"What does it actually feel like, being a Relic?"
The question hung in the cold air of the empty senate, and Emma felt every second of silence that followed weigh a little heavier than the last.
She could have just not answered. After all, why should she have to? She didn't even have a straight answer to give. Or she could have lied. She could have, like with Agatha back at the very beginning, measured her words, letting only what served her slip through.
But something in Paul's gaze, that sudden intensity in the green of his eyes that had replaced his earlier amusement, seemed to force Emma to answer, as though that gaze were rearranging her own thoughts without her consent. He would know. He'd know instantly, the same way she herself had learned to recognize a lie since her awakening.
"I..." she began, her voice more fragile than she would have liked.
She stopped dead.
Not by choice. By reflex, sensing a shift in the air of the senate before she even understood its cause, a barely perceptible vibration climbing up from the stone floor into her legs.
"Paul."
"Since when does one use their Distortion within the Capitol itself? On a member of my faction, no less."
Agatha's voice cracked from the top of the tiers, sharper than anything Emma had ever heard her say, even in her worst fits of fanaticism. She was already descending, her pace measured and glacial, each step striking the wooden stairs like a metronome with no intention of slowing.
"Agatha."
Paul didn't turn around right away, taking his time, with calculated slowness, to finish examining Emma one last time before deigning to grant the newcomer his attention. "I thought Relics were supposed to be a gift to humanity. I didn't take you for someone so selfish."
The air between the two adults filled with a tension Emma couldn't immediately name, something that went far beyond the simple administrative rivalry their words suggested. She stood perfectly still, not even daring to breathe too loudly, aware that in the span of a few seconds she had become neutral ground over which two powers far older than her were disputing a territory whose full shape she didn't yet understand.
Agatha finished her descent and positioned herself with almost choreographed precision between Paul and Emma.
"I wasn't aware that Councilors of your rank had taken to wandering the Capitol's private wings alone these days."
"I thought this wing belonged to the Capitol as a whole," Paul answered, saying her name without the slightest title, which Emma instantly understood as a deliberate slight. "Not to you alone."
"As President of the Senate, I bear full responsibility here. You know that perfectly well."
Neither of them yielded so much as an inch. There were no raised voices, no sudden gestures. Only the unbearable weight of two massive wills colliding in leaden silence, crushing the air around Emma.
The tension had reached its peak. Emma no longer knew where to stand, or even whether she was supposed to stand anywhere at all. It was as though their conflict were generating its own static electricity between them, the kind of silence that makes you want to take a step back without quite knowing why.
Finally, Paul released all the pressure at once, his amused smile reclaiming his face, that same smile that nothing, apparently, ever managed to shake for very long.
"Well, well, Agatha. Who would have thought old age would sharpen you this much."
The jab was direct, cruel in its precision, aimed squarely at the age now showing on Agatha's face. She didn't react. Not a blink, not so much as a tightening at the corner of her mouth. Nothing that might betray whether the blow had landed or not.
She turned instead to Emma, ignoring Paul with an almost theatrical coldness, and asked her plainly, in front of him:
"What did he want from you?"
Emma gathered herself. The question, asked so bluntly, in front of Paul, without the slightest tact, stirred in her an irritation sharper than the fear she should have felt. Once again, she was being discussed like a file to be managed, not a person to be consulted.
"None of your business," she answered, her voice cutting with restrained anger. "And I don't belong to anyone."
Paul didn't respond to Emma directly. He turned instead to Agatha, an amused smile playing on his lips.
"Your faction, you said?"
"On that note, I bid you both farewell, ladies."
He bowed, a touch too elaborate to be entirely sincere, then turned on his heel and walked off toward the upper tiers of the senate, his footsteps echoing long after his silhouette had vanished through the far door.
Agatha waited for total silence before finally turning to Emma.
"Come," she said simply, without a trace of her usual grandmotherly warmth, as though the confrontation with Paul had cost her some of the energy she normally reserved for that mask. "We'll talk in my quarters."
The walk passed in silence. Emma followed, her thoughts still hanging on Paul's last remark about factions, which kept floating through her mind like a thread whose full weight she didn't yet grasp.
Once the door to her chambers closed behind them, Agatha sank into the room's single armchair with a weariness Emma had never seen her display so openly.
"Paul Verlot," she said at last, as though the simple act of saying the name left a bitter taste in her mouth. "Councilor of the Senate for only two years now, but already determined to become a great deal more. He leads what some call the Horizon faction."
"The Horizon?"
"The Horizon preaches absolute meritocracy. They want power to belong exclusively to those who carry the densest Distortions. No more politics, no more diplomacy. Only the law of the strongest, raised to the level of a system of government."
All of these concepts were new to Emma, but Agatha didn't seem inclined to elaborate any further, and Emma could already count herself fortunate to have gotten this much out of her.
"Even if you don't fully trust me, which I understand," Agatha continued, her gaze hardening, "never trust Paul. He is dangerous. Far more dangerous than I am."
Emma stayed quiet for a moment, taking it all in.
"And you, in all this?" she asked finally. "What do you govern by, if not the law of the strongest Qualia?"
Agatha opened her eyes again, and for the first time since Emma had known her, something that looked like genuine amusement crossed her gaze.
"You learn fast." She straightened slightly in her chair. "The Capitol stands on a fragile balance, Emma. Thirty years of relative peace, built stone by stone on the ruins of a civil war no one here wants to see return. The Horizon promises strength. What they actually offer is chaos, dressed up in a promise of purity."
Emma fell silent, taking in the answer, but part of her remained elsewhere, still caught on that strange sensation she hadn't managed to name throughout the entire confrontation.
It was as if the information had assembled itself inside her head, forming a thought that wasn't entirely her own.
She remembered, with an almost disturbing clarity, that exact instant when, faced with Paul's question, something inside her had started wanting to speak, almost against her will. It hadn't been fear. It hadn't been a genuine desire to answer, either. It had been something else, a gentle but insistent pressure, like an invisible hand pressed against the small of her back, urging her toward a cliff edge she'd never intended to approach.
Was that him? His Distortion? Did he just do to me exactly what I did to Andrew without meaning to?
The thought chilled her more deeply than anything Paul had said out loud. If that was really what had happened, then she had just discovered, in her own flesh, what it felt like to be on the other side of the power she now carried inside her. And she hadn't liked it. Not one bit.
"You're somewhere else," Agatha noted, her gaze sharpening, studying her with that same clinical attention she usually reserved for the Shard itself.
Emma hesitated, then decided, for once, not to lie entirely.
"Something happened. With him. I don't know how to explain it."
"His Distortion touched yours," Agatha said, without the slightest trace of surprise in her voice, as though she were simply confirming something obvious rather than revealing a secret.
Emma froze.
"How could you possibly know that?"
Agatha didn't answer directly. She simply held her gaze for a long moment, an enigmatic smile drifting across her lips, the kind of smile that promised no answer, no matter how many times the question was asked.
"That doesn't matter, for now," she said finally. "What matters is that your first Distortion has awakened since our visit to the Shard. I know it. I knew it before you even knew it yourself."
The silence that followed settled over Emma differently, heavier, more final than anything that had come before that day.
"The world you've landed in, Emma, forgives nothing in those who don't know how to defend themselves." Agatha rose, smoothing the folds of her dress with an almost mechanical gesture. "You've been lucky so far. You're safe here, whatever you may think of me. But that luck won't last forever, especially now that men like Paul have started taking far too close an interest in you."
"What do you mean?"
"I mean that starting tomorrow, you're going to learn how to fight." Agatha made her way to the door, her silhouette cutting briefly against the cold light of the hallway. "And more importantly, you're going to learn how to use what you now carry inside you, instead of letting it awaken on its own, at random, in corridors where it might end up revealing state secrets before you've even had time to understand what was happening to you."
She paused at the threshold, without turning around.
"Tomorrow," she repeated, before disappearing into the corridor and closing the door behind her.
Emma stood alone, her heart beating at a pace she couldn't have called afraid or excited, something between the two, something that didn't have a name yet.
She remained there, facing the closed door. The fear had vanished, replaced by a cold and absolute necessity. If they wanted to play with her mind, she was going to have to learn how to break theirs.