[South Palisade — Day 74, 0300]
Raven was already at the south wall when he got there, which meant she had been there before three in the morning, which meant she had not gone to sleep at all.
She was leaning her back against the southeast corner post — the one Bellamy had built himself, in the first week, the section of the wall that had been standing the longest and had not needed repair since the Reaper-raid reinforcement — with her walking stick horizontal across her lap and her mug in her right hand and her left hand flat against the timber. The generator's whine was the only continuous sound. The night fires had gone to coals. Every other person in the six-hundred-and-twelve-resident camp that had once been ninety-seven scared kids in jumpsuits was apparently asleep or managing their insomnia somewhere else.
He sat down beside her.
The timber was rough against his back — the splinter-edge of pine that had been cut and set fast, without the sanding time a building project in another world might have taken. His shoulder was at twenty-eight days of healing and the cold made it specific: not general aching but two specific points where the muscle had rejoined around scar tissue that was still negotiating its place.
He didn't adjust.
Raven said nothing for four minutes.
He counted, without meaning to. The CPE ran the background count the way it ran all the background counts — quietly, without comment, providing information because providing information was what it did.
[CPE: Current camp population welfare index: Stable.]
He closed the notification.
"I don't sleep," Raven said. "I haven't since fourteen. The first time I tried to fix it I built a sleep schedule like a duty roster — specific times, specific durations, everything written down. I thought if I treated it like a system problem it would respond like a system problem." A pause. "It didn't work. So now I just don't sleep. You don't sleep either." She did not make it a question, because she had been watching him for eight weeks and had run the observation already. "Did you have a system for it?"
He held the question.
She was asking whether he carried what she carried. He knew this — not from the words, from the register. The question was only partly about sleep schedules.
"I had a logistics analyst's coping mechanism," he said.
"What does that mean?"
"It means I organized things. Inventories. Plans. The next problem after the current problem. It kept the cognitive load high enough that the part of the brain that was going to run the other thing at night didn't have bandwidth."
"Did it work?"
"It also didn't work."
She made a sound that was not a laugh and was not not a laugh. The sound of a person recognizing a kinship they had not expected in that exact form.
"I build things instead," she said. "Which is the same answer, different vocabulary."
"Yes."
She turned her mug with both hands — the rotation that meant she was thinking about something rather than drinking. The walking stick stayed horizontal across her lap. In the dark, the camp was a different shape than in daylight — the structures flattened into silhouettes, the wall line simple, the distance to the east forest reduced to a texture rather than a space.
The Voices were quieter.
This was the first time since the Tier 2 unlock that he had noticed them quieting. They did not stop — Mira was still there, the frequency she had left in the catalog, and Hala and Ortega and the names from the archive sheets and now Rhys. But the proximity of a living person who was not asleep and was not performing presence — just actually there, against the same timber, doing the same thing he was doing — turned down the signal.
He did not say this.
He filed it.
"The assault council is at 0700," she said.
"Yes."
"If I go to sleep now I'd get three hours."
"Yes."
She didn't move. He didn't move. The generator ran its cycle and reset. A coal in the nearest fire pit shifted.
At 0317, Raven's shoulder came to rest against his right side — the uninjured one — not a lean, not a movement toward, just the settling of two people who had been sitting close enough and long enough that the geometry had arrived at the only natural conclusion. Her walking stick was still horizontal across her lap. His hands were on his knees. The contact was the breadth of a shoulder-seam and it did not change the conversation and neither of them adjusted.
Three minutes.
Raven stood at 0320. She moved the walking stick to vertical, got her weight centered over it in the specific practiced motion of someone who had been doing this for months and had optimized the sequence for the single bad knee. She picked up her mug.
"See you at 0700," she said.
She walked back toward the radio station, which was where she spent the hours that other people spent sleeping, because the bench was the system that worked the same way his organizing worked. The walking stick made its particular sound on the packed earth — three-point rhythm, familiar, the rhythm that had been background noise for two months and had become one of the sounds the camp made.
He stayed at the wall.
The Voices were still quieter.
He did not analyze why. He sat with it for the remaining four hours before the assault council, which was time that could be used for planning and was also time that could be used for sitting against a wall in the cold until it was not so cold.
He used it for both.
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