This One #3
"Yes. But power is vulgar. Everyone wants power after sufficient inconvenience." He looked at his hand. "This is more personal."
Marin waited. Oliver liked that about her. She could wait without turning silence into pressure.
"I want to be difficult to erase," he said.
The sentence entered the space between them without decoration. Marin's face changed. He continued before tenderness could make him less accurate.
"I want every threshold to fail before I do. I want whatever is inside the Deep to discover that I am inconveniently specific. I want to know whether there is a point where the world cannot mistake me for something else."
"That sounds like survival."
"Partly."
"And the rest?"
He looked at the exact shadow.
"Pride."
"Curiosity."
"Also that."
"Control."
Oliver smiled. "You know me terribly well."
"I am building a list."
"I find that erotic."
"Do not."
"Too late."
Her mouth betrayed her for half a second. The cold pressure at Oliver's chest did not lessen. Bhodi seemed perfectly content to remain present while they flirted around it. That was almost insulting. Marin lifted her wrapped left hand.
"May I?"
Oliver knew what she meant without asking. He nodded. She placed her palm flat against his chest where the shadow-touch felt coldest. Pain crossed her face because the hand was still injured. Oliver immediately covered it with his left.
"That hurts."
"Yes."
"Marin."
"I am capable of stopping."
He almost argued. Then did not. Her hand remained because she chose it. The distinction steadied him more effectively than anything magical.
"What do you feel?" she asked.
"Cold."
Marin's questions narrowed from there. Pressure. Pain. Compulsion. Oliver answered no to each, paying attention before he spoke because a rehearsed denial would have been useless. Invitation took longer.
"Not exactly."
Her thumb shifted once against his shirt. "Want?"
"Mine."
"Good."
He looked down at her.
"That sounded possessive."
"It was diagnostic."
"Shame."
The shadow beneath them shifted as cloud crossed the sun. For the first time in several minutes it obeyed the light perfectly. Bhodi's attention remained. Oliver could feel that too. Marin withdrew her hand. He let her.
"What are you going to do with this?" she asked.
There it was again. Marin had left the decision where it belonged. Oliver looked east. Kelm's people had begun tightening harness straps. Seraphine stood beside the wagon, pretending not to watch them. The old semaphore still pointed stop over a railway no one used. He could say stop.
That would comfort Seraphine. It might comfort Marin, though he suspected less than most people would assume. It would be a lie.
"I am going to keep looking."
Marin nodded once. Fear passed through her expression and stayed. Oliver loved her for not disguising it.
"With conditions," she said.
"My conditions or yours?"
"Ours where our bodies overlap. Mine where mine is involved. Yours where yours is."
"Infuriatingly reasonable."
"I practice."
He considered the shadow.
"No deliberate exclusion merely to test the model."
"Agreed."
They added the rest without ceremony. No crossing a Thin Place because curiosity wanted a cleaner answer.
No treating the masks as futures. No assuming the next manifestation meant the same thing as this one.
Oliver agreed to each and found, to his irritation, that none of the boundaries made him want the question less.
"You realize you have turned existential danger into laboratory etiquette."
"Someone has to."
He leaned down and kissed her. Briefly. Not because danger made permission irrelevant.
Because her face softened before he moved, because she lifted her chin, because the answer existed between them in the half-second where either could have changed it.
Her mouth was warm from bad station coffee.
Oliver kissed her once and stopped. Marin stayed close.
"Still you?" she asked.
It should have been a joke. It was not. Oliver looked at her grey eyes, the healing cut at her arm, the bandage around the hand she had just chosen to place over his heart.
He felt the ache in his ribs, the pull in his palm, the old wound of Seraphine walking away, the newer terror of having her back, the impossible appetite in his shadow and the ridiculous pleasure of a wet ridge under an open sky. He had never felt less replaceable.
"Annoyingly," he said.
"Good."
Behind Marin, Seraphine called, "If the two of you are finished conducting field research, Kelm wants to move." Oliver raised his voice.
"We are never finished."
"That was the answer I feared."
Marin stepped away first. Oliver retrieved the handcart.
They rejoined the convoy as the sun broke through beneath the western cloud bank and threw their shadows long across the ridge.
Oliver watched his for three steps. One shape.
His. Perhaps. The word refused to leave him. Neither did the wanting.
He glanced once toward Marin and then at the dark figure keeping pace beside his boots. Not that Oliver. This one. The worst part was how much it sounded like an invitation.