“How was that racist?”
“If you have to ask . . . But no, Elliott is Caryl’s, uh—” He looked at me and seemed to think better of it. “I dunno if she wants me talking about that yet. You’ll meet him later.”
I held the washcloth against my elbow, watching Teo irritably rub his head where I’d hit him. My brain sort of flatlined; I lost track of what we were talking about.
“You okay?” he said, his hand still in his hair. “I was about to show you the viscount’s file.”
“What’s the point, if I’m fired?”
“You’re not fired,” he snapped, leaning down to rummage through his desk. His hair stuck straight out where he’d been rubbing it. “I’ll tell her I like you.”
“You’ll tell her you do?”
He ignored me. “Look at this.” He handed me a folder neatly labeled RIVENHOLT. It hardly seemed to belong in the mess of his room. Inside the folder were some sort of forms, filled out in careful block print with information that mostly made no sense to me. I wasn’t really looking at the words anyway, because the photograph clipped to them was the kind of thing that captures attention.
I remembered him now, though like Teo, I couldn’t remember his character’s name in Accolade. He looked to be in his early thirties, with aristocratic cheekbones and a generous mouth. His hair was nearly as pale as his skin and fell in waves just to his collar. It was his eyes that I couldn’t stop staring at, though: almond shaped, fog gray, their chill softened by tawny lashes.
“God,” I heard myself say.
“I know, right?” said Teo scathingly. “Must be nice to be able to design your own face.”
It was hard to reconcile Rivenholt’s distant expression with the feelings he had poured into his drawings. “What’s he like?” I asked. “Have you met him?”
“Once or twice. Your basic aristocrat stereotype. Thinks he’s better than everyone, vain about his appearance, doesn’t like humans touching him.”
“There are reasons besides snobbery that someone might not like to be touched.”
“Either way, when we find him, my boot is going to touch his ass.” He hesitated, then turned to fix me with a grave look. “You know that’s a joke, right? I play by the rules, even if Mr. Pretty Boy thinks he’s above them.”
“May I remind you,” I said, “that I know approximately jack about the rules?”
“This is important, She-Hulk, so listen up. No violence against fey, ever. Not one drop of blood spilled. Not a scratch.”
“What if one attacks me?”
“Then you take the beating. Smiling optional.”
“That’s bullshit.”
“There are really good reasons for that rule—like, epic reasons—but those details are way above your clearance level. But this is all you need to know: we do not want to piss the fey off, and not just because if it came to war they’d wipe us out like a termite infestation. They’re behind every great—well, anything, really. Our whole society depends on them.”
“Do they depend on us, too?”
“Yeah. To them, our way of reasoning and organizing is the most amazing thing ever. Like their whole ranking -system, with viscounts and barons and whatever? They got that from the Brits, ages ago, and it’s practically religion to them now. Even simple stuff like counting time, it’s totally foreign to them and they love it. Fey without human Echoes just sort of . . . drift around like they’re in a dream. Don’t even really have memories.”
“Huh.”
“I’ll let Caryl do the rest of the lecturing. I need to make some lunch.”
While Teo went downstairs to rummage in the kitchen, I set up camp in the bathroom. After a quick shower and a cleaning of my prosthetics, I debated with myself: using the wheelchair would be a pain in the ass, but if I wasn’t dry enough when I put my prosthetics back on, I could cause skin problems that would put me back in the chair for days. Finally I decided to risk it: I used a hair dryer on both my stumps and the prosthetic sockets, praying that would be enough. I put them on, along with a nice skirt and a short-sleeved button-down.
Then came the hard part.
I wiped a clear patch from the foggy bathroom mirror and rubbed some styling wax between my palms, trying to tame the worst of my cowlicks without really looking. I didn’t like being reminded that I no longer matched the image in my head, that I never would again. But there was no getting around it; I was going to need to put on some makeup.