we are the ones who don't slow down at all
For the first time, and startled by it—with the pain and sound and suddenness of a gunshot—O recognizes why her mother always liked this kind of thing so much.
In rooms like this one, everything dies in slow motion.
She has never cared for politics much. If at all. That was one of a few things she had inherited from her father—a complete lack of patience for social niceties, an honest-to-god, deep-seated hatred of the way girls and politicians treated each other—evil with slight smiles, weak-spined but always cool. That they could have agreed on, if the timing had been a little better. And like him O had always been better suited to the barrel of the gun than the hilt of it; why waste time talking when a blade could say so much so much quicker?
Ah, but now it all makes sense. Suddenly O recognizes the glitter-strewn, body-packed ballroom for what it is: a battlefield, subtler in nature but with all the same effects, sending a chill of excitement up her spine, curling her lip in a kind of protective sneer. Watching Andi and Aghavni interact is like having front-seat tickets to a gladiator fight. They are so well-practiced that for a moment O almost feels inferior. She’s an observer with an itch to enter the ring but not enough experience to warrant it, blinded and dazzled by the way these girls manage to glare and smile at each other at the same time, the flash of their teeth, the hard glint of the eyes.
For this brief heartbeat of a moment—this sentence held on a taut string of silence—she is in love with them both, the evil girls they are.
And she knows Andi feels the same (or something close to it) because, when O lets her sharp tongue slip, she cannot not notice the way the kelpie’s mouth tightens and her eyes break apart like a seashell at the bottom of a bookbag.
O has no idea what she is looking at.
Who is this girl? It certainly isn’t Anandi. Not the one she knows, at least. And not even close to the one she wants. Even the slightest reaction—the way the emissary blinks a few times in a row when the words hit her, like a startled deer—makes O uncomfortable, self-conscious, like she is witnessing something she was never supposed to. Like she is seeing behind the velvet curtains and finding that the stagemaster is a high-functioning alcoholic.
Andi’s eyes are deep and deep and deep, heart-swallowing deep, earth-shattering deep, and all the broken pieces of them are beginning to knit back together, and everything rings with a regretful pain, and O thinks: I am going to die. Her chest aches. Is this horror or sympathy? (It hurts either way.)
O blinks, and—
Knows, suddenly, sharply, and instinctively—knows, with a sinking, body-numbing certainty—that she was in that dark, soft place for much longer than she had intended.
Aghavni is returning to their circle from a dance O cannot remember her beginning; and Andi is standing in the same place, still as a statue, but radiating with a heat and irritation that simply was not there before. The room falls silent as partners break off and the violin trails away. O can hear the ringing in her ears, and that’s almost worse then the crushing loudness; and then Aghavni speaks, smirking breathlessly, and that is even worse still. In Solterra my species is not so welcomed as yours, she says, and despite herself,
Apolonia cringes.
It’s a millisecond, there and gone. But the fact that it even happened—that she thought for a moment, and seriously, about defending Anandi over Aghavni—makes her hate herself. What would her mother say? What, now, of loyalty? O wants to fight someone just to prove she’s still capable of it, not just some love-struck teenager. Makes her want to back away slowly. Makes her want to screw her eyes up and let it all melt away and away and away.
O rolls her lip between her teeth until it splits and aches and her nostrils fill with the hard scent of blood.
She does not know what to say; in fact, she feels incapable of saying anything.
So she mouths to Anandi, silently, with a look half-pleading, I’m sorry. I missed you.
