right alongside each other—hence the term parallel. But then you guys developed big magic, and we didn’t.” Sloane shrugged. “I thought it was the Tenebris Incident that caused the split, but now I think it’s because Genetrix’s World War Two was fought primarily on water instead of air, so they focused on underwater surveillance, which is what precipitated the Tenebris Incident and . . . what?”
They were both giving her odd looks.
“Where,” Ziva said to Mox, “did you find this fucking nerd?”
Sloane wolfed down two cans of soup for dinner, the first one lukewarm because she started spooning it into her mouth the second she got the top off, and the second warmed over Mox’s siphon as he whistled out a controlled flame. Both of them were quiet. Mox seemed almost glum as he twirled his spoon in a can of corn.
She wondered what he would be like when he didn’t have to fight for his life anymore. He had spent so long locked up with the remains of his friends, separate from the world. Would he even know how to go back to a regular life?
She hadn’t fared very well at that herself. She had her friends around, but she was still leaping across rooftops to avoid journalists with questions, grimacing through public events, lying to her loved ones, spending her nights in recurring nightmares and panic attacks. And now Albie, who had anchored her, was gone. She had been able to delay the grief somewhat because she wasn’t even in the same dimension as his remains. But she wouldn’t be able to delay it forever.
“What is it?” she asked Mox after he had twirled his spoon for the twentieth time.
He glanced up at her. “It’s stupid,” he said, making it sound like a warning.
“So?”
He smirked and set the can of corn down on the table. She was sitting cross-legged on the floor of the storeroom on top of a folded blanket. The wool was making her ankles itch.
“We’re closer to taking him down than I’ve ever been before,” Mox said. “And I should be eager to do it. But seeing the army like that, I . . .” He shook his head. “I’ll have no excuse to keep them around once he’s gone.”
“No,” Sloane said, “I guess not.”
“And if they’re gone,” he said, digging a knuckle into an eye socket as if to work at a headache, “then I’ll be alone again.”
And she would be leaving too if they succeeded, she thought. Something neither of them was saying, because they had known each other for only a few days, and it was ridiculous to get attached after such a short time. Yet she had. It had been so long since anyone had talked to her like she wasn’t eighteen-year-old Sloane Andrews.
Still, it wasn’t the impending loss of her that plagued him. She had seen the way he looked at those oozing, marble-eyed people that came forward to be mended. Heard the tenderness in his voice as he spoke to them. Noticed that he knew every single name, welcomed every comment. “They weren’t just people you were supposed to command, were they?” she said. “You were close.”
“Not to all of them, obviously,” he said. “But to some. Ziva especially. You and I, we’re fated to join this fight. But not her. It was her choice. She wanted to defend the world. I can’t imagine taking on that kind of burden voluntarily.” He smiled. “I seem to attract the chronically grumpy.”
Sloane felt like she could see the person Mox had been before as he fidgeted with the cuff of his sleeve, picked at his cuticles, scratched an itch on his forearm. Always moving, and always elsewhere, watching the light of magic play across the room, maybe, or searching for the source of it inside him, the place where it started, the precise shades of his desires. He attracted people with a certain sharpness because he needed it—needed someone to give him a light smack and tell him to focus.
“She’s the best friend I’ve ever had.” Mox sighed. “You must think I’m fucking twisted, keeping a bunch of corpses around for company.”
Knowing magic was about knowing yourself, she thought. If you could be honest with yourself, you could better predict what your magic could do. Only how was anyone supposed to know themselves that way? Almost thirty years in this body and she still had no idea where it was half the time or how it worked. If anything, it was