“We are. The Monster Security Agency—” he began from the upper-right-hand corner of the room, and I held a hand up in warning.
“No. No. Do notstartthat bullshit with me. You know I’ve been working with you, trying to get you to remember that there are people outside these walls—people with lives. People with feelings. And you just?—”
“I offered the most appropriate level of interference,” he said, his voice coming out of a different speaker, so I whirled.
“No—you undercut me.”
“Why would I do such a thing, Sirena?”
“I don’t know!” I shouted up at him. “And? To some degree it doesn’t matterwhy.It matters that youdid.”
“You don’t know those women—” he began, trying to logic me back into his solution.
“Yes—but you don’t know women. At all.” My voice was scathing. “You don’t know what it’s like tobe one.And you sure as shit don’t know what it’s like to listen to other people having to be one, every single day.”
Misogyny was alive and kicking. I’d been listening to men think about my ass ever since I’d walked out of the sea. And worse than that, I’d been listening to women thinking about men thinking about my ass, from about thirty seconds after on, because toxic masculinity was contagious.
Everyone in the world just needed to think about their own fucking ass, if they needed to think about one, and leave everyone else’s ass in the world alone.
“You don’t understand,” I said. “To guys like Voss, people—women—they’re just commodities. It doesn’t matter that they have wants, and needs, and souls. You have no idea how many of them I’ve had to listen to.” Running recon outside of galas, or worse yet, attending them, getting to see the men who were possessed of such thoughts up close.
“Those women meannothingto him. They might as well be gum he’ll pay someone else to scrape off of the bottom of his shoe. And there is no way in the world that whatever they did to Sophia, and now to whichever box of women he’ll pick up one port over, is wholesome. None.”
Nex had the graciousness to let his fans spin for a thoughtful moment before he answered, even though I was certainhewas certain of how he’d respond as of the millisecond my speech was over.
What I hadn’t expected was the bluntness of his response. “Those women are theoretical, to me.”
“What does that even mean?”
“That to some degree those women are akin to Schrödinger’s cat, if you remember the experiment.”
“I do, and it’s not making me feel better about this convo.”
“Be that as it may—I do not know them.”
“They’re women, Nex. Humans.”
“Yes—and humans hurt one another all the time.”
I took a stunned step back. “I’ve been having hard philosophical conversations with you for months now. Have you...just...been humoring me? Or—just tolerating them?”
“No. I enjoy thinking—it’s what I’m good at. But our conversations don’t erase facts.”
“And so your answer to the trolley problem is, what—to just blow up the trolley, and everyone in a five-mile radius?”
“If you were on the trolley, I would become the brake.”
I crossed my arms. “That’s not how the trolley problem works, Nex.”
“And who says that? Humans.”
I snorted—and felt a small crowd of consciousnesses coming up the hall. The door to Nex’s server room opened, revealing Cassia, attended by all of the snakes in her hair hidden beneath her wrap.
“Susan told me you’d be here,” she announced, once she’d spotted me.
I found where I’d thrown my headband crown to the ground, picked it up, and shetsked. “You don’t need to put that on for me.”
“That’s great, because I’m not, since you’re imposing yourself on my private conversation,” I said, dusting the headband off.
