gone on too many missions without knowing everything there was to know. She had never made an informed choice in all her life. Bert had taken advantage of the eagerness of her young mind, and Nero and Aelia had intended to do the same.
But that wouldn’t happen again.
Mox wasn’t in his room when Sloane entered, for which she was grateful. She stripped down in the bathroom, a jug of water at her side, and cleaned up the best she could, shuddering from the cold the whole time. Mox’s pants were hopelessly long on her, so she wore her own. She put on his shirt but rolled up the sleeves so they bunched around her elbows. She was braiding her hair when he came in, his hand in the beat-up green siphon he had been wearing when she first met him.
For a second, they just stared at each other, Sloane’s fingers still tangled in her hair. Then she turned back to the mirror.
“I guess you don’t have to worry you’ll be recognized,” she said.
“No,” he said. “Only a few know my face. Him included.”
That was how she might have talked about the Dark One. It was the way she had referred to him with Albie—as if the man were always in the room with them, never needing to be named.
“In Genetrix’s doomsday prophecy,” she said, “is it one person against another? One Chosen, one . . . destructive?”
“With Genetrix as the battleground,” Mox said, sounding distant. “Two men colliding.”
She nodded. “And you think Nero is one of them,” she said. “Your Dark One.”
“Is that what you called yours?”
She thought of him, his waxy face twisting with amusement as he told her to choose. Choose, between her and Albie, between one horror and another.
She swallowed, hard. “Yes.”
“Then yes,” Mox said. “That’s what I think.”
Sloane finished her braid and tied it off with the band she kept around her wrist. It was so tight that it tugged at her scalp when she moved her head.
“Here.” Mox went to the little table where she had gulped down a cold can of soup the night before. He picked up his other wrist siphon. It was no finer than the one he wore, but it was more flexible, made of little black plates like the scales of a fish. He made a trilling sound, and all the plates stiffened, like he had sent an electric charge through them. He held it out to her.
“I know you can’t use it,” he said, “but in a city like this, you attract attention without one.”
Sloane sighed and guided her left hand into the empty glove the plates made. As soon as her fingers were in place, the plates collapsed around her hand, draping over it like a piece of chain mail. Mox turned her hand over to tighten the wrist cuff. For a man with such big hands, there was an elegance to his fingers.
“Well,” she said. “Let’s go have a chat with a prophet, I guess.”
They made their way to the train station on foot at first, walking along the river. Mox had an ease about him that confused her; he kept his hands in his jacket pockets, his head tilted back to take in the daylight. Sloane, however, felt hypervigilant. She twitched at every footstep or distant shout she heard.
Away from the Loop, the buildings looked even more like ones she recognized. They were made of the red brick that Chicago favored, rows of two- or three-flats with strips of grass and leafless trees between them. Every so often they passed something that was otherworldly to her: a house that was just an orb, turning slowly between two needle-like structures; a sculpture that looked like it was collapsing in on itself from one angle and rebuilding itself from another; a store façade that put art nouveau vines together with linear stickwork under a mansard roof, a visual mash-up that made Sloane cringe.
When they reached 31st Street, Mox hailed a taxi with a flash of light from his palm and a squeak from the whistle fastened behind his tooth. Sloane had seen other people wear whistles that way, silver glinting when they smiled and clicking when they ate. It was more convenient than sticking a whistle in your mouth whenever you wanted to do something, she assumed.
They were silent in the taxi, both listening to the radio playing from the dashboard.
“Stocks of Siphona Technica are at a record high this week, after hitting rock bottom last year when