Croe couldn’t say she was precisely surprised by Mallos’ behavior. Her own activity level had two settings – deliberate action or deliberate inaction; the least motion necessary or no motion at all – but she had known many who fidgeted, especially during times of stress. She watched him as one would a skittish animal, the chaos of him in contrast to her orderliness, her composure. He stood up abruptly, kissed her, kept moving. She followed him only with her eyes, saw him take up the familiar activity of dismantling a mechanical thing. It was interesting to finally see what the object was before he rendered it unrecognizable.
“Better than you did,” she answered him, stepping over his sketchpad to approach the desk, her head tilting in its customary expression of curiosity. It was not difficult to surmise that his entire body was burning with energy, desperate to run, or at least be free of these walls. Croe felt it, too. “Mallos…what are we going to do? I could run, you know. I could disappear. Would that make things easier?” She picked up another mechanical object from his desk, pushed it closer to him without looking at it. If he felt he could not leave this place, she would at least do her best to keep his supply of victims fresh. Her frown deepened as she glanced over the room, looking for a clock, a pocketwatch, a lighter…“I am afraid for you. They may hang me, but that is only a moment of suffering. I am afraid for our daughter. I cannot imagine her being raised as an orphan in the fortress of her parents’ captors…” Finding no sign of any frivolous robotics, she sighed, moved away from him to the window.
“Tell me how to help you.”
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