The tube held her the way it had held her for longer than she had words for.
Sabrina Luxuria had stopped counting the years somewhere past the first hundred, not because she'd lost the capacity for counting but because counting implied the years were doing something, moving toward something, and inside the tube nothing moved. The luminescent liquid suspended her in a state that was not quite sleep and not quite death, a third thing the demon queen's architects had built specifically because sleep and death had both, at various points, been tried and found insufficient to the purpose.
She had been beautiful once, in the ordinary human way, before the ranking and the tube and the three hundred years of not-quite-anything. She still was, in the way the tube preserved things — dark hair floating loose around a face that time had not been permitted to touch, features that had a kind of symmetry designed rather than born, though the design had happened so long before her transformation that she no longer remembered which parts of her had been chosen and which parts had simply been hers.
She remembered the night she'd been chosen for something else entirely.
~
It had been a court. That was the important detail, the one Sabrina returned to whenever the tube's long nothing gave her room to return to anything — not a palace exactly, not in the way the word meant now, but a hall full of powerful people who had gathered to look at each other and decide, through the specific violence of politeness, who among them would rise and who would be quietly ended for having risen too far too fast.
She had been very good at that court.
Not through power. She'd had none, not then — no fire, no earth, none of the elements that had made other people's fortunes in that hall. What she'd had was attention: the specific, total attention she gave to whoever she was speaking to, an attention so complete that people mistook it for love, for loyalty, for whatever they most wanted it to be mistaken for, and by the time they understood what they had actually given her in exchange for it — secrets, allegiances, the location of things that should have stayed hidden — it was always, without exception, too late.
She had risen very far, very fast, on nothing but that.
There had been a man at that court, in the second year, before the demon queen ever found her — a lord's son named Aurelio, plain-faced and unremarkable in every way except one: he was the only person in three years who had looked at Sabrina's total attention and, instead of mistaking it for love, recognized it for exactly what it was.
"You don't want anything I am," he'd told her once, in a garden not unlike the one Thomas had proposed in centuries later and worlds away, though the woman in the tube had no way of knowing that her story and the story unfolding in a house full of chosen ones would ever be spoken of in the same breath. "You want what I can be made to give you. There's a difference, and I think you know there's a difference, and I think it frightens you more than anything else in this hall."
She had not charmed him. She had tried, out of habit, out of the specific fear his accuracy put into her, and it had not worked, the same way it would not work on the demon queen a year later, and she understood, standing in that garden with a man who saw her clearly and did not flinch from what he saw, that being truly known was a different kind of terror than any she had built her rising out of avoiding.
She had left the garden without answering him. She never went back to it.
The demon queen had come to her in the third year of her rising, when Sabrina had already ruined two houses and quietly ended a third through nothing more than knowing exactly what to want from a person and how to make them believe wanting it back was their own idea.
"You've been doing my work for me," the demon queen had said, "without knowing you were doing it."
Sabrina remembered the shape of her, that first meeting — not a shadow yet, not the cold and formless thing she would later become known as, but a woman, tall and dark-eyed, dressed in something that seemed to absorb the candlelight of the room rather than reflect it. She remembered thinking, in the specific arrogant way of someone who has spent three years being the most dangerous person in every room she entered, that she could charm this woman the way she charmed everyone.
She had tried.
It had not worked, and the not-working had been the most important lesson of Sabrina's entire long existence — the demon queen had simply looked at her, unmoved, with an expression that was not offended so much as amused, the way an adult might be amused by a child attempting a trick that only worked on other children.
"You want to know what real power feels like," the demon queen had said. It was not a question. "Not the borrowed kind. Not the kind you have to keep performing every single day for the rest of your life or lose. I can give you that."
"What would it cost."
"Everything you currently are," the demon queen had said. "And in exchange, you will never again have to wonder if the room believes you. They simply will. Every room. For as long as I have use for you."
Sabrina remembered — this was the part the tube gave back to her most clearly, over and over, the part that three hundred years of luminescent nothing had not managed to wear smooth — that she had said yes before the demon queen had finished the sentence.
She had not asked what "as long as I have use for you" meant.
She understood now — three hundred years alone in a tube was the shape of what "use" meant to a woman who had once looked at Sabrina's finest trick and been amused rather than moved. She thought, in the last conscious moment before the offer took hold of her three hundred years ago, of the garden and the plain-faced man who had seen her and not flinched, and she thought that if she had it to do again she might have gone back and answered him instead. She did not have it to do again. That was the nature of the choice she had made — it did not offer second gardens.
~
The tube's liquid began, after three hundred years of stillness, to move.
Sabrina felt it before she understood it — a warmth spreading from where the demon queen's hand had come to rest against the glass, a warmth that had no business existing inside something that had been designed to hold its occupant at a temperature just above the one where the body forgot how to continue being a body. The liquid, which had been the color of something between blue and nothing for three hundred years, began to take on a different color entirely, gold at the edges, the color of a thing waking up.
"Sabrina," the demon queen said, and her voice came through the glass the way it had come through the candlelit air of a court that no longer existed, in a language no one alive still spoke. "Seventh of mine. Wake up."
The tube opened.
Sabrina came out of it the way a person comes out of very deep water — all at once, gasping, the liquid running off her in sheets that evaporated before they reached the floor, her bare feet finding the cold stone of a room she did not recognize and did not need to recognize, because the only thing in it that mattered was the woman standing in front of her with three hundred more years on her face than the last time Sabrina had seen it and none of them showing.
"How long," Sabrina said. Her voice came out rough, unused, the first sound she had made in longer than she could measure.
"Long enough that everything you knew is gone," the demon queen said. "Long enough that I needed you again."
Sabrina looked around the room — the other six tubes, dark and full, waiting — and felt something she had not felt in three hundred years of not-quite-anything, a feeling with no name in the language she'd been born speaking but a very simple one in every language after: purpose.
"What do you need," she said.
The demon queen smiled, and it was not a kind smile, and Sabrina found, the way she had found three hundred years before in a candlelit hall, that she did not particularly care whether it was kind.
"I need you to do what you have always done best," the demon queen said. "Make a room believe whatever I need it to believe. Only this time, seventh of mine, the room is the entire world, and what I need it to believe is that it already belongs to me."
Sabrina Luxuria — hollow-eyed, dark-haired, beautiful in the designed and terrible way the tube had preserved her — bowed her head.
"Yes," she said. "I understand exactly how to do that."