“Six laws is conservative.”
“Rhazek.”
He rises and crosses the room with the slow, unhurried grace of something that has never been prey in its life. The floorboardscreak beneath his feet. When he stops behind me, he does not touch until I meet his eyes in the glass and give the smallest nod. Then his hands settle at my waist, warm through the thin fabric of my shift.
“You are unchanged,” he says.
“That is what I see.”
“That is what I feel.”
I press two fingers beneath my jaw, finding my pulse. Strong. Steady. Annoyingly normal for a woman who has recently helped incinerate parasitic remnants of an ancient monster through a dual-channel infernal bond.
Rhazek’s gaze drops to my hand. “Again?”
“I like data.”
“You like control.”
“I contain multitudes.”
“You contain suspicions with excellent posture.”
My pulse beats beneath my fingers, calm and sure. I count it because numbers do not flatter, do not panic, do not try to comfort me with poetry. Sixty-eight. Seventy. Seventy-two after Rhazek’s mouth brushes the side of my neck, which is unfair interference and should be scientifically disallowed.
“You did that on purpose,” I say.
“Yes.”
“I am gathering evidence.”
“I provided a variable.”
“You are a menace.”
His lips graze the shell of my ear. “A precise one.”
Later, because he understands that teasing will not satisfy me, Rhazek takes me beyond the house to the ridge where the morning mist gathers between black pines and the air tastes of cold stone. He shows me time dilation not as a theory scrawled in a margin, but as a living mechanism. He draws two circles in the dirt with the point of a dagger, one inside the other, thenthreads infernal light through the outer ring until it begins to rotate so slowly I think it has stopped.
“Time is not a river,” he says.
“I beg several philosophers to disagree.”
“Philosophers describe drowning with impressive vocabulary. That does not make them swimmers.”
I crouch beside the circles, watching the inner ring remain still while the outer moves with such subtle pressure that the grass bends away from it. “Then what is it?”
“A pressure field. Locally obedient under the right conditions, wildly vindictive under the wrong ones.” He kneels beside me, his shoulder brushing mine. “Immortal beings do not simply avoid age. We exist in altered relation to duration. My body does not count years as yours did.”
“As mine did,” I repeat.
His eyes move to me. “As yours did.”
The words land quietly, but they land.
I look back at the circles. “So what am I now?”
“Extended,” he says, then grimaces slightly. “That sounds clinical.”
