“What?” had been his gut response, delivered so sharply it rattled his entire aching brain from the depths of his many upsetting thoughts. “What do you mean you’re not doing that?”
“I’m not killing someone,” she said, shrugging. “I won’t do it.”
“Well, suppose you won’t have a choice,” he said.
“In the thought experiment, you mean?”
He hesitated, and then said, “Yes, in the thought experiment.”
“Everyone always has a choice.” She chewed the inside of her cheek, tapping the manuscript in her lap to the wave of something he probably couldn’t hear. “Would you?”
“Would I what?”
“Kill Callum.”
“I—” He blinked. “Well, I—”
“Or me.” She glanced at him sideways. “Would you kill me?”
“No.” No, not her. What a waste it would be for anyone to rid the world of her power, her capability. What an absolute crime against humanity. That was an easy conclusion, even if sex were not part of the equation. “No, of course not, but—”
“What did Parisa say?”
It occurred to him that Parisa had said something precisely the same, only drastically different: I’m not doing that.
“I think,” he said slowly, “Parisa would plot some sort of mutiny. Take over the train.” He managed a grim laugh that hurt his throat, stinging. “Kill three and save three, somehow, just so she didn’t have to do precisely as she was instructed.”
“Well, there’s that for choices,” said Libby, shrugging, as if anything he’d said were a plausible option. Tristan blinked, attempting to formulate thought, but was interrupted by the motion of Libby carefully marking her place in the manuscript, turning to face him.
“I should probably talk to—” A pause. “I need to, um. My boyfriend is,” she began, and then faded into silence. “I should probably tell him.”
“You aren’t going to…” Fuck. “What are you going to tell him?”
She chewed her lip. “I haven’t decided.”
“You’re not going to—” Stay.
“I don’t know. I don’t think so.” A pause. “No.”
“So…”
The fact that Tristan could neither fully speak nor fully keep from speaking was a rather upsetting one. He longed for the presence of mind to say nothing, to wander out of here like someone who did this sort of thing all the time, but at the moment he suffered only pinpricks of dehydration and total, unfettered stupidity.
“So you’re just going to tell him, then? Straight out?”
“I don’t know. I need to think about it,” she said.
Clearly she meant alone, which was fair. This thought exercise, unlike the previous one, was not designed for peer review. The impulse to ask think about what? temporarily flooded Tristan’s consciousness, but muscle memory kept him from lingering overlong. Bad enough that he’d done what he’d done; he did not want to suddenly become the sort of person who lingered. He had limbs accustomed to impassive distance, and to his relief, he put it between him and Libby Rhodes with ease.
Weeks later, he had still heard nothing from her. Their first few interactions had been slightly awkward, with occasional averted glances and one truly precarious collision that involved his palm inadvertently skating her hip as they passed each other between tables in the reading room, but there had been no further discussion. There had been no deliberate contact of any kind, nor anything outside of hello or good evening or please pass the bread.
Until, of course, “Electrons.”
“What do you mean electrons?” Tristan asked, feeling groggy and stupid. Ironic that the research spent on thought would leave him so utterly bereft of any, even after nearly two months. Their current topic of precognition (and its study of history’s most famous precognitors, like Cassandra and Nostradamus) had done absolutely fuck-all to prepare him for
this sort of interaction, which could only be described as nightmarishly unexpected.
“If you could break things down as small as an electron, you could alter them chemically,” Libby said. “Conceivably, that is.”