Re: Cass & Alex: the (bad) diner
Cass spun lines like cobwebs, the vague prescience that people expected of the timeless. Diners were timeless. There were a dozen all over, frozen in moments like this, with the discontented just so. She needn't turn a thing. There were girls who would, who might. She wore paper pyjamas and she sat with her hands quiet and her face innocent in the Home, as if she'd never run away to Mexico with a man for three days of hedonistic bliss. He inhaled as if it were incense in church, worshipful.
She heard his question falter. She'd known it would, she'd known it needed curiosity to feed it, the half-hearted kind like a stray cat searching for food on windowsills. Curiosity was wetted, sharp as a knife but fear stroked its tail. He hadn't given it. She'd forgotten, dreamily in the moment between this moment and that. In another here, he had introduced himself, and shaken hands and Cass studied the palm of his hand as if it held portents in the traceries of lines.
Her expression was enigmatic. "I'm Cass." The name-tag read Cassandra, but it wasn't strictly true. She flicked ash in an arc until it caught the gutter. She said nothing else. She said nothing of death in streets, of the shiny, plastic way blood massed under dead flesh and guttered towards storm-drains.