The banging started before I was properly awake.
"MARX." Three more knocks, rhythmic, completely unnecessary in their force. "I know you're in there, I can hear you not answering."
I opened the door in whatever state of dishevelment Sunday morning had left me in. Sky stood there in yesterday's energy, somehow still running on it, a half-eaten pastry in one hand.
"Friday," he said, by way of greeting, "was lit."
"Good morning to you too."
"I'm serious. After you left it got better. Priya organised a thing with the lights, someone brought a speaker that was actually good, and I—" he gestured vaguely with the pastry "—I had a moment. A real moment. Socially."
"I'm thrilled for you."
"You should be, because you missed it." He stepped past me into the apartment without waiting for an invitation, which had become his standard operating procedure at this point. "And then Saturday — where were you Saturday? I texted you four times."
"I was out."
"Out where?"
"Out, Sky."
He was already walking, mid-sentence, toward the balcony door with the unthinking momentum of someone who'd done this so many times it had become muscle memory.
Then he stopped.
Not dramatically. Just a small hitch in his stride, a half-step that didn't complete itself, like his body had remembered something his mouth hadn't caught up to yet. He glanced at the door. Then at me. Then, very deliberately, he turned around and sat on the couch instead.
"Anyway," he said, with the overly casual tone of someone recovering from something, "you were out doing mysterious things again. Fine. Don't tell me." A pause. "Actually tell me eventually. But not now. Now we're doing something normal."
"We are?"
"We're going to the mall." He said it like an announcement. "The big one. Where they have the rooftop cinema and the food court with the good noodle place."
"Why."
"Because you need to exist around people who aren't—" he made a gesture that somehow encompassed missions, lenses, balconies, and several other things he didn't have words for "—all of that. You need normal socialising. Window shopping. Overpriced coffee. The full teenage experience."
"I get plenty of normal socialising."
"You get Bella on a balcony and a girl named Kenzie who you smile at your phone about." He counted on his fingers. "That's not normal socialising. That's a soap opera."
I didn't have a good response to that, so I got dressed instead.
The mall was enormous in the specific way malls in Annex City had decided to be — multiple floors, glass everything, an atrium with a fountain that someone had clearly spent too much money on, and the particular hum of hundreds of people doing the low-stakes business of spending a Sunday afternoon.
Sky had a plan, which mostly consisted of finding people he knew and introducing me to them. We ran into two guys from the debate club who'd apparently softened toward me since Thursday, a girl from the chemistry class who complimented Sky's shirt and ignored him afterward, and a loose cluster of fourth-years near the electronics store who treated Sky like a minor celebrity for reasons I didn't fully understand and he didn't fully explain.
I existed at the edges of all of this. Present. Polite. Genuinely trying.
Somewhere around the second floor, in the gap between Sky finishing one conversation and starting the next, I drifted.
Not far. Just enough that when I turned back, the group had moved three shops down without me, and I was standing alone outside a store that sold expensive headphones, looking at a display I had no actual interest in.
That's when I heard it.
Not loud. Just sharp enough to register — a voice pitched at the particular register of someone trying to stay calm while being crowded.
I followed the sound around the corner near the escalators.
Four guys. Older, the kind of older that meant they probably weren't students here, gathered in a loose, deliberate half-circle around a girl who had backed herself against the railing with the controlled stillness of someone calculating exits rather than panicking.
Camilla.
She had a shopping bag in one hand and her phone in the other, and her expression — when I got close enough to see it properly — was not afraid.
It was calculating.
The kind of calculating I recognised because I'd seen something close to it on Bella's face in a warehouse, in an alley, in a server room basement. The specific stillness of someone deciding exactly which of several available responses would produce the cleanest outcome.
One of the men said something I didn't catch. Another laughed in the low, performative way designed to make the girl feel smaller rather than to actually find anything funny.
I didn't think about it very long.
I walked up, slid an arm easily around Camilla's shoulders like we'd done it a hundred times, and said, "Hey, sorry, got held up," with the breezy, unbothered tone of someone who had absolutely no idea anything was wrong.
The men looked at me.
I looked back with the specific blankness of someone who was either too oblivious to read the room or too confident to care, and let them decide which.
"We were just talking to her," one of them said.
"Cool," I said. "We're actually late, though. You know how it is." I glanced at Camilla. "Ready?"
For half a second, something flickered across her face that wasn't part of her usual control — genuine, quick, almost amused. Then it was gone, replaced by the smooth social performance of a girl who had decided to let her boyfriend extract her from an annoying situation rather than do something to four strangers that several of them would need medical attention to recover from.
"Ready," she said, looping her arm through mine with practiced ease.
We walked.
The men didn't follow. They hadn't really wanted to fight anyone — that kind of crowding rarely did. They wanted an audience and an easy target, and the moment both of those things stopped being available, the whole situation deflated into something they'd probably already forgotten by the time we reached the escalator.
We didn't speak until we were two floors up.
Then Camilla pulled her arm free, smoothed her sleeve, and looked at me with an expression that had recalibrated into something between amusement and assessment.
"You do know," she said, "that I had that handled."
"I believe you."
"I was three seconds from doing something that would have made the food court news for a week."
"I believe that too."
She studied me for a moment, head tilted slightly, the particular quality of attention she brought to things she was deciding how to file. "Then why intervene?"
I thought about how to answer that honestly. "Because four guys aged out of being students cornering someone half their size isn't a fair fight regardless of how it would've ended. And because watching someone get hurt — even the people doing the cornering — isn't something I particularly want to witness on a Sunday."
Something in her expression shifted. Not warmth exactly. Recalculation.
"That's a strange kind of chivalry," she said.
"Maybe."
"Most people who intervene want credit for it."
"I wanted them gone. The credit's optional."
She was quiet for a moment, walking beside me toward the food court, her earlier composure fully restored except for something underneath it that hadn't quite settled back into place.
"Thank you," she said finally. Simple. Direct, in a way that felt more honest than anything sharp she might have said instead.
"You're welcome."
"I would have been fine."
"I know."
"I want that to be clear."
"It's clear."
We reached the food court. The noodle place Sky had mentioned was exactly as good as advertised, judging by the queue, and we ended up at a small table near the edge with bowls that steamed gently between us. Camilla ate with the same precise economy she brought to everything — no wasted movement, full attention on the task in front of her, occasional glances up that assessed more than they socialised.
"Those men," I said eventually. "Did you know them?"
"No."
"Random, then."
"Mostly." She set her chopsticks down for a moment. "I look like someone worth bothering. That's not personal. It's just statistics."
"That's a bleak way to describe yourself."
"It's an accurate one." She picked the chopsticks back up. "I've learned to plan around it rather than be upset by it."
I thought about the stillness I'd seen in her face before I'd arrived. The calculation rather than fear.
"What were you about to do?" I asked. "Before I showed up."
She considered the question, the way she considered most things — weighing how much of an answer it deserved.
"Disable the closest one," she said simply. "Pressure point at the wrist, then a redirect into the one behind him. Two down before the other two understood what was happening."
I stared at her.
"I've had training," she said, in the tone of someone offering a perfectly reasonable explanation for a perfectly reasonable thing.
"What kind of training produces that specific plan in three seconds?"
Something closed in her expression — quick, deliberate, a door shutting before I'd quite seen what was behind it.
"The kind that comes with growing up the way I did," she said, and the sentence had the particular shape of something designed to sound complete while answering nothing. "Eat your noodles."
I let it go. Filed it. The way she filed things.
We finished lunch with lighter conversation — the mock trial, Sky's increasingly elaborate theories about Debate Club hierarchy, whether the rooftop cinema was worth the ticket price. She was good company when she allowed herself to be, sharp and dry in a way that made the time move easily.
I spotted Sky before he spotted us.
He was crossing the food court with a tray, scanning for an empty table, and stopped mid-step when he saw who I was sitting with. His expression went through several stages in quick succession — surprise, recalibration, a flicker of something that looked almost like he was solving a puzzle in real time.
He didn't approach.
Instead he found a table on the far side, sat down, and very deliberately did not look over again, which was somehow more obvious than if he had.
Camilla noticed. Of course she did.
"Your friend," she said.
"Sky."
"He's giving us space."
"He does that. Eventually."
"Generous of him."
"He'll have several hundred questions later."
"I'd expect nothing less." She finished the last of her noodles and set the bowl aside with the same economy she'd started with. "This was unexpected."
"Good unexpected?"
She considered it honestly, which I appreciated.
"Yes," she said. "Good unexpected."
We left separately — she had somewhere to be, mentioned vaguely, the kind of vague that I was learning meant I'm not going to explain and you shouldn't ask. I found Sky waiting near the entrance with the patient expression of a man who had used the walk over to compose exactly the right number of questions and was now choosing the order carefully.
"So," he said.
"So."
"Camilla."
"Camilla."
"The food court. Noodles. You two. Looking like you were having a normal time."
"We were having a normal time."
"I notice things too, you know," he said, not unkindly. "I just don't always say something right away."
I didn't confirm or deny it. He didn't push.
"Good day?" he asked instead, as we headed for the exit.
I thought about it — the noodles, the conversation, the brief flash of something real in Camilla's expression before she'd closed the door on it again. Camilla left far from normal, she was deeper than what normal eyes could make out. The strange, specific comfort of an afternoon that hadn't gone the way it was planned and had been better for it.
"Yeah," I said. "Good day."
Sky bumped my shoulder, satisfied, and didn't ask anything else.