Monica went flat on her stomach and stacked her palms under her forehead, using them as a pillow because there wasn’t one in the room and nobody down here had thought to ask for one.
Then she went still.
That was the permission.
I put one knee on the mattress. It was too thin for it and the floor came straight up through my kneecap. The white dress had left a strip of skin open across her back. The hard light in the room made the luminosity of it harder to ignore.
"You seem like a nice person," she said.
My palm found the bare skin across her back.
She’s warm.
"A lot of people have said that."
I started with the heels of my hands, slow, working outward from the spine. The muscle under the skin was tight in bands. Wherever I pressed, something small gave and then held again. She breathed out through her nose and didn’t speak for a stretch of seconds.
"Why did Max put you down here with us?" Her head turned, cheek onto her palm as something in her let go. "I’ve been trying to work it out all day. There’s no reason for you to be in this room."
My hands kept moving. The next vertebra. The one below it. The fabric of the dress shifted under the edge of my thumb and I stayed on the bare skin where I could.
"There’s a problem between us. That’s all it is."
A girl.
Her mouth didn’t move.
They’re both the same age and it’s always a love interest. Funny how little the world changes.
"It’s about a girl," I said.
My thumb found a vertebra just under the fabric and she made a sound before she could stop it, and I felt the small embarrassment go through her shoulders straight afterward—a flinch that had nothing to do with pain and everything to do with being heard.
Lower.
My hand went lower and settled at the base of her spine and stayed there. The heat of her skin against my palm. The slow release of whatever she’d been holding since she pulled the mattress onto the floor.
"Her name’s Sherry."
"Let me guess." Her voice dropped. "The girl loves you, and he cares about her more than you do."
"Not really." I kept my thumbs on the same spot. "He does care about her. I just don’t think he cares more than I do."
Why is Bram taking this long in her room?
Not the woman under my hands.
That one came through a door and a wall and across the corridor.
I didn’t let anything reach my face. Melissa’s mind was a bright, irritated line in the sealed air—close enough that I could have answered it out loud if I’d wanted the argument.
Of course it’s Moni. It’s always Moni. She’s been entitled since the day she was born.
She’s got that boy feeding her by hand. Or rubbing her feet like a servant.
She’ll be lying there enjoying it and she won’t say thank you.
She’s not going to say thank you, Bram.
Under my hands, Monica let out a long breath and sank another half inch into the mattress. The bands of muscle along her lower back loosened by degrees.
That’s the other thing about this place.
I get all of it.
And I can’t switch a single one of them off.
"That’s a kind thing to do," Monica said. "When I was a young girl, two boys fought over me. Properly fought. I didn’t take either of them."
[ That information is crucial. ]
[ The missing primordial is her daughter. The Veyron girl we have not located. ]
I know. She’s mid-sentence.
"You say that like it was a long time ago."
"It was."
"Really." I lifted my hands off her. The skin where my palms had been stayed faintly pink for a second and then the luminosity evened it out. "You look young."
"How old do you think I am?"
She said it into her own arm, and there was something underneath it I hadn’t heard from her before. Not vanity.
Something closer to a woman fishing for one ordinary answer from one ordinary person. The open weather of her mind went briefly quiet around the question, as if she were actually waiting on the number and not on whatever political use the number might have.
I looked at the side of her face and gave her the number a man would give if he knew nothing at all.
"Twenty-eight."
"Nice guess."
She sat up and turned and looked directly into my eyes.
I know exactly what you’re thinking.
And the worst part is that I don’t mind it.
It’s been a long time since anybody looked at me like a woman instead of a name.
The thought sat between us without armour. The white dress. The short hair still flat on one side.
"How’s the back?" I got up off the mattress. My kneecap complained. The floor had been under it the whole time.
"Better." She put something on her face that was almost a smile. "Thank you."
She said it.
Melissa’s going to be insufferable about that.
"Alright. I’ll leave you to eat."
"Thank you."
She got up off the floor and sat on the empty frame with the tray beside her. The institutional portion. The anonymous meal. A primordial in a white dress on a metal bed frame under hard white light, reaching for food I had carried from a gap in a sealed door.
I went out and pulled the door to behind me.
And stood in the corridor for a second with the white light on me. The single ray from the ceiling hole had moved further along the floor. Across the corridor Melissa’s irritation was still bright enough to touch. Sophia’s silence held—asleep, or simply elsewhere.
She let me touch her.
That’s progress.
I don’t need to be clever down here.
I just need to keep carrying the trays.
I picked up the next one.
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