Page 51 of Graceless

"Where are your wings?"

It came out as a joke. I had meant it as a joke.

And then it was in the air between us and it wasn't one, and I heard it the way he must have heard it, and every hair on my arms went up. I hadn't known that was in me. I'd have sworn on the saints there was nothing under that sentence but sarcasm and bad sleep.

He didn't laugh either.

"I'm not a man," he said.

"Okay," I said. "Okay. See, this is the part where you tell me you're a Mason."

His mouth did the almost-thing it does, and for one second we were us again — the two-cup operation, the arrangement — and then it was over and he said it anyway.

"I was made before your species had language. I was set to watch you. I came down, and I stayed down, and I have been on this earth ever since." He said it the way he says everything, flat as a form letter.

I looked at him.

"No," I said.

"Cate—"

"No. Absolutely not." I was almost laughing again, and it came out wrong. "That's — Raq, that's crazy. That's a crazy thing to say out loud in a basement. You've been sitting in that chair for two weeks. You drink terrible coffee. You have a jacket."

"Yes."

"So say a real thing." My voice climbed and I let it. "You want to tell me you're ex-something, fine. Government, mob, whatever it is you don't say — I have run every scenario, I have theories, I've had two weeks and a very good imagination. Pick one. Pick any of them. But don't stand in my grandmother's house and tell me you're⁠—"

I couldn't say it.

"—that."

"I know how it sounds."

"Do you? Because from here it sounds like the thing men say when the real answer is worse."

He looked at me for a moment.

"You should sit down," he said.

"I'll stand."

"You'll want to be near the bench, then."

"Why—"

And then the air did the thing.

The blur. The lurch. The gap where the world's spine should be, the thing my stomach had met twice before and my brain had overruled both times — and he was at the far wall, by the sink, standing exactly as still as he'd been standing, and no part of the room remembered him crossing it.

My body got there before I did. My hip found the workbench, my hand found the edge of it and gripped, and something older than I am — older than language, the thing in the spine, the thing that kept my whole species alive long enough to invent doubt — stood up inside me and said what it has always said in the presence of a thing that moves like that. It did not say wow. It said run.

I didn't run. I stood with the bench biting my hand and my heart going like the whole percussion section falling downstairs, and I watched him not move, and the fear arrived — all of it, finally, two weeks of it, all at once. He watched it arrive. He did nothing to stop it — no you're fine, no step toward me. He stayed against the far wall, as far from me as that room allowed, and did not move at all.

"Once more?" he said. Quiet.

"No." My voice had gravel in it. "No. Once did it."

I got my hand off the bench. Flexed it. Put it back.