It wasn’t what she’d meant to say. The question had slipped out of her in a rush. Kane didn’t answer, merely panting as she dislodged another metal shard, but his head canted to the side in acknowledgment.
“I killed a man tonight, Kane. I killed him, and it was one of the worst experiences of my life, and I’d do it again.” She kept her eyes on her hands, cheeks warm. “Cecile once told me that everyone is just a compilation of the choices they make. If that’s true, then what does that say about me? I never know if I’m making the right choices; I can only tell when I’m making the wrong ones.
“But sometimes, even when I’m making the worst decisions possible, I don’t think I feel the way I’m supposed to. I’m like an invention that hasn’t been put together properly—everyone can tell it’s not working quite right, but no one can explain what, exactly, the problem is.” She let what she hoped was the last shard fall to the floor. “Better?”
Kane nodded. “Thank you,” he said, his voice thick with relief. He still looked dreadful, his eyes shuttered, but there was less tension in his face and neck.
Zaria watched the muscles of his torso expand and contract with each shallow breath. His blood was on her hands, a distant part of her acknowledged, but she didn’t move to deal with it. Now that she had finished, exhaustion slammed into her. It was as if every emotion she’d repressed over the last few hours had returned all at once to drain her energy. “You don’t need to thank me.”
“You could have let me die. I told you to.”
End it, he’d begged, and something in Zaria balked at the memory. At the terror that had unfurled within her very bones.
“No,” she whispered. “I couldn’t have.”
He was quiet at that, and for a moment she wondered if he’d fallen asleep. She stared sightlessly at the wall, listening to the insistent beat of her own heart.
“Yes,” Kane said finally, startling her.
“What?”
“Yes, sometimes I feel as if I don’t truly know myself. Maybe not in the way you described—I’m not generally concerned with how I’msupposedto feel about anything. But if everyone is a compilation of the choices they’ve made, then the truest version of me is dead. He died when I wasn’t even looking.”
The dryness in Zaria’s throat returned. “I didn’t think you were listening.”
Kane continued as if she hadn’t spoken. “I try not to think about the boy I used to be, you know. How terribly the world let him down. How terriblyIlet him down. Whenever I dare to look back, I can’t quite remember how I got here. Which parts of myself I stripped away, and which ones I replaced them with.” A labored breath. “I try to tell myself that’s what it means to grow up. Secretly, though, I wonder if this—the way I am now—is the product of layers of damage I can’t undo. I wonder if I’ll ever recognize myself again. If it evenmatters.”
He said all of this with his eyes closed, the slant of his mouth tight. Although she was sitting down, Zaria felt unsteady. As if any sound, any abrupt movement, would irreparably fracture the delicate peace between them. She didn’t know what to say to that kind of honesty. Whatwasthere to say? She couldn’t lie, couldn’t tell Kane he wasn’t damaged. She couldn’t tell him the boy he’d been would be proud.
“Maybe you’ll never recognize yourself again,” she said softly. “Not in the way you’re hoping. But that doesn’t make you wrong.” The silence stretched between them. “You’re exactly who you are.”
He opened his eyes, then, and Zaria knew he remembered. He’d said those exact words to her in the dark shed behind Moore & Sons, his face lit from beneath by candlelight, magic glittering between them.
“That may have been true for you,” he rasped, “but I’m not sure it applies here. You know me better than that, Zaria.”
“We’ve established I’m not necessarily the best judge of right and wrong.”
Kane’s lips curled up. “No, I suppose you’re not. If you were, neither of us would be here right now.”
She couldn’t help her own smile, sardonic though it was. “I bet you wish you’d never walked into the pawnshop that first time.”
“I think about it a lot.”
“Do you?”
“Part of always having a plan is playing each one back in your mind, wondering where things went wrong. Wondering what you should have done differently.”
Zaria stilled. She didn’t think they were talking about that night at the pawnshop anymore. “The day we went back to the Exhibition,” she began haltingly, “you said you’d changed your mind about the Waterhouse jewels. What did you mean by that?”
Kane’s attention was still on her, gaze arresting. He looked gaunter than ever. “Just what I said. I wasn’t going to leave you with nothing—I had decided to take the jewels after all.”
“You’re lying.” The reply slipped out before she could think better of it.
“And what reason would I have to do that?”
“So you can convince me I’m the bad guy. That only one of us was going to break our agreement, and therefore I should feel guilty.”
“Do you?”
