"I'm not a car."
"You're better than a car." Her grin came back, all teeth and neon. "A car I understand. You I want to figure out. Do you know how rare it is for me to want to figure something out? I built a resonance amplifier that shouldn't function according to four separate branches of physics, and I understood it before I finished the first draft. I haven't been genuinely curious about anything in two years. And then Dominic walks in with you, and you've got a divine graft feeding on human essence and a lifespan counter and a stolen analysis ability that failed on me, and I have never wanted to strap someone to a table more in my entire life."
"That's the second time you've mentioned the table."
"It won't be the last."
Vale walked past both of us to the third shelf on the far wall and, with the air of a man who had decided to make a point, picked up the thing he'd told me not to look at.
I looked at it.
