“Thinking of bringing this back with you? Should I be teaching you how to bake?”
He started to say something and then stopped.
“What’s wrong?” she asked, glancing at him. Then she looked back down and turned the dough out of the bowl onto the mat. Sometimes it was easier to talk if someone’s eyes were somewhere else.
“I wish…” He trailed off. Then he started again. “I sometimes wish I didn’t have to go back.”
Inside she stilled, but she kept her hands moving, shaping the dough into rolls while she thought. “Why is that?”
“This plane is a lot nicer,” he confessed.
“We’re pretty messed up,” she reminded him. “We’ve screwed up our environment, we do terrible things all the time.”
“You don’t eat each other,” he pointed out. “Much.”
“We don’t,” she agreed. “Although we do a lot of killing each other anyway. Maybe it would be more honest if we ate each other after.”
“The majority of you haven’t killed anyone at all.”
“I guess. But we lie all the time, which you don’t have.”
“It’s kind of refreshing? Here, at least, if you hate who you are, you can say you’re someone else. And then sometimes if you try hard enough, you can even make that true.”
“I hadn’t really thought of it that way,” she said.
“I like bread,” he said suddenly. “And ice cream. And subways. I like watching Gisele make her pictures and I like how excited she gets to make them.”
“Those things are all pretty great.” And she wasn’t going to be able to enjoy any of them if she ended up in a nightlight.
“What do you want, Morgan?” he asked suddenly.
“I don’t want to end up on the Infernal Plane.”
“I know that,” he said. “But that’s a thing you don’t want. You have a lot of things you don’t want. You don’t seem to have a lot that you want.”
“I want things all the time!” She slashed at the dough, scoring it a little more deeply than she’d meant to. That roll’s rise wasn’t going to be even. It would be better if she had the right tool instead of a regular kitchen knife, but she couldn’t afford fancy kitchen gadgets and couldn’t afford a kitchen large enough to keep them in. “I want a lame so I can get my bread ears to come out right.”
“That’s a really little passing thing, though,” he pressed. She glanced up at his dark eyes, feeling herself pulled into them, and reminded herself that his real eyes were a sulfurous yellow. “Surely there are big things? What do you want out of life?”
“I don’t know,” she confessed to her loaf. “When I was little, I wanted to grow up to help my mom, like my dad does. She was so exciting and glamorous and powerful, and I could never imagine myself like her. But my dad was her Librarian. He did all her research and patched her up. She could have had anyone and she picked him, the quiet one, the one who was always there and always had the answers. He’s her reason to fight, he’s her grounding.”
“You dreamed of being support staff?”
That sounded pathetic. She tried to get him to understand. “I dreamed of being relied on. Valued.”
For a moment, her throat tightened. She covered her loaf and briskly brushed the flour off her hands. “But I sucked at that, too, it turns out.”
“And now?” he asked, his voice quiet and lacking judgment. That was OK, she could supply the judgment all on her own.
“Now? I don’t want stuff. Wanting stuff just makes you desperate. Disappointed. Uncool.”
“Well, when you think of a perfect future, what’s there?”
“Why do you care?” She glared at him.
He didn’t retreat like she expected. But he bit his lip. “At first, I liked that you didn’t seem to want so much. Everyone else here is screaming all the time.”
“Even Gisele?” She regretted it as soon as she said it.
