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“An hour for pizza, then. There’s a place not too far from Bridge View.”
    As they passed, she caught Magnus’s eye and shook her head once in answer to his raised eyebrows. He slid his hands in his pockets, watched them go.
    â€œHow are your heels?” Ethan asked at the door.
    â€œI’m not walking, if that’s the question. Did you want me to describe them?”
    He flushed, just at the tips of his ears, when you caught him out. “Nope, that’s the question. I already know how they look.”
    He was so predictable it worried her. Black pumps, some stockings, long hair, a little lip gloss. That was it. He never even joked about the contract when he was flirting with her.
    (“If he does . . . invoke the terms in an inappropriate way, let me know and I’ll speak to his handlers about it. It’s bad form,” Magnus had told her, not meeting her eyes, just before her first overnight date with Ethan.
    Grace told her, “If he shouts the clause number when he comes, run for it.”)
    It stung to slide into the backseat of the car. Of course she could walk there; she didn’t wear any shoes she couldn’t run for her life in. But it was no good reminding anyone you were a fighter. She sat back and let the fifteen blocks slide by, carefully not thinking of anything at all.
    She goaded him into getting a mushroom pizza (“The whole thing?” “Harold can’t see you. You afraid of lookinghungry?” “. . . We’ll take the whole thing”), and as they ate he told her about a high school visit he’d made where they gave up on lunchtime crowd control as people lined up for his appearance and just threw a school-wide pizza party before he got there.
    â€œIt was my first leftover pizza! It was delicious. Maybe I was just really hungry—I’d been at a photo shoot all day—but it was like, stuck to the cardboard a little and the cheese had kind of dried up, and I swear, it was the most delicious thing I’ve ever eaten. It was cool to sort of connect with them that way.”
    â€œWere they watching you eat?” Louis XVI had done that—eaten in front of the court, ten courses to prove he could, and let the courtiers dive for the scraps.
    He cracked up around a mouthful of pizza. “God, no, that would be so weird! I had a meet and greet with the Model Assembly team. They’d made regionals or something because of their debate on the water crisis. They were really into it. It really made me think about the water crisis, actually. Those were smart kids.”
    Suyana had grown up in a water crisis. Crops had failed two years in a row, and that was all it took for riots to start. The government had sent out the military, here and there. By the time the land-rights groups were marching, it was too late.
    â€œI was fifteen the first time I saw a body of water I couldn’t walk across,” she said.
    It was a strange thing to tell him. Too honest; she hadn’t thought about it before she admitted it. But when she had her pleasant smile back on and looked up, he was watching her steadily, unblinking, looking for a moment sharper and more present than she thought of him.
    â€œSorry,” she said. “I stepped on your story.”
    â€œNo, you didn’t.” He wiped his fingers. “I know so little about you. Whenever you tell me something, I try to pay attention.”
    â€œOh.”
    While she was trying to think of a way to deflect him without sounding dismissive, he leaned forward, tracing the ridge of her knuckles where they met the back of her hand.
    â€œI remember the mountain range you showed me the night we met,” he said, with a pretty uncertain smile for a guy who had gotten her on a silver platter a few weeks later. “Where you grew up.”
    Where she was born, maybe. She’d grown up in the aisles of the IA, severed from home and watching the games people