Chapter 42 – Just you

“I acted in the public interest,” Alice said.

The words came out clipped, rehearsed, the opening statement of a defence that had clearly been assembling itself behind her eyes for some time. She pushed herself straighter against the wall, which cost her something—a wince, quickly smothered—and fixed Florence with a look that was probably intended to be imperious but landed somewhere closer to peevish.

“There were eleven armed cultists in that building. Eleven. Your brother was outnumbered, outflanked, and operating on a destroyed ankle. I intervened. I engaged hostile targets. I saved civilian lives. Multiple civilian lives. I did not seek confrontation with your brother, I did not initiate—”

“Alice.”

“—I did not initiate hostilities. I was leaving. I was walking away. I had holstered my weapon, and I was walking toward the breach in the wall, and he came up behind me making friendly conversation like we were at a garden party, and then he—” She broke off. A cough tore through the sentence, wet and rattling, and she pressed the heel of her hand against her sternum until it passed. When she spoke again the cadence had slipped, the prepared remarks losing their footing. “He grabbed me. Just—hands on my wrist, out of nowhere, after I’d just spent—I’d just saved his life, Florence. Fifteen minutes. And that was his first instinct.”

Her voice had risen. The flush on her cheeks was deeper now, and Florence was reasonably certain it wasn’t all mana.

“I responded proportionally.”

“You broke his nose,” Florence said.

“Proportionally,” Alice repeated, with the absolute conviction of someone who had redefined the word to suit her needs.

Florence regarded her.

“Alice,” she said, gently. “You were walking around a bombed building in a mask, carrying weapons, with no identification. You wouldn’t speak to him. You wouldn’t show your face. You had just killed several people.”

“Bad people.”

“People,” Florence repeated. “And Thomas is a Senior Inspector. It’s his job to identify unknown combatants at a scene like that. He didn’t know who you were. For all he knew, you were with the cultists. Or a third party. Or—”

“I had just saved his—” The sentence snagged. Alice’s eyes went briefly unfocused, the way they had when she’d first tried to sit up, and she blinked hard, twice, dragging herself back. “His life. I killed a man. I put a bullet through a man’s head to stop him from turning your brother into a—into—”

She lost the word. Florence watched her grope for it, her mouth working, her brow creasing with the specific frustration of someone whose vocabulary had always been her sharpest weapon and was now misfiring.

“A red smear,” Alice managed, less elegantly than she’d intended. “And the first thing Thomas does is try to arrest me. That’s logical to you?”

“Yes,” Florence said.

Alice stared at her.

“He’s an officer of the law, Alice. Someone in a mask just fought and killed people in front of him. He doesn’t get to just wave goodbye and go home because they seemed helpful. He has a duty. You would have done the same thing.”

“I would never—”

“You absolutely would have.”

Alice opened her mouth. Closed it. Opened it again. Her jaw worked, the muscles tightening and releasing in rapid succession, and Florence could practically hear the gears grinding as Alice searched for a rebuttal and found the cupboard bare.

“That is—” Alice started.

“Completely reasonable?”

“Beside the—” Another cough. Shorter this time, but it stole the rest of the sentence, and when it was done Alice seemed to have forgotten what the sentence was. She stared at the blanket for a moment with the hollow bewilderment of someone who had lost their place in a speech. “Whatever. The point stands.”

She tried to cross her arms. The motion required more coordination than her fever-addled body could supply, and the result was a graceless tangle of limbs and borrowed pyjama sleeves that ended with Alice huffing through her nose and settling for clenching her fists on top of the blanket.

Florence looked at her.

She looked at the flushed cheeks. The damp hair plastered to her forehead. The pyjamas already wilting from the heat. The trembling hands that couldn’t hold a spoon twenty minutes ago, balled up now in outraged little fists on top of a patchwork quilt in a boarding house attic.

This was the masked figure who had gone toe to toe with a Tier 5 Inspector. Who had stolen his gun out of thin air. Who had broken his nose with an uppercut and held him at gunpoint and delivered a speech about killing for him that had made Thomas go quiet in a way Florence had never seen before.

And right now she couldn’t lift her arms above her shoulders.

The laugh escaped before Florence could catch it.

It started small—a tremor at the corner of her mouth, a hitch in her breathing that she tried to disguise as a cough. But Alice was still glaring at her with the impotent fury of a wet cat, and the contrast between the girl in the blanket and the spectre in the mask was so vast, so absurd, that the laugh broke through every barrier Florence erected and came out in a helpless, gasping burst that she immediately tried to smother with her hand.

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“Are you laughing?” Alice said.

Florence shook her head, her palm clamped over her mouth, her shoulders shaking.

“You are. You’re laughing at me.”

“I’m not—” Florence managed, before another wave hit and she had to press both hands to her face. “I’m sorry. I’m sorry, it’s just—you were so—and now you can’t even—”

“Can’t even what?”

“Hold a spoon,” Florence wheezed.

Alice’s expression underwent a rapid and violent transformation. The outrage curdled, twisted, fought for survival against the sheer indignity of the observation, and lost. Her mouth flattened into a thin, furious line that wobbled at the corners in a way that suggested her own face was staging a mutiny.

“I am convalescing,” Alice said, with tremendous dignity.

Florence lost it.

The laughter came properly this time—open, warm, the kind that folded her forward and made her eyes stream. She pressed her forehead against the edge of the mattress and laughed until her stomach ached, and every time she thought she’d gotten control of herself she would look up and see Alice’s face—offended, feverish, and fighting a losing battle against the smirk that was trying to colonise her expression—and it would start again.

Alice watched her with the narrow-eyed tolerance of a monarch enduring a court jester.