning. If not for vocational reasons, then for personal ones.
“It isn’t a threat,” said Atlas. (Leave it to Atlas Blakely to make an obvious lie sound as mild-mannered as a breakfast order.)
“Certainly not,” Parisa agreed, to which Atlas arched a brow. “You couldn’t find Rhodes,” she pointed out in clarification. “Or the source of your … little problem. Ezra, I believe his name is?” Atlas very cleverly didn’t flinch. “So forgive me, then, if I do not tremble where I stand.”
“You misunderstand me. It’s not a threat, Miss Kamali, because it’s an invitation.” Atlas bent his head in as sly a motion as she had ever seen from him, concealing something so recreationally petty she couldn’t quite name it at first. “After all, what will you do without me to rail against?” he asked. (Mirth, Parisa decided. It was definitely mirth.) “I give it six months before I find you at my door again.”
There was a flash of images behind her eyes then, like a maelstrom of déjà vu. Someone else’s sweets filling the cupboards; jewels she didn’t even like; two sets of cups in the kitchen sink. The tedium of an old argument, a story relayed too many times, hollow apologies to keep the peace. She’d never be able to prove whether it came from Atlas’s mind or her own.
“Now that,” Parisa said, finding her heart in a sudden vise, “was a taunt.”
“Or a promise,” said Atlas, whose lips twisted up in a smile she’d never considered handsome because handsomeness, like most things, was nothing. “I’ll see you very soon, Miss Kamali. Until then, I wish you every satisfaction.” A parting benediction from Atlas Blakely was rather like a gauntlet thrown. “Unfortunately, I don’t think you have any idea what that looks like.”
“Atlas, are you suggesting I don’t know how to have fun?” had been Parisa’s feigned reply of shock at the time. “Now that’s just insulting.”
And it was. Though, perhaps fun was something Parisa had been woefully short on in recent weeks.
Now, standing in the hotel lobby with Sam Cooke crooning soulfully overhead, sublimely behaved and not-at-all-bored Parisa felt a sudden, pressing need to turn her day around.
Darling, you send me, sang Sam earnestly as Parisa allowed herself a long moment’s perusal, taking stock of the scene with an eye to a bit of … what did Atlas call it?
Ah, yes. Satisfaction.
Parisa scanned the room, reconsidering the landscape of the lobby as if it were a battlefield. Oh, Parisa wasn’t a physicist—she wasn’t a fighter. She wasn’t trained in much as far as combat went, though she wasn’t without her talents for theater. And what a stage! The hotel was a beautiful conversion from its former life as a pre-medeian power plant, unnecessarily large, brutalism expressed in opulence. Gilded Age in splendor, if not in architectural devotion. The high ceiling was left exposed, naked beams framing its crown jewel: a bar that was exquisitely crafted from a single piece of wood and topped with a gleam of self-illuminating brass. A real centerpiece, and manned by a bartender so unapologetically trendy he seemed written for the part. Mahogany shelves lined the mirrored back wall, set back from draping black curtains; moody lighting glistened, jewel-like, off the laudable selection of spirits. The chandelier overhead was grand without being antiquated; a winding spiral of exposed bulbs that hung like suspended tears. The walls were cavernous, raw concrete swathed in velvet. It lent the whole place a sense of being deep underground, as if its guests descended the high street for hours instead of seconds.
A lovely tomb, as it were. For someone with less of Parisa’s joie de vivre.
She sensed danger at her back, angling her head ever so beguilingly to catch a glimpse of her oncoming attacker. The first of her assassins wore a cloyingly old-fashioned bellhop uniform; he was withdrawing a pistol from the inner lining of his jacket. Two people were looking at her breasts. No, three. Fascinating. She pondered how long to let things go on; whether to ruin the dress, which was silk. Dry clean only, and who had the time?
Sam sang tenderly on from the lobby’s speakers, momentarily distracting her. Parisa glanced to her left to lock eyes with the attendant behind the front desk (he, sweet thing, was looking at her legs).
“Be a doll,” she requested graciously, hand snapping out to pause the murderous bellhop just as she felt his thoughts taking aim at the back of her head. “Speed this up, would you?” she asked, referencing the music playing overhead. “Oh,” she added on second thought, sensing the intensity of a moment’s calculation as the bellhop’s finger gently stroked his trigger, “and kill the lights.”
Darling, you s—
S-send—
Darling, you s-send—
The lobby went dark just as the shot rang out.
Then the bass dropped.
To Parisa’s very great pleasure, Sam’s crooning met up with a heavy, synthetic hip-hop beat, a fitting affair of soul and funk in tandem. The shift in atmosphere offset the sudden handful of panicked screams and became—to Parisa’s immense satisfaction—something she could actually dance to.
The lights flickered back on just as Parisa had grooved her shoulders to the left, beckoning the bellhop to dance with a nod. He, uncooperatively, stood dazed at her back, staring with great bewilderment at the wild shot he’d taken courtesy of some expertly deployed telepathic subterfuge. Behind the bar, champagne now flowed freely from the bottle on the top shelf, collecting in a reflective pool atop the brass countertop. “Oh, come on,” purred Parisa, hooking him with a finger from afar. “Don’t make a lady dance alone.”
The bellhop’s eyes narrowed as his hips began to undulate against his will. His body rolled awkwardly to the beat while Parisa shimmied to the right, enjoying the feel of the song pulsing in her chest.
Only three figures had failed to move in the wake of the bellhop’s shot, too professional to blink at the sound of a bullet. The other assassins, then, had revealed their exact positions in the room, however unintentionally. (Easy to tell that the very young woman who’d taken cover below her stool and the businessman who’d all but pissed himself beneath the flow of champagne were nothing more than a pair of unlucky onlookers. Cosmic punishment, Parisa thought, for conducting a sordid affair under a roof of such impressive workmanship.)
She’d just begun to really feel the bass when the second of her assassins—the bartender, whose mustache curled up at the tips for a somewhat cartoonish sartorial effect—leapt over the bar, pistol brandished in her direction. Parisa, tiring of her current dance partner’s limitations (he seemed, for whatever reason, not to like her), swung in a graceful pirouette to stage left, the bullet grazing the place her cheek would have been had she not been so expertly choreographed. With an idle command—drop it, there we go, good boy—the pistol fell to the floor, sliding conveniently in her direction. She swept it up in a dazzling backbend just a breath before the bellhop wrenched himself out of his trance mid-shimmy and dove, leaving him to land, stunned, in a heap at her feet.
“Someone ought to enjoy this view,” Parisa informed him, lifting her right foot to drive his cheek sideways into the polished concrete floors. Then she rolled her body to the steady hip-hop bass, swaying rhythmically beneath the arc of the bartender’s oncoming knife.
She dug her heel deeper into the bellhop’s cheek as she reached for the bartender’s tie and beckoned to the concierge, who had recently finished compiling the various pieces of the rifle he’d been concealing behind the desk. “Darling, you thrill me,” Parisa sang, a little off-key, and then gave the bartender’s tie a swift tug, yanking his hips flush against hers just as a quick buzz-roll of bullets drilled out like a parade band snare. Their tango now cut regretfully short, Parisa slipped under the bartender’s flailing arm, grinding her heel until she felt the gravelly surrender of the bellhop’s cheekbone giving way beneath her shoe. The bartender’s chest, meanwhile, rattled with the impact of the bullets intended for her, dappling the bar’s bronze sheen with a stain of freshly spilled blood.
The woman was no longer screaming, so presumably she’d put two and two together and left. The person at the front desk was frantically trying to evacuate what remained of the guests and staff. Five stars, thought Parisa, impressed. Proper hospitality could be so hard to find.
Another round of shots was fired, the bar’s velvet curtains crashing perilously down as Parisa slipped behind one of the concrete pillars, sighing to herself about waste. It was such a shame, really, to damage such tastefully selected pieces. As the din of artless warfare continued to escalate within the lobby courtesy of the concierge’s rifle, Parisa determined that a minor instance of telepathic discombobulation might not be breaking any ceremonial rules of combat. After all, what was an automatic weapon against one tiny, unarmed person? Unfair was what it was. So she gave the concierge something more useful to think about, such as the nature of perfect fusion and, as an added bonus, the task of solving the so-called homeless problem on whatever the city was calling a social service budget these days.
The concierge’s mind now put to more nuanced use, obstacles yet remained. The bellhop, who had scrambled away on all fours beneath the hail of careless gunfire, was now imminently on deck. Parisa put a little sway in her hips as the bellhop stumbled to his feet, rushing her at the same time that her fourth assassin—a maintenance worker in full janitorial splendor, who had been wisely steering clear of his accomplices’ more lethal shots—withdrew a wrench from his toolkit and threw it wildly, without thought. Parisa, less mad than, say, disappointed, paused to pick up the knife that had long since plummeted from the bartender’s hand (he was busy dying an ugly death) and turned, intending the blade to find a home between the eyes of the oncoming maintenance man. He, however, was somewhat quicker than the others. He dodged the knife and caught her wrist, spittle flying as he tackled her backward into the concrete pillar.
Parisa hissed in surprise and annoyance, her exposed back meeting cold stone. The knife had fallen from her hand from the force of the maintenance man’s impact, the blade clattering to the floor just out of reach. To say the assassin had a few pounds of force on her was something of an understatement. She struggled to move, to breathe, the assassin’s sudden wrenching of her arm augmenting the necessity for cooler heads. Parisa’s combat style, after all, was theatrical but not stupid. Better not discover what a man in his position might do next.
Parisa spat in the maintenance worker’s face and beckoned the bellhop with a little tug to his mind. His posture went rigid, first in opposition, then in submission to the force of her overriding command. With a grimace, the bellhop marched tightly forward and lifted a heavy boot, landing a hard stomp to the center of the maintenance man’s hamstring and leaving him to collapse around Parisa’s legs.
Parisa snapped the maintenance man’s neck backward with a hard impact from her knee to his jaw, the sudden rush of blood in her ears joining up with the pulsing bass that still played over the hotel speakers. As the maintenance worker dropped, execution-style, to his knees, the knife skittered up from the floor into her hands, no less recalcitrant than the straining bellhop. Parisa grimaced; relieved, briefly, that Nico wasn’t there to witness the limits of her physical magic. She discovered that she’d hate to lose any shine in his eyes, which was quite frankly disgusting.
Parisa drove the knife’s blade under the maintenance worker’s clavicle, repulsed with herself. He collapsed sideways on the art deco runner she’d so admired, convulsing once before falling still beside the beautiful, blood-sprayed bar.
The dress was ruined, too. Disappointing.
Two down, two to go. Behind the concierge desk, the most trigger-happy of her assassins was still sweating over municipal budgets, one hand clutched despairingly around the rifle like a child with a toy. The bellhop, meanwhile, shook off the effects of her telepathic command, one eye visibly obscured from the swelling of his cheek. She’d most definitely broken his face.
“Why should I let you heal?” she asked the bellhop. (Never let it be said she was a bully.)
“Fuck off,” he spat in reply, or so Parisa was forced to assume, because it wasn’t in English. She didn’t recognize the language, which didn’t really matter. Anyone could be bought. Regardless, the subsequent “bitch” was so obvious in intonation she didn’t require translation, much less anything meriting debate.
“Well, it was fun while it lasted,” she lamented with a sigh, bending to fetch the knife from the maintenance worker’s gurgling neck. Overhead, Sam Cooke was fading gradually into tinny, uncertain silence. There was a slight ringing in Parisa’s ears, some nausea. The beginnings of a migraine. She felt the bellhop’s presence at her back as she bent to retrieve the knife, and for fuck’s sake, the things that crossed his mind. As if it made a difference that she had the goddamn glutes of Aphrodite. To him she was nothing, nothing more than an object, something to be used or fucked or destroyed.
This was the world, she reminded herself. Atlas was right.
Suddenly, everything felt substantially less festive.
Parisa rose to her feet and flicked the blade across the bellhop’s throat; a tight, efficient slash to his carotid. He staggered, then hit the ground with a thud. She stepped over him, panting, and swiped a slick lock of hair from her forehead with the back of her hand. Then she walked past the unmoving bartender to pause before the concierge.
He was still lost in thought—or, more aptly, trapped in it. He looked stricken as she withdrew the automatic rifle carefully, almost gingerly from his hands. Presumably he found the puzzle she’d given him to be very punishing indeed.
“Let me put you out of your misery,” Parisa suggested, licking blood from the corner of her mouth.
The kick of the chamber discharging was really something. Then again, he should have known it wasn’t a weapon meant for close range.
A few minutes later, the bell dinged with the elevator’s arrival onto her floor. She paused for the requisite retina scan into the room (that, come to think of it, had been the probable source of her afternoon visitors in the lobby) and felt the latch give way beneath her hand. The door swung open, inviting her to step leisurely over the threshold into the tranquility of the room.
“You’re back early,” called a voice from the bathroom. “Am I to assume things went well at the consulate?”
The door shut behind Parisa as she drank in a calming breath. The rooms, much like the lobby downstairs, were the work of someone with excellent taste, though the teal chaise that had been so expertly chosen for the backdrop of mahogany paneling had been swallowed up by two days’ worth of discarded clothes. From the handcrafted gold mirror on the wall, she could see the humidity had not been kind to her hair. Nor had the blood of four recently dispatched men.
“Define ‘well,’” said Parisa, her stomach gurgling when she spotted the remains of that morning’s pastries. A single pain au chocolat sat untouched beside an open page of scribbled notes on the desk. She reached for it, taking a wolfish bite just as Dalton emerged from the bathroom on an inviting wave of steam.
He wore a towel around his waist and nothing else. Pearls of water still clung to his chest; his dark hair was slicked back from his forehead, emphasizing the fineness of his princely cheeks.
It remained strange, Dalton being two people at once: the melding of his inner animation, the fraction of his ambition that had been forced back into his corporeal form, alongside the lofty version of him she’d initially pursued. His thoughts were the same as they usually were since she’d interfered with his consciousness last year; a mix of incomplete things, unintelligible and sometimes garbled, like radio static. The rest of him remained as pleasant a view as ever, though he’d begun to make small changes. Not so cleanly shaven. Less devotion to detail for his appearance generally. The notes on the desk were becoming increasingly illegible, disordered.
Wordlessly, his gaze traveled the length of her blood-splattered dress.
“Did you kill him?” Dalton finally asked with an undertone of amusement.
If only. But no, her intended afternoon had not remotely come to pass. “He wasn’t there. I ran afoul of unpleasant company,” she replied, licking chocolate from her thumb.
Dalton made a sound like mm, seemingly in admonishment. “I believe I mentioned I was available as an escort,” he remarked.
“And as I believe I mentioned to you, I’m a very talented negotiator,” Parisa replied. She flicked another glance at his notes, gesturing to them. “Discover anything new about the universe while I was away?”
A roil of his thoughts met hers. She parsed what she could and blocked out the rest. Latter stages of her headache were impending.
“Nothing that can’t wait until later,” Dalton replied, taking a step to finger the strap of her dress, implications featherlight and gossamer. “Will this be a problem?” he asked, gesturing tacitly to the bodies downstairs.
“I’ll put a placard on the door,” said Parisa. “In general I find the staff here to be incredibly fair-minded.”
They would have to relocate momentarily, but Dalton seemed to grasp that there wasn’t much point bringing it up. “Would you like to discuss it?”
“What more is there to say? Nothazai wasn’t at the consulate and yet another group of men tried to kill me.” Dalton’s hands framed her hips in sympathy, palms gliding smoothly across silk as he leaned in to place a kiss in the hollow of her throat. “But I’m not bored in the least,” Parisa added with a self-indulgent tone of brightness, “so there’s that for the prophecies of Atlas Blakely.”
Dalton chuckled into her neck as Parisa raised the pastry to her lips, indulging another bite. “Ah, that reminds me. Another summons came for you while you were away,” Dalton informed her, disentangling for a moment to reach for a white card she hadn’t noticed on the edge of the unmade bed.
Underwear had been flung beside the discarded duvet, a wrinkled shirt and a pair of mismatched trouser socks lingering in its wake like watchful shadows. Parisa was overcome with a sudden desire to tidy up, which was monumentally upsetting. So she ignored it, taking another bite of pastry to watch it crumble onto the floor.
The correspondence card that slipped itself before her face between the prongs of two dexterous academician’s fingers was the third in a series of attempted correspondences, such that she did not need to know the details of the message contained within.
“He did say he’d be able to find me,” Parisa murmured to herself, not reaching for the proffered card.
Dalton, taking the hint, withdrew it, though a look of boyish amusement remained. “This, I assure you, is not Atlas’s work,” he said. “And I take it you still do not intend to answer?”
“Does it require an answer?” Parisa arched a brow. “You led me to believe the logistics of the Society’s institutional workings weren’t a worthwhile concern.”
“What I said,” Dalton clarified, “was that the Society was as functionally tedious as any governing body. But that doesn’t mean I think you ought to ignore them entirely, seeing as you’ll need to gain access to the archives again.”
Parisa’s gaze strayed back to the open page of his notes, which were filled to the margins with his scribblings on worldmaking. “Do you think they’ve got any idea what we’re up to?”
“No.” He’d been sounding relatively himself until then, but then he laughed, an acerbic laugh, which was as new to his recent transformation as was that particular facial expression. “I assure you, Parisa, this summons is simply standard protocol. The Society doesn’t possess the requisite imagination to guess you might choose anything but them.”
“But it could be a trap by Atlas,” she pointed out. “A method of luring me.”
Dalton shrugged. “The Society tracks your magical footprint at will,” he said plainly, confirming two years of Parisa’s suspicions with the flutter of the summons in his hand. “But I highly doubt that Atlas would use any of the official Society channels to find you. That would require a paper trail, reports, administrative approval. Which,” Dalton pointed out, “would counteract decades of calculated subterfuge to maintain his position without betraying the nature of his research. And I assure you, he’s not that desperate yet.”
“Yet,” Parisa echoed, lifting her chin to meet his eye. It was there again, that indecipherable rush of chaos from his thoughts.
Eventually, though, it stilled, and Dalton’s lips curled into a smile. “At some point, yes, it’s possible Atlas may consider other means by which to interfere. Or he may simply try to be rid of you. You are, as he is well aware, a uniquely capable opponent.”
“Not an opponent,” Parisa corrected thoughtfully. “More of a nemesis. I wouldn’t say we’re playing the same game.” The experiment was Atlas’s driving force, his sense of purpose. He lived and breathed for the possibility of opening the multiverse. Parisa was notably more inventive.
“I think he came to believe otherwise over time.” Dalton’s hand stroked her shoulder, the tip of one finger slipping below the strap of her dress. “He isn’t wrong, Parisa, that until one of you is rid of the other, neither of you is likely to succeed. And you could easily replace him as Caretaker,” Dalton suggested, not for the first time. “The governing board meets routinely. What Atlas has done to win them over, you can replicate to greater effect. Then the archives and their contents can be yours, the others can be summoned, and the experiment can finally begin.”
Dalton leaned forward, his lips brushing her cheek, and then her ear. “I can make a new world for you,” he said to the edge of her jaw. “All you have to do is say the word, Parisa, and everything can be ours.”
Everything. Men who stared at her breasts and shot at her heart.
Everything.
And all it would cost was the Caretaker who’d chosen to use her to help himself.
Parisa shivered as Dalton’s touch grazed the flecks of dried blood on her arms. He smelled like hotel shampoo, gardenia lotion. The lingering haze of fresh coffee dovetailed the edge of his kiss. Her heart fluttered like the rounds of an AK, pulsing with adrenaline and hunger.
“Tempting.” Her mouth was dry. She needed a shower, a glass of water. The headache would only get worse. Dalton peeled the dress from her body and she let him, the pastry falling to the floor as he kissed his way across her chest, down the planes of her abdomen, along the insubstantial panels of lace wrapped snugly around her hips.
He nudged her knees gently apart, eyes rising to meet hers slowly with his lips pressed to her thigh. Mysteriously, his towel had disappeared.
“You’re set on villainy, then?” She meant it to be insouciant, but there was a definite edge of something less productive, more urgent.
“Yes,” Dalton said with a princely smile. “I like you with a little carnage.”
His thoughts roared with incongruity, power and softness, capitulation and control. The heat of it was daunting, increasingly perilous to stand beside.
Parisa was sore from overexertion, dehydrated, hunted, her stomach still growled. All the usual signs to cut and run were present and accounted for. Why had she felt Dalton Ellery a necessary constant after a decade of hard-earned solitude? Put it down to a mix of things: Vindication. Revenge. Desire. He was Atlas Blakely’s favorite toy; Atlas’s only chance at real, meaningful power. A maker, unmaker of worlds. The pure scale of it was enough to reorient her aptitude for company.
On the basis of power alone, Parisa could certainly commend Dalton’s argument to give up her mundane attempts at survival in favor of total, world-dominating control—and with it, perhaps, finally, freedom. Actual freedom that looked a lot like a life.
Two problems. One: Parisa did not have the requisite pieces to complete the experiment as Dalton had postured. Dalton was necessary to call what needed to be called; Tristan was necessary to see what needed to be seen. For reasons any psychology undergraduate could guess, Tristan belonged to Atlas as surely as Dalton belonged to Parisa, which at present left the players stagnant on the board. Libby, half their power source, was a question mark. Nico, the other half, was malleable, but still only half. Reina—fucking Reina—was an obstacle, at best; a generator who resented being what she was, and whose personal enmity was too irrational to be predicted. Winning the arms race to the multiverse against Atlas Blakely, then, would mean a tactical landscape of highly political, deeply personal warfare—for which, of course, Parisa was both uniquely challenged and particularly skilled.
The second problem was more pressing, and also more nuanced in that it was not technically a problem at all. Put simply: if Parisa won and Atlas lost, then the game would be over. The prospect of victory, however assured, had a hollowness to it that Parisa didn’t like to question, for fear the answer would be Freudian. Or dull.
She would win. There was no question of it. But there was so very much with which to occupy her time until then; a checklist that could not reasonably be called irresponsible. Problems abounded, both in the form of organizations who targeted her cohort and assassins who bled on her silks. And, of course, there was the Society itself, which had promised her glory and so far fallen shy.
Business before pleasure, she recalled through a thud in her head, grasping the roots of Dalton’s thick hair and giving it a gentle tug. “What happens if I don’t answer?” she asked, gesturing to the correspondence card that had fluttered, forgotten, to the floor.
“What will the Society do to you, you mean?” Dalton brushed the curve of her thigh with his lips and despite her headache, Parisa felt more at ease with him today. He felt familiar to her at the moment, for the most part. The same could not be said for every day. (But she was not, she thought silently, bored.)
“They’ll continue to follow protocol, I imagine. I expect I’ll receive a summons shortly myself,” he reminded her. “I got one ten years ago. As soon as they realize I’m no longer a researcher in the archives, they’ll likely send me one again.”
Parisa considered this, turning it over and over from every angle in her thoughts. “What do they want from us?”
“Exactly what they promised you. Wealth. Power. Prestige. Did you really think those things would only benefit you?” He looked up at her, mouth still hovering idly above the fabric of her underwear while his hands traveled the arcs of her calves. “They’ll ask you your goals, put you in touch with other Society members, make for you whatever privilege they cannot steal or buy. And if you’re not sure what you’d like to do as an Alexandrian, then they’ll send you on to another department.”
“Which one?”
He shrugged, slipping the underwear down her legs as she brushed a set of fingertips over the nape of his neck, tracing the patterns of his vertebrae. “I never went that far. By the time I got my summons, I already knew what I wanted.”
That, or Atlas had already decided it for him, having sequestered enough of what Dalton was to ensure his compliance. A very different game indeed. “Mm.” Parisa allowed him to nudge her backward toward the bed, collapsing onto the piled duvet and reaching for the errant sock below her hips before tossing it onto the floor where he knelt. “So then does it actually matter whether I reply?”
“Yes.” Dalton laughed abruptly, though he didn’t lift his head from the curve of her thigh. “The Society is only the Society if its members continue its legacy of prestige. You don’t have the option,” he reminded her, moistening his lips with the careful slip of his tongue, “of being average.”
“You’d think with that sort of mindset they’d be more proactive about protecting their investment,” Parisa muttered. Difficult to climb the entirety of her rage, obviously, what with Dalton’s tongue being put to such productive use, but the events of the hotel lobby that afternoon hadn’t been the first of such annoyances. When Parisa and Dalton first arrived in Osaka from the Society house a month ago, there had been medeians stationed at all the transports and secret police patrolling the trains, all thinking the name Reina Mori so hard that Parisa had felt personally insulted. Now, of course, someone—Nothazai, the de facto head of the Forum, being Parisa’s best guess—had clearly formed the wherewithal to realize Reina would not have ventured far from her precious books, and certainly would not have returned to Osaka, a place to which she felt no connection. As the attacks began to increase in regularity, it was clear the hunt had really begun.
At which point it seemed fair to say that Parisa expected more than a correspondence card in assistance, or what had the past two years even been for?
“It’s no different than what Atlas told your cohort at the installation,” said Dalton, pausing his ministrations to meet her eye. “As far as the Society is concerned, people may be trying to kill you, but your lives are not in danger. You will always be more dangerous than anyone who could ever dream of hunting you. You will always be the most dangerous person in the room. They know it, and they will not protect you. The best they can do is use you, and hope that you’ll be satisfied enough with the stupor they offer you that you’ll resist the urge to become a danger to them. Because you, Miss Kamali,” Dalton promised her with a flick of his tongue, “are the most dangerous thing in every world, including this one.”
Parisa shivered unintentionally, groaning when Dalton slid her a knowing smile. “I’ve already run away with you, Dalton. Stop flirting with me and suck my clit.”
Dalton chuckled and obliged, and Parisa came quickly, almost dizzily. Her hips cramped from the force of it and Dalton gave another low rasp of a laugh, massaging her with a look of amusement. “Do you want to—?”
“Later.” She felt intensely aware of her headache now, the muscular fatigue beginning to take root like poison. “Dalton, I’m covered in blood.”
“You wear it well,” he said.
“Of course I do. But that doesn’t mean I like the outfit.” Her phone buzzed from where she’d set it on the dresser, a timely distraction. Parisa glanced over with a sigh before struggling upright, reaching it only after it had already stopped ringing.
“Anyone important?” Dalton called to her over his shoulder. He’d risen to his feet, striding naked to the wardrobe for a clean shirt. Admirable, Parisa thought, eyeing the edges of his glutes, the teardrop of his quads, the crevice of his hamstrings. Optically speaking, he must have been up to much more than reading during his sabbatical as a researcher. Even their customary recreation wouldn’t account for that sort of obvious athleticism.
“Who’d be considered important?” Parisa asked with a snort. She’d had no contact with anyone for two years. There was rarely any purpose to her even carrying the phone around. For logistical purposes, though, she tapped the missed call icon.
Unknown number.
Parisa’s skin pricked. Not just anyone had this number.
“Atlas,” said Dalton immediately. “Or the naturalist. You did say you could talk her around.”
A voicemail popped up on the screen. Her headache had worsened now that she was upright. Parisa fought the urge to jump to conclusions, only half-listening to Dalton. “Mm.”
“The physicist sent a message while you were gone,” Dalton said. “More speculation that the archives are trying to kill you, which you probably shouldn’t ignore. I suggest the empath.”
She considered hitting play on the voicemail, then reconsidered. If it was who she thought it was, maybe better to listen in private. She looked around for her clothes, suddenly overcome with annoyance at the mess. Dalton’s towel was still in a heap on the floor. Darling, you thrill me.
Her head had begun to throb in earnest and she reached into the hotel mini-fridge, twisting off the cap and drinking directly from a glass bottle of water. “Okay,” she said belatedly. It probably wasn’t who she thought it was.
Though, Nico had promised the technomantic network he’d constructed to secure their devices was protected. And though Parisa hated to admit it, she did implicitly trust him when he did something stupid but impressive.
“Okay, you’ll kill the empath?” echoed Dalton, sounding amused with her again. “It would solve a number of your problems, by my count. He seems to be the naturalist’s comrade of choice purely on the basis of compliance, not magical aptitude. You’re the better medeian, so perhaps there’s something of a trade you could make to secure her for the experiment. Though I know you’re not overly fond of compromise.”
“I—” Parisa looked up from her screen, still lost in thought. Her heart was pounding somehow, like she’d run there from somewhere else. Like she’d been doing nothing but running and running all her life. “What?”
Dalton had sidled up to her, his breath warm on her shoulder. She tried reminding herself that Dalton could not actually see, hear, or feel the way her pulse had raced, or the places her mind had gone for as long as the voicemail remained unopened. That sort of telepathic infiltration was her expertise, not his, and she soothed herself with the fortunate recollection that she had never known anyone as good as she was.
Not counting Atlas Blakely. Or Callum Nova. Both of whom were not in this room and could therefore fuck off from her thoughts.
“So,” Dalton remarked. “There is someone important to you after all.”
Abruptly, Parisa determined she wanted to be alone. “I’m getting in the shower.”
Dalton paused a moment like he would offer an argument, or worse, a taunt.
Then he shrugged. “Fine.”
Parisa slipped into the bathroom and turned on the water, letting the shower run as she listened to two seconds of the voicemail. Then she hit call.
It rang once, twice. “Hello?”
“Nasser.” She cleared her throat. “Hi.”
“Hi, love. Give me a moment, it’s loud—”
“Yes, that’s fine.” Parisa nudged the bathroom door open a crack, glancing into the hotel room. Dalton was lying on the bed now, flipping through channels on the television. He skipped through cartoons and sitcoms, then lingered for a moment on one of the twenty-four-hour news channels. Parisa recognized the outside of the Hague on the screen, scanning the closed captions for meaning. A human rights trial. Dalton would not understand the Farsi she was speaking, but he would know what it meant that she was speaking it at all.
“Parisa,” said Nasser, his voice a quiet resurgence in her ear. “Sorry, I hadn’t expected you to call back so quickly. It was silly of me,” he added after a moment. “To call.”
She didn’t touch that. “What time is it there?” She hadn’t yet adjusted to Eastern time; normally she was never more than two or so time zones from Tehran.
“Late, almost midnight. Just catching up with a few of the partners before the board meeting in the morning.”
“I see. Business is good, I take it?” she asked, scanning the bathroom floor for something to make this less … whatever it was. It was a lovely tile choice, a rich magenta. Unusual and vibrant. Sanguine, like the flecks of blood still dotting her bare skin.
“You know me, business is always good.” His voice was light, carefully restrained. She imagined hers probably sounded the same. “But you know I wouldn’t call just to chat about money.”
Parisa said nothing, realizing blood had stained her cuticles. She tucked her phone against her ear and turned on the sink, scrubbing the nail of her thumb.
Nasser audibly cleared his throat. “I haven’t heard from you recently.”
“You never hear from me, Nas. It’s our thing.” She tried to sound nonchalant and was alarmed by how easily she succeeded, as if this were truly just another phone call. Just a normal afternoon cleaning blood from the beds of her nails, admiring expensive tile. “Might as well get to the point.”
“True.” A brief pause. “Are you in trouble?” he finally asked her.
Parisa looked up at her reflection, noticing blood in her hair, on her scalp, wanting to laugh. How could he know? Deductive answers pressed in on her brain but she disliked them, ignored them. She considered a false answer, no answer, the truth. Why do you ask? Did someone find you? Who was it?
Was he wearing an unnatural amount of tweed?
“Nas, you know me,” she said casually. “Never in more trouble than I can manage.”
She glanced through the crack in the door again to observe the motion of Dalton’s shoulders as he folded his arms below his chin. The trial on the screen was over the actions of a dictator, probably a mix of the truth with Western opportunism, plus a dose of racism and hypocrisy to sweeten the deal. Parisa had a sudden craving for waffles; for a different world.
She also had a feeling that she knew where Nothazai, self-appointed champion of human rights, had gone that afternoon instead of his meeting at the Czech consulate.
“You’re sure everything’s okay?” Nasser asked, though he didn’t wait for an answer before adding, “I’d like to see you if I can.”
Parisa returned her attention to her reflection in the mirror, wondering what would happen if the bloodstains remained. Would she still be considered beautiful? Probably yes. “Are you planning to be in Paris?” she asked doubtfully, choosing to permit the assumption that she hadn’t moved from where he’d left her.
“I can be wherever you are,” Nasser said.
Parisa chewed the inside of her cheek, considering it as she peered through the doorway again. She had a new destination in mind given what she’d just gleaned from the news, but that didn’t mean she couldn’t make a quick side trip if necessary. She was done with captivity now, academic or otherwise. Free to do as she liked, to be who she liked, to go where she wished. A deeply hard-won freedom that, aside from this particular moment, she did everything in her power to take for granted and forget.
“I suppose I could come to you. You know, oddly enough,” Parisa added, reaching for a coquettish tone that she found with alarming ease, “I’ve been craving bamieh since—”
“No,” Nasser cut in, his tone firm before he gentled. “Not here. Sorry, sweetheart.”
Parisa must have inhaled sharply at the unexpected admonishment, because Dalton had looked up from the news coverage (now just some idiot American talking about an election) to glance at her. She turned away, fighting the instinct to lower her voice, and shut the bathroom door, looking again at her reflection.
“Nas, are you worried about me or you?”
“Never me, always you.” His tone remained sunny, unchanged. “You’re still in Paris, then? I can meet you at the hotel you like. The fancy one.”
She looked away from the logo on a discarded robe, an opulent pile of Turkish cotton. “No, not there.”
“The café then? Same one I used to meet you?”
“That was years ago, Nas. I don’t even know if it’s still there.”
“I remember it. I’ll find it.”
No, she thought about saying. It seemed easy for a moment.
“What time?”
“Maybe eight in the morning? Does that work?”
“I thought you had a meeting?”
“Yes, well, now I have one with you.” He switched from Farsi to hush someone on the other side of the line, hurrying them off in rapid Arabic before returning his attention to Parisa. “Eshgh?”
Parisa swallowed around the term of endearment. “Yes?”
“I have to go. I’ll see you in the morning, okay?”
“Nas.” Parisa felt cold suddenly, folding her arms over her chest. She thought to ask a question, two questions, then chose very pointedly not to. “Can we make it later? Maybe eleven.”
He was silent for a moment. “Okay, eleven. But promise me you’ll be there.”
She blinked. Once, twice. “Okay.”
“Promise me.”
“Yes, Nasser, I promise.”
“I love you. Don’t say it back, I’ll know you’re lying.” He laughed, then, and hung up, leaving Parisa to stand silently in the center of the bathroom, not realizing she was staring blankly at her reflection until the door opened.
She set her phone on the counter as Dalton’s arms came around her from behind.
“I didn’t realize you were still in contact with your husband.” Dalton’s voice in her ear was the measured, patient one belonging to the version of him that Parisa already knew was capable of keeping a secret.
“Only occasionally.” She looked over at the water still running from the shower. “I’m going to get cleaned up. And then we’re going to Paris.”
In answer, Dalton’s face was shadowed with juvenilia again. Amusement, again, like he was laughing at her for something. “I thought we were hunting Nothazai,” Dalton mused aloud. “Despite my ample protestations, I might add.”
She felt a tremor of annoyance. “It’s no loss to you, then, is it? If you think it’s such a waste of my time.”
Dalton shrugged. “I never said it was a waste. Just that Nothazai is no more likely to serve your interests than any other enemy. The Forum does not have what you actually need, which is the archives.”
Parisa stepped into the shower and let the water soak her scalp, suddenly irritated with herself. The mess in the room, the blood on her hands, the length of time it would take to gather her things. Why had she ever been so careless? Two years away and already she’d forgotten she wasn’t the kind of person who could afford to make a mess.
“Parisa.” Dalton was still waiting for an answer. Parisa reached for the shampoo with a sigh.
“I don’t have to find the Forum today, Dalton. I can find them anywhere, any time.” Nothazai would be proselytizing in the Netherlands soon enough. If not, then he’d head back to Forum headquarters eventually, at which point back to London they would go. “And there’s no point taking over the archives until we have the other pieces we need.”
The fragrance of the shampoo was a temporary release until Dalton spoke again.
“You left him.”
“What?” she called back distractedly.
“You left him,” Dalton repeated. “But now you’re at his beck and call?”
“Who, Nothazai?”
“No, your husband.” He seemed to be needling her with his repetition of the phrase so she ignored him for a moment, rinsing the shampoo out of her hair. She felt nauseated; a little sick. Her head pounded again. Again. Again.
She lathered with conditioner, slicking it through her ends.
“Nasser and I don’t talk,” she said, with the implication obvious to her, if not to Dalton. Meaning: He wouldn’t ask me for this unless it was very, very important.
She cleaned the blood of her would-be killers with a bar of French soap, scrubbing at her arms until the water at her feet had turned a rosy, feminine pink.
“He hurt you,” Dalton observed, and Parisa felt vaguely aware of the tension in her jaw, the position of her teeth.
“I never said he—”
But the words stuck in her throat. She heard Callum’s voice.
Who hurt you?
Everyone.
And Reina’s.
You can’t actually love anyone, can you?
And Dalton’s.
I don’t care who or what you love—
“It’s complicated,” Parisa muttered eventually, shutting off the water. She remained there in the steam, in the silence, for another minute. Another. The bathroom door opened, then shut.
By the time she stepped out of the shower, Dalton was gone. She exhaled something she told herself was not relief, then turned on the lights, the bright ones over the vanity.
Her phone wasn’t on the counter where she’d left it. But she chose not to think about that right now.
She toweled herself dry, seeing herself in patches from the fogged-up mirror. What was she really? She wondered it again. She already knew what other people saw. What Dalton saw, what her assassins saw. Some kind of beautiful ratio, exquisite math, fortunate statistics, the indulgences she dutifully skipped (except for today—blood and pastries).
What had Atlas seen?
It didn’t matter. Parisa shook out her hair, flipping it forward and then backward, leaving her cheeks flushed with effort as she raked her fingers through her damp waves, taming them, leaving them to fall where they naturally did, in some delicate, unintended perfection.
Why had Atlas chosen her?
Then, like cosmic punishment for irrational, pointless thinking, the voice in her head was suddenly her own.
Nas, how could I ever be happy here? I never wanted to be a wife, I don’t want to be a mother, you want me to keep living my life in chains just because I was grateful to you for one thing, for one chance—
Parisa tousled her hair, switching her part from one side to the other. She didn’t have a bad side.
—but I’m done being grateful! I’m done trying to make myself suitable for this family, for this God, for this life. I’m done being small, I’ve outgrown the person who needed you to save her, I don’t even know who she is anymore—
She pouted at the mirror and started again, pinching her cheeks to see the color come and go.
—and I want more, so much more—
Lip balm. Mascara. Lips softer, eyes wider, be something different, something else.
—I just want to live, Nas! Just let me live!
What was the point of reliving the past? She was hunting her invisible nemeses, grappling for power, finding new methods of control. She should be busy, too busy being the most dangerous person in this or any world to think about why she’d been such an easy target for Atlas Blakely, a man in need of weapons just to make a universe that he could stand. But now—
Now she was thinking about Nasser, as if it mattered at all what kind of person she’d been over a decade ago.
Just an hour of your time, now and then. That’s all I ask. I know, I know, I’m asking a lot more from you inside my head, but that’s not fair—doesn’t it matter what I choose to put in front of you? Someday maybe you’ll understand that there’s a difference between what a person thinks and who they choose to be—
A glint caught her eye from her reflection. A brief, unnatural sparkle in the placid lake of her appearance, the consistency of her beauty, the easy grace she always wore. She leaned forward, forgetting her internal monologue, letting it collapse.
Someday the view will be different, eshgh, and I hope you see me in a softer light—
“Parisa?”
Dalton leaned against the frame of the bathroom door. In his left hand was one of her dresses. In his right hand was her phone.
“I don’t care if you want to see your husband. Sorry—Nasser. If you want me to call him that, I will. I suppose you’re right, anyway, you’ll need to see him, because if the Society could find evidence of him in your past then the Forum surely can as well, and so can Atlas. And so can anyone else who wants you dead.” Another pause as Dalton set her phone back on the bathroom counter. “I replied to the physicist for you as well. I think you’ll need to find out what he plans to do about the archives, or at least keep track of what Atlas is doing at the house. Atlas is going to win over both the physicists unless you can convince one of them to do it differently.
“What is it?” Dalton asked, frowning at her silence. His gaze traced the placement of her fingers, which had been parsing the thickness of her hair.
“I—” Parisa was caught somewhere between laughing and crying. “I found a gray hair.”
“So?”
Laughter, definitely laughter. It escaped her in something of a rueful bray. Unattractive, like a selfish woman. Ugly, like an ambitious one. Like one who chose to punish a good man for not being the right man, who left because staying was too boring, too painful, too hard. Like a woman who had to be a weapon because she couldn’t be anything else.
“Nothing.” Only the future loss of her desirability, the collapse of her personhood. The first glimpse of an empire steadily falling to unseen ruin. The fate she already knew was coming, the punishment she’d always known she deserved. What timing!
“Sorry,” she said, repeating, “nothing, it’s nothing. What were you saying?”
—if the Society could find evidence of him in your past then the Forum surely can as well, and so can Atlas—
Confirmation of the thought she hadn’t wanted to have. That if Nasser knew she was in trouble, it could only mean that he was in trouble, too.
Selfish. She had always been selfish.
I don’t want to be a wife, I don’t want to be a mother.
Reina again, unhelpful as always.
You can’t love anyone, can you?
A younger Parisa, one without any signs of forthcoming decay, screamed, I deserve the right to choose how I love! while this Parisa, entering her crone era, whispered, Maybe not, maybe you’re right.
Maybe I can’t actually do it, maybe I don’t know how.
(The world is exactly the same series of disappointments as it was before I brought you here, said the timely reappearance of Atlas Blakely in her thoughts.)
“Atlas,” Dalton repeated impatiently. “And the other physicist—”
“You mean Rhodes?” Parisa reached out for the dress Dalton had brought for her, a simple knit fabric. She slipped it easily over her shoulders and turned to face him, telling herself nothing had changed.
So she had one gray hair, big deal. She also had assassins and a husband, a game still in the process of unfolding, a multitude of worlds and sins. She would die someday, either with regrets or without them. It would happen regardless of the color of her hair, or whether she was fuckable. Whether she could explain why or where it hurt. She was born with an ending built in, just like everyone else was. She had always known that desire was temporary, that life was fleeting, that love was a trap.
That her beauty was a curse.
“Yes, she’s back, which means Atlas will have her running the experiment soon. Probably.” Dalton was still frowning at her. “You look strange.”
She shook her head. “It’s fine. Just … just vanity.” Just mortality, that’s all. “Nothing lasts forever. The important thing is—”
Her head throbbed like a tribal drum. Something was whispering to her like a ghost.
(Eshgh. My life. Run if you have to run.)
(I just want to live, Nas! Just let me live!)
It was a small voice, but an unavoidable one. It asked a question she couldn’t answer.
(Was this really the life she’d meant to chase, or was this just another way to run?)
But no, some voices had to be silenced. Some voices would never be quiet unless she was the one to shut them up. Because if Parisa was a person who’d learned to fight for herself, who’d chosen satisfaction over compromise and power over morality—if she was a person with blood on her hands—it was because she’d had to be. Because this world demanded it. Because she’d needed protection that no one but herself had ever been willing to provide. Because this was a world that would stare at her breasts and still count her for less if she let it; a world that would gladly tell her what she was worth and what she wasn’t.
So what mattered about this world? Only that she remained the most dangerous thing in it.
“The important thing,” Parisa repeated, louder, “is that we get to Rhodes before Atlas does.” Yes, that was it. The game, the game still needed playing. “I can work with Rhodes. Rhodes will see the logic—that even if Atlas could somehow convince Reina, he still needs you.” Yes, there it was. Parisa held the winning piece and always had. “You’re the only one who can spontaneously create life, so—”
“There’s no evidence showing it’s spontaneous.”
“What?” Dalton’s thoughts were warping again, distracting Parisa’s already frazzled mind. She heard the inside of his head in bursts, in newsreels and headlines, the mixed media of his disjointed thoughts. The American election, the Hague, apparently he could read Arabic well enough to guess at one or two of the things he’d heard her say, though not enough to understand Farsi. And not nearly enough to understand her.
“But if you really want to go—”
“Yes.” She blinked. “Yes, let’s go.”
The transport at Grand Central was busy; crowded enough that Parisa could avoid the traps if she concentrated, if she focused hard enough. A small pool of effort at the small of her back, a gray streak in her flawless hair, all to remind her that not even perfection, not even the desire of a thousand commuting financiers would be enough to save her from death. She arrived at the café in Paris thirty minutes early, an unfashionable arrival time to pair unfashionably with her wrinkled dress, traces of blood still staining the tips of her fingers.
Not that it mattered.
Nasser never showed up.