Yumi laughed, sudden and bright, and for a second she and Vale looked at each other across the workshop, and I saw the whole history of them in it, the two years and four months, or three years if you counted the silent stretch Vale insisted on counting, the chaos of two people who could each end the world in their own specialized way choosing to point that chaos at each other for a while and then choosing to stop.
There was no heat left in it. Just the familiarity of two disasters who had survived each other.
"I'm not going to be your girlfriend," Yumi said, and her delivery had the weight of someone who'd already calculated every angle I might be coming from and preemptively sealed all of them.
