himself from burning. No one Sloane knew had done that.
But she made herself look at him anyway, because she deserved it, deserved to know just how disgusting she was, how she had betrayed Albie and ruined him and set him on a path that would lead to his death—
But Mox was just looking at her.
The pressure in the air had diminished; Sloane no longer felt like she was chewing on every breath. “I know,” she said, choking a little, “about the rage that takes over when you think about someone. About the rage that changes you.”
Mox tucked his hair behind his ears with both hands. His face looked thinner this way, and pale. He was tired, and no wonder—he had lived for years just scraping by in abandoned buildings and warehouses with an army that fell to pieces every time it moved, and sometimes even when it didn’t, and the burden of what had happened to them falling on his shoulders. He was as tired as she was.
He said, “There’s a thought experiment—moral philosophy—called the trolley problem, have you heard of it?” She shook her head no. “Basically it says there’s a trolley on a track, and if it goes one way, it will kill five people, but if you flip the switch, it will only kill one. And you’re supposed to say whether you would flip the switch, whether you could bear to be directly responsible for a death even if you’re sparing lives.” He scowled. “I always hated it, hated it, and I used to tell my teacher that what I would do is take the person forcing me to make the choice and throw him on the tracks, because he’s the one who really deserved it.”
He smiled a little, forcing a crease into his cheek.
“Not really the point of the exercise,” he said. He covered her hand, balanced on her kneecap, with his own. It made her feel small, but in a good way—in a way she never got to feel, being as tall as she was. “But the person who asks you to make that kind of choice, between you and a friend, between pain and guilt—fuck that person.”
His hand tightened on hers. For a moment they just stared at each other, and she felt like the horror was farther away, that it had settled deeper inside her again.
They ate Sibyl’s chicken in silence, all of them transparently relieved when Sloane took her last bite. Mox and Sloane busied themselves in the kitchen scooping potatoes into containers for the refrigerator, scrubbing plates and pots. Sibyl let them take over and went out to the back steps to smoke a cigarette—“My afternoon indulgence,” she had called it, not that Mox or Sloane had said anything. Then she started up the engine of the old Toyota and drove them to the train station, wearing thick glasses with green tortoiseshell frames.
As they drove past the rows of low brick buildings and empty lots that patched the land between Sibyl’s house and the station, Sloane marveled at how barren everything looked without the magic-influenced architecture that defined Chicago. She had gotten used to it, even in the short time she had been on Genetrix. The most interesting buildings in St. Louis were churches, which seemed to have gotten more plain in the absence of Unrealist or Bygoneist architects—flat, white buildings with sharp corners that reminded her of minimalist structures on Earth, but with glass-block windows arranged in the shape of crosses.
Sibyl gave Mox a hard look when they pulled up to the curb next to the station and said, “Keep your eyes open.”
He leaned in and kissed her cheek, even though she looked just as stern and irritable as she had since they arrived. “Thanks.”
Sloane got out without saying goodbye. She was distracted by a buzzing sensation on the surface of her skin, like a purring cat. They had to be closer to the limits of the magic-canceling siphon’s power here. When Mox shut his door and the Toyota pulled away, she turned to him and asked, “How did you meet her, anyway? I never got to meet the prophet on Earth.”
“I did a lot of poking around at the Camel,” he said, tipping his head back to look at the sky. It was cloudy, the sun covered with a pale haze. “They could never keep me out of any room for long. Something’s off—do you feel that?” He wiggled his fingers. “All bright and shiny for me. Magic’s back.”