The Devil's Favourite Obsession

The corner of her own mouth had moved before her brain had given it permission. She caught the movement. She returned her face to its careful neutrality. She picked up the next piece of toast.

Olga’s next question arrived softly, in the same conversational register the food preferences had occupied, and it landed in Cixi’s throat before her brain had time to brace.

”Are you planning to adopt the baby. To show that you really have one.”

Cixi coughed.

A small, hard, unprepared cough. The toast wedged in the wrong part of her throat. Her eyes watered.

Olga lifted the water glass from her own side of the tray and passed it across.

Cixi took it. She drank. She set the glass down. She did not look at Olga immediately.

”It is not going to drag on that long.” Her voice was hoarse. ”Once he comes back, the act will be over.”

Olga did not ask who *he* was. Olga had been told who *he* was on a couch six metres away the previous evening, and the woman across the breakfast tray did not yet know that Olga had been told. So Olga simply nodded once, as though the answer she had received was the answer she had expected.

”All right.”

”You were going to tell anyone anyway?”

”No.”

”Then we are even on that one.”

”We are even on that one.”

A small silence. The breakfast continued.

Olga set down her fork.

”Cixi.”

”Yes.”

”Who do you think pushed you from the terrace?”

Cixi looked at the terrace door at the far end of the living room. The curtains had been drawn back. The morning sun lay along the marble in a long pale rectangle. The doors were closed. From this angle, the railing was not visible.

She turned back to Olga.

”I do not know.”

”Guess.”

”Someone who does not like that fifteen percent of Crown Capital is sitting in my name.”

Olga nodded slowly.

”This place is full of your enemies, Cixi. It could be any of them. The only difficulty I have with the question is that whoever pushed you vanished from the terrace before I reached the railing. I did not see them either.”

”Whoever it is.” Cixi exhaled. ”I will have to avoid balconies. And terraces. And apparently windows.”

She tried to smile.

The smile did not arrive correctly. Underneath it, in the small private corner of her mind the Reaper had not yet bothered to occupy, Cixi held the small, dark, profoundly inconvenient comfort of being a woman who could not die.

Thank the curse for that one, she thought, and felt at once ashamed of having thanked it. Although. If a person were going to be hunted in a Palace, immortality was not the worst quality to carry into the hunting.

She had not, until this morning, allowed herself to consider that the Reaper’s contract had any side that pointed the right way up.

She was considering it now.

”Why do I feel,” Olga said, ”that you overthink a great deal?”

Cixi smiled sheepishly. Her eyes went to the rim of her plate. She did not say anything.

Olga let it pass. She lifted her cup. ”You must be studying.” It was almost a statement. The kind of sentence a mother made when she had decided what the answer was and was asking only as a courtesy.

Cixi shook her head.

”No. I am not studying anymore.”

Olga’s cup paused.

”I could not afford it. The studies and the work. I needed the money. I left college.”

She looked down at the plate.

She had not, until that sentence left her mouth, realised how much it still hurt to admit. She had not said it aloud to another human being since the morning she had walked into the registrar’s office and signed the form to withdraw. The form had been quick to sign. The reason she had signed the form — the deepfake that had been circulating through the dormitories for a week, the boys who had stopped saying her name and started saying a different name when she walked into the cafeteria, the lecturer who had asked her if perhaps she ought to *take some time* — had taken longer to leave her body than the form had taken to sign.

A small sadness moved across her face.

Olga noticed. ”What is it.”

Cixi did not answer.

”Cixi. If you want to study, I can sponsor your studies. You do not have to work.”

Cixi’s hands moved before her mouth did. Both palms came up, crossed in front of her chest in the small, hard, immediate refusal of a woman who had spent twenty-three years not taking gifts from strangers because gifts from strangers were not gifts.

”No. Thank you.”

”Cixi —”

”It is fine.”

The crossed hands lowered. Cixi placed them in her lap. She kept her eyes on the napkin because looking up at the woman across from her was a thing she did not yet have the strength to do without giving away something she had not yet decided to give away.

She could not, she thought, go back. Not to that college. Not to any other college. She did not have the answer to the deepfake yet. She did not know who had made it. She would know more about all of that at six o’clock this evening, possibly.

Until then, she was not going back to college.

She was not going to be sponsored into one.

She lifted her face.

”Thank you, Mrs Romanovs. Truly. I am —” She arranged the careful professional smile on her lips. ”I am all right. I have a plan. The plan does not include college.”

Olga did not press further. She didn’t want to make Cixi uncomfortable. She wanted to tell Cixi she was her mother. But Cassian asked her not to. Atleast not for now.

She had not pressed Lorian for twenty years. She knew how to do this.

She nodded once, the same single grave nod she had given the answer about the baby, and lifted her own fork, and returned to her egg.