and formal. It was hard to believe that this woman, with her aggressively normal house and family, could have spoken so many prophecies, including one about the end of the world. No wonder magic was so repellent to her. It was the opposite of the life she had built for herself, in all its rigidity.
Mox was standing in the bedroom wearing a pair of worn blue jeans and a gray T-shirt, which surprised her, since she hadn’t seen either type of garment since she arrived on Genetrix. He stood braced against Sibyl’s dresser, hands tight around the edge and his head down. His hair was straight when it was wet, and longer, almost brushing his shoulders. His feet were bare.
He was, she thought, very solid. Spare through his midsection, likely due to the difficulty of his life for the past ten years, living on cans of soup, but his long arms were sturdy enough to fill out T-shirt sleeves, and his shoulders were broad, like he was built for more muscle than he had. Maybe in another universe.
And he was also losing control; the pressure of the air around him was so different from that of the air in the hallway that Sloane’s ears popped when she drew closer to him.
“Sorry,” he said in a tight, small voice without looking at her. “But you calmed me down . . . on the train.”
“Oh.” Sloane tried to think of what she had done on the train. She’d touched his hands. The prospect of touching him right now was far more daunting. On the train, it had been instinct, but here . . . she would have to mean it.
Air pressed against her face the same way it had when she was a kid and biked to the top of Oak Street just so she could ride down again. Like she could take fistfuls of it.
Coward, she said to herself, and she put a hand on Mox’s shoulder right where it joined with his neck. His wet hair tickled her knuckles. She leaned closer to him. “What is it?” she asked. He didn’t answer. He was hyperventilating, she noted, judging by the shifting of his rib cage under his shirt. She put her hand on the back of his neck and squeezed lightly. His skin was hot to the touch. It had been a long time since she had touched someone who wasn’t Matt in this way, vulnerable and presumptuous.
“Talking about him—all the memories,” Mox said, and it sounded like his teeth were gritted, though he was still hidden behind a curtain of hair. “It’s—”
“A lot?” Sloane supplied. “Well, let’s just . . . sit for a second.”
She pressed down gently, and as Mox went to his knees, she went with him. She sat with her back against the dresser, one of the drawer pulls digging into her spine. He knelt there, his arms shaking, still refusing to look at her.
“Me and my friend—the one who died,” she said, and she felt that old, familiar terror rising up inside her. “We were taken captive by Earth’s Dark One. It was only for a day.” She dug her shoes into the carpet. Sibyl had raised an eyebrow when she walked into the house without removing them, but she hadn’t said anything. “But the Dark One gave me a choice.”
She felt a sensation like knives piercing her throat when she swallowed.
“He told me that one of us—me or Albie—would suffer, and I would decide which one.” You or him? She didn’t close her eyes. If she had, she would have seen it, the Dark One’s placid face as he waited for her answer in the doorway, leaning against the frame. “I didn’t want to. But he said that if I didn’t, it would happen to us both, and why should both of us endure that?”
Mox had straightened ever so slightly to look at her through his curtain of hair. It was curling as it dried.
“So in the end,” Sloane said, forcing out the words that she had never, not even once, said out loud, “I chose him. I spared myself.”
The horror was so close to the surface now. If she had wanted to, she could have released it, shuddered with it, screamed it into being. She was afraid to look at Mox, afraid to see the revulsion she was sure he felt. He had killed, but only to save himself; he had not done this, thrown a dear friend into the fire to keep