Plan for Not Dying Again

Here is what they do not tell you about being murdered: it makes you very good at the half-second.

In my last life I had been a slow woman. Not stupid, I want that on the record, but slow in the way comfort makes you slow, the way a person raised to take the offered arm learns to receive the world rather than read it. Then I spent twenty minutes dying on a floor, and somewhere in the back half of them, with my pulse going wrong in my ears and Tristan's voice doing concern across the room, time had widened out like a held breath, and I had got, finally, far too late, fast.

So when the glass came toward my hand, the colour of a coin held to a lamp, the exact colour of the water around the burning ship, I did not panic. I had already done my panicking. I had done it three years from now, on a tablecloth I chose myself. There was none left for a Tuesday.

What I had instead was a list. Of course I had a list. I had thrown one in the river that very evening and here was my mind, the obedient horror, already drafting another behind my eyes while my face held its pleasant nothing, because that is the broken thing Margot built in me, I make a plan the way other people flinch.

One: do not take the glass.

Two: do not refuse the glass in a way that tells him you know.

Those two items are, you will notice, in direct opposition. That is the trap, and Tristan had built it in a single evening off a single refusal. He had heard me say I don't drink what I don't know the pouring of, and instead of being warned by it he had been delighted, because to a man like Tristan a rule is just a lock, and a lock is just proof there is something worth taking behind it. So he had watched the pour himself, the whole way, no tricks, and now if I refused the glass I was not a careful woman anymore. I was a woman refusing the one drink in the room she had no reason on earth to refuse. I would be telling him, in the only language he respected, that my rule was not a habit but a defence, that I knew there was something to defend against, which meant the whole game tipped over before I had a single piece on the board.

In my last life Tristan never made me solve anything this hard until the prenup. I had clearly been a much more relaxing person to murder.

The flute hung in the air between us. Roan had gone very still at my shoulder, that deep-water stillness, and I could feel the honest man in him winding up to do the honest thing, which would be to knock the glass from Tristan's hand or say something true and unsurvivable, and that would tip the board too, harder. So my first move was not about the glass at all.

It was a small move. I laughed.

Not a big laugh. A warm one, low, the laugh of a woman charmed despite herself, and I let it reach my eyes, which is the part that cannot be faked unless you have practised being delighted by your own killer, and reader, I had. Three years of practice and twenty minutes of graduate study.

"You watched it poured," I said. "At the bar. The whole way."

"The whole way." He was so pleased with himself. That was the gift, the thing I could use, the one constant across both my lives: Tristan Vane could not resist being admired for his cleverness, and a man who needs to be admired will hold a pose for you if you only keep looking.

"Then it would be terribly rude of me not to trust it," I said, and I lifted my hand, and I watched his eyes do the small flare of triumph, the lock turning, the thing behind it his, and I closed my fingers around the cool stem of the glass, and I did not lift it to my mouth.

I raised it instead, level, the way you raise a glass to look through it, the way I had stood looking through a hundred glasses in my dying minutes trying to find the one that had done it. I held it up to the gallery light between the three of us, and the champagne caught and threw little drowned suns onto the white wall, and I said, conversationally, to the man on my other side, "Mr Maddox. You're the suspicious one. Does this look poured-the-whole-way to you?"

It was a knife with two edges and I had thrown it underhand.

Here is what I knew that Tristan did not know I knew. Roan Maddox could not lie. Could not, the way some men cannot whistle. If there was anything wrong with that glass, a film, a faint wrong cling on the crystal, he would not be able to tell me it was fine. He would say something true instead, and his truth was the most reliable instrument in the room. And if there was nothing wrong with it, if Tristan really had only poured a clean glass to win a point about my rule, then Roan would say so, and I would drink it, and lose nothing but the small thrill of refusal, and keep my cover intact.

I had handed the question to the one man who could not answer it falsely, in front of the man who would one day kill me, dressed up as a flirtation between the careful girl and the suspicious villain, with Tristan cast as the generous host whose wine was being charmingly doubted. The old Ines could not have done it in a week. The dead Ines did it in the time it took the suns to settle on the wall.

Roan looked at the glass.

He took, I think, longer than the glass required. He has told me since, much later, in a quieter room, that there had been nothing wrong with that champagne, and that he had spent those few seconds not examining the wine at all but trying to work out how a woman he had known for twenty minutes had handed him an exit she could not have known he would need.

What he said was: "It looks exactly like what it is."

Which was true. Which was, I would understand later, also the truest thing anyone said all night, and which committed him to nothing, and which gave me the half-second I had bought.

"There," I said, to Tristan, light as foam. "Even your worst review. I think I'm safe." And I set the glass down, unsipped, on the little white plinth beside the painting, with the ease of a woman who has been reassured and simply lost interest. No refusal. No alarm. Just a beautiful woman setting down a drink she has decided she does not feel like after all, in a room where beautiful women set down drinks they do not feel like every minute of every gala.

Tristan watched the glass touch the plinth and something moved behind his face. Not the cold this time. Curiosity. The lock had turned and the box had been empty, and Tristan Vane did not like an empty box.

"You really don't drink," he said. It was not quite a question.

"I really don't," I said, "drink things I didn't pour. I told you. It's the only superstition I have. You'd be amazed how few people I trust to pour."

"And yet you trust him." A nod at Roan, easy, but I heard the hook in it, the first cast of a line he would spend three years reeling. "A man you met an hour ago. Over the most eligible host in the city."

"I trust his eyes," I said. "He looked at the glass. You only looked at me."

I felt Roan go still in an entirely new way at that, and I did not look at him, because I could not afford to. The sincere thing had got out, the one I am allowed per evening, the one that always escapes the cage at the worst moment and means more than I want it to, and the only thing to do with a sincere thing once it is loose is to keep moving so nobody can stand still long enough to weigh it.

"You're a strange girl, Ines Calloway," Tristan said, and the smile he gave me then was the one I should have been afraid of, because it was the smile of a man who has just upgraded a project from easy to interesting, and interesting, for Tristan, is the same as marked.

"So I'm told," I said, for the second time that night, and somewhere a string quartet found the back half of a waltz, and Tristan, gracious, recalibrating, filing me into whatever worse drawer interesting women went into, said he would, of course, find me later, and went, the current closing over him again, off toward the better light.

The glass stood on the plinth, clean and untouched, the colour going flat under the spots. I would have it tested by morning anyway, by a private lab, by men who owed the Calloway trust money and asked no questions, and it would come back clean, and that would teach me item three, which I wrote in my head right then, standing by the cooling poison that was not poison.

Three: he will not always use the wine. Now that he knows you watch the wine, the wine is the one thing he will keep clean.

I had taught him that, in one evening, with one refusal. I had thought I was hiding behind a rule and instead I had drawn him a map of exactly where I was not. The old fear came up cold from the floor, the understanding I'd had while dying that I never once knew the real shape of the danger until it was already in my glass. I had changed the morning. I had caught the cup. I had said no, thank you. And every change had not made me safer, only legible, a problem he could see now and would solve somewhere I was not looking.

I picked up the list in my head, the new one, Plan for Not Dying Again, mark two, and I started to number it properly, the way I do, the way that has never once kept me alive but has kept me from feeling the drop.

One. Two. Three.

And then Roan Maddox said, beside me, very low, not looking at the glass and not looking at me, "You shouldn't have given me that glass to read."

"You said it was clean," I said.

"It was clean." He was quiet a beat. "That's not what I mean. I mean you handed it to me without thinking. Held it up and passed me the reading of it like you'd done it a hundred times, like it was the most natural thing in the world to trust my eyes over your own." His jaw worked. "Nobody hands a stranger a glass like that, Miss Calloway. People guard their drinks from a man like me. They don't make me the judge of them."

I stopped numbering.

It was a fair point, and a dangerous one, and the only honest answer was the one I could never give: that he was not a stranger, that I had learned the gesture from him in another life, that somewhere ahead of us he was going to make a habit of taking the glass from my hand and reading it and swapping it for his own without a word, and that my body had simply reached for the future before my mind could stop it.

"Maybe I'm a bad judge of people," I said, which was the truest unsafe thing I owned, Margot's whole curriculum in six words, "and I've decided to outsource it to the one man here who can't lie to me."

He went still. Not the deep-water stillness. A stiller kind, the sort that comes over a man when a thing he had filed as impossible files itself, without permission, as familiar.

"How do you know I can't lie," he said.

And I opened my mouth to give him some light deflecting nothing, and found I had run clean out of them, and across the room, past Roan's shoulder, by the bar where the pale couture had been, a woman I had last watched pour my death turned, at last, and saw me. Properly. The recognition came up in Delphine Asher's face like a coin surfacing in dark water, and she smiled, the warm chosen-you smile she had practised on me for three years, and she started across the floor to make a friend of me, on schedule, exactly on schedule, and I had not the first idea what I was going to say to her.