“You wouldn’t know,” she said, so quietly that I paused in the park and let my eyes follow her as she walked past me. I watched her back, frowning, and leaned forward.

“Wouldn’t know what?”

“How he feels.” The words were tossed over her shoulder, flippant, and they stung. They hurt, but I tried not to let it show. I launched into an awkward jog-walk, to catch up, and when I was beside her I slowed to match her pace. I didn’t look at her, though.

“And you know?” I asked. The words came out bitter and sarcastic, but it wasn’t my intention for them to sound that way. They hung in the air, heavy and dripping poison, out too fast, out before I could pull them back into the darkness of my mouth and swallow them so that they only hurt me.

If my words affected her, it didn’t show. Her face was placid, smooth, a picture of perfection I could never reach, even in my wildest dreams. She made a small noise in her throat, and I would have labeled it a snort if I didn’t know that Katarina Bazarov did not snort. “Of course I know,” she said, “He tells me everything.”

We both knew it was a lie. The words were too glittering and too beautiful to be true, but I didn’t say anything. I couldn’t bring myself to feel any satisfaction in shaming her, not now. The annoyance and anger I felt pulsing through my body seconds ago lessened into a weariness that made me sigh. The tiredness I felt blanketing my body made itself known in the stutter of my step, the way I suddenly felt like Atlas—worse off than Atlas, even—shuddering under its weight.

She went on to speak even though I offered no prompt. “But, in any case, I wouldn’t need to have him tell me. I can see it. I can see it in his eyes, in his smile. I can see all of it.”

She abruptly stopped walking and, because it seemed like the right thing to do, I stopped also, about three steps from where she stood. I looked back at her, turning all the way around because I refused to be like her, refused to only look over my shoulder, and saw that she was squinting at me, a hand raised against the glare of the sun to shadow her eyes. My shadow stretched towards her, reaching her feet, and for a second I found it odd that I should be the one haloed instead of her.

The smile that spread across her lips was a cold one, baring her teeth like a snarl. “I could never compare,” she murmured, giving a little shake of her head.

I found that odd, too, because I had figured I could never be something that was considered matchless.