She removed her heavy cloak. It would only get in her way, and she didn’t need to hide who she was any longer. She took her tactical knife out of its sheath at her hip, crept into the space, and crouched beside one of the built-in desks, behind the cubicle wall.
Then she waited for the Resurrectionist to return.
Matt and Esther would be angry if they knew she was deviating from their plan. Maybe they would even hate her for it. But really, Sloane thought, they ought to have been suspicious when she agreed to be bait again. Besides, she wasn’t necessarily abandoning the plan entirely; she was just . . . changing its timeline.
She waited.
Her heartbeat still hadn’t slowed when she heard footsteps in the hallway. But no voices—he was alone. The door opened, and she heard his heavy breaths, the rustle of fabric around him. She tipped her head back just enough to see his hood over the low wall that surrounded the desk, and then she stood, stepped around the wall, and lunged—
She yanked his hood off with one hand and brought the knife up to his throat with the other, holding him by his hair—which was dark and long, for a man—and pressed the blade in just enough for him to feel how sharp it was.
“Hi there,” she said.
She could feel the warmth of him, the life in him. She had known that he was human, but part of her had wondered if he was the same as his army, more dust than man. His breaths came fast through the siphon, crackling.
“Keep your hands still,” she said. She held the knife above the siphon that covered his throat, but with her free hand, she reached down to undo the clasp of the siphon around his wrist. It was too strange, her skin brushing his as she felt for the release and tugged it; the siphon dropped, heavy, to the floor. She switched knife hands so she could do the same to his other wrist.
She was conscious of her breaths, which were just like his, fast and loud. Everything sounded muffled. He had almost killed Kyros in front of her with just a whistle. What else could he do before she could stop him? And here she stood with a tactical knife like an idiot.
“Should have known you’d come back.” His voice came out tinny, warped by the siphon. “True hero and all. Your kind do tend to go on ill-advised suicide missions.”
Sloane laughed harshly. “Your assumptions about my character are so off base, it’s actually hilarious,” she said. “I’m not here to kill you. If I were, I’d have slit your throat already. Because I’m also not here to die.”
He held his hands out from his sides. They were big and pale, with oddly delicate knuckles. “Slitting my throat immediately would have been smarter,” he said.
“As much as I wanted to, that would kind of defeat the purpose of my being here. I came for a trade,” she said. “Truth for truth.”
“Truth,” he repeated. “I’m not even sure what that is anymore.”
“Please, for the love of God, don’t be one of those villains who waxes poetic about existentialist nonsense, because if you are, I really will have to cut you,” she said. “How about we start with this: Who the hell are you?”
“You don’t already know?”
When she didn’t answer, he lifted his hands, slowly, up to his face. Sloane kept the press of her knife steady. He undid the latches of the siphon that covered his eyes and pulled it away. She saw his reflection in the windows across from them, but only faintly—just the paleness of him and his shape against the dark.
He was still as she moved around him, his hands up, palms facing forward. His wrists were scarred from siphons, the kind of marks worn into skin day after day, for years. His nose and mouth were still covered, but his eyes were dark and focused and familiar. She laughed.
“Mox,” she said. “So I take it you didn’t just happen upon me in the cultural center that day.”
He undid the latches of his mouth siphon too, then wiped his chin of sweat. He set both siphons down on the desk beside him. He looked worse than he had the last time she’d seen him—wan, dark circles under his eyes, sweaty. Young.
“I gave you your truth,” he said, and his voice was different than she remembered it from the cultural center or the Tankard,