The rice was done before she came downstairs.
Caleb had been in the kitchen since seven — quietly, the way he did most things, assembling the ingredients with the unhurried precision of someone who had learned to cook out of necessity and had at some point crossed the line into genuine competence without making a big deal about it. Shrimp, defrosted and seasoned. Eggs, beaten. The specific combination of soy sauce and sesame oil that Nana had declared the correct ratio approximately four years ago and that he had maintained exactly since, not because he couldn't adjust it, but because he saw no reason to.
The egg rolls were from the recipe her mother had written on an index card that lived in the kitchen drawer, the same drawer it had always lived in, next to the takeout menus and the batteries and the rubber bands that accumulated in kitchen drawers regardless of how anyone felt about rubber bands.
He heard her on the stairs — the particular descending rhythm of someone who was awake and enthusiastic about it — and had the plate ready when she came around the corner.
She stopped.
She looked at the plate.
She looked at him.
"You made the shrimp rice," she said.
"You mentioned it twice this week."
"I mentioned it —" she stopped. Thought about it. "Okay, I mentioned it twice. But I wasn't requesting —"
"Sit down, hamster."
She sat down.
The happy dance started approximately thirty seconds into the first bite, which was — he watched it from the stove, one arm on the counter — not really a dance so much as a motion. A small rhythmic thing that happened with her shoulders when she was eating something she genuinely loved, unconscious and entirely sincere, the kind of expression of feeling that she had never learned to edit out because she had never seen any reason to.
He crossed to the table.
He reached out and pinched her cheek.
"Nghh?!"
She reacted immediately — the chopsticks down, the full turn, the glare deployed at maximum intensity, both eyes narrowed, the specific expression that had been her attempt at intimidating since she was approximately six years old and that had never once in all that time achieved its intended effect.
It had the opposite effect.
He was already smiling before he registered that he was. Something about the glare — the genuine effort of it, the complete and total lack of actual threat, the way her cheeks went slightly pink when she was indignant — made it physically impossible to do anything but smile, and the smile made her glare harder, and the harder glare made him smile wider, until she gave up and went back to her rice with a dignity that was, objectively, not fully intact.
He patted the top of her head.
She endured it with the bearing of someone who had decided not to give him the satisfaction of reacting but whose shoulders had already relaxed.
"Three more days," she said, into her rice.
"Three more days," he agreed.
"And the river tomorrow."
"The river tomorrow."
"And you said you'd try the fishing."
"I said I'd hold the fishing rod."
"That's the same as trying —"
"Those are not the same thing —"
"Gege."
He sat down across from her and ate his breakfast and watched her eat hers, and it was morning in the house and her parents were moving somewhere upstairs and the city outside the window was doing its ordinary morning things, and he let himself have it fully. The specific texture of this — the rice and the egg rolls and the little motion she did with her shoulders and the glare that wasn't a glare.
He let himself have it.
Later, he would be glad that he did.
She had the jacket on before he'd cleared the table. Motorcycle keys already in hand, hunter kit already over one shoulder, the starfish clip in — slightly off-center, as always — and that particular expression on her face that meant she had already left, mentally, and her body was simply completing the formalities.
"Call me after the mission," he said.
"I know —"
"From the field, not hours later —"
"I know, Gege —"
"And don't go into the outer sectors without backup, the briefings have been flagging irregular wanderer movement in —"
"Caleb." She turned to him in the doorway. Full attention, the way she sometimes stopped the chaos and just — looked at him. Steady and clear. "I'll call. I'll be careful. I'll stay in range." A beat. "I promise."
He looked at her for a moment.
"Go," he said.
She launched herself at him first — one arm around his waist, brief and warm and already moving away before he'd finished registering it — and then she was out the door and down the path, and the motorcycle started with the enthusiasm of a vehicle that had absorbed its owner's personality through prolonged contact.
He stood at the door.
He wanted to say something. Something about the speed, the route she took, the outer sector briefings. He opened his mouth.
She was already gone. The sound of the engine fading down the street, and that laugh — he heard it even from here, the tail end of it, the bright spill of it that meant she was already in the next moment, already forward, already moving toward whatever came next with her whole self.
He closed the door.
He stood in the hallway for a moment.
*Three more days,* he thought.
He went back to the kitchen to finish the washing up.
.
.
.
.
.
Xavier was on the bench outside HQ when she arrived.
He didn't look like he was waiting. He never looked like he was waiting — he had the quality of someone who simply was somewhere, present and unhurried, as though time accommodated him rather than the other way around. His blade kit was already on. His jacket collar was up against the morning cold.
He glanced up when she crossed the courtyard.
"You're three minutes late," he said.
"I had shrimp fried rice," she said, like this explained everything, which to her it did.
He considered this for a moment with the expression of someone updating a data point, then stood and fell into step beside her as she pushed through the HQ doors. They moved the way they had already started moving after only a week of partnership — without negotiating the space between them, without the slight adjustment period of people who were still learning the other person's rhythm. She was quick and slightly sideways. He was steady and slightly ahead. Somehow it worked.
"Lily liked the bunny," he said.
"I knew she would." Nana grinned, pulling up the mission brief on her Association ID. "Did she name it?"
"Snowball."
"Snowball." She turned to look at him, delighted. "That's the best name. That's objectively the best name for a white bunny."
"She's been carrying it everywhere." Something in his voice when he said it — not soft exactly, because Xavier was never exactly soft, but something adjacent. The slight lessening of the usual economy, like there was more space around the words than he usually allowed. "She wanted me to tell whoever helped get it: thank you."
"Tell her it was a joint operation," Nana said. "She should know it took two people."
He glanced at her sideways. "You did it while I was asleep."
"You did six days of reconnaissance first. That's half the mission."
He was quiet for a moment. Then, in the tone of someone logging a fact rather than giving a compliment: "You don't take credit easily."
"I take it fine when I've earned all of it," she said. "That one we split."
They reached the briefing room. She pushed the door open and dropped into the nearest chair and started actually reading the mission brief rather than skimming it the way she usually did when she was excited, which meant today's route had some complexity to it.
Xavier sat across from her.
"The claw machine," he said, after a moment.
She looked up. "What about it?"
"You said someone taught you. When you were small."
"Oh —" she set the brief down slightly. "Yeah. My Gege. Caleb." She pulled her knee up, settling in the way she settled when a story arrived. "I couldn't have been more than — five? Six? We were at a market fair, one of the big ones they used to do near the river district. And there was this claw machine with a cat plushie in it that I absolutely had to have immediately, for reasons I can no longer reconstruct."
"Obviously," Xavier said.
"Obviously. So I'm standing in front of it and I'm too small to see properly into the machine, and I can just barely reach the controls, and I'm crying already because I'd tried twice and lost and the injustice of this felt, at age five, genuinely insurmountable." She smiled at the table. "And Caleb just — came up behind me. He was — I don't know, ten? He scooped me up with one arm. Just picked me up like it was nothing, so I could see properly into the machine. And with the other hand he put mine on the controls and guided them."
She demonstrated briefly, her hand moving the invisible joystick.
"And I missed the first time, because I was still upset. And he didn't make me get down or say we should try something else. He just — reset. Guided my hands again. Patient. Like we had all the time in the world." She was quiet for a second. "And when I got it, he let me hold it for a long time before he put me down. Just — held me up there."
Xavier was looking at her.
She didn't notice in the way she often didn't notice when he was looking at her, which was its own particular problem for him.
"He sounds," Xavier said, carefully, "like a good brother."
"The best," she said, without hesitation. "Genuinely, objectively, the best one." She picked the brief back up. "He's visiting right now, actually. Goes back in three days." She said it lightly, but he caught the slight change in tempo — the speed at which she moved on from it. "He's not blood — he's adopted, my parents and his were close, I went to live with his family when I was five. But that never —" she shook her head, "— that never made any difference. He's my Gege. That's just what he is."
Xavier absorbed this.
He thought about the story — the Ten-year-old who had scooped up a crying five-year-old at a market fair and guided her hands with patience and held her up for a long time before putting her down. He thought about three years ago, when a Colonel with SKYHAVEN clearance had presumably left this city and this girl behind and had been calling her ever since on every frequency he could justify.
He thought about the way she'd said *the best one* without a single hesitation.
*Adopted,* some quiet part of him noted.
He filed it away without examining why.
"Outer route," he said, redirecting. "The brief's flagging elevated activity near sector nine."
"I saw." She was already back in mission mode, the story packed away. "I want to approach from the ridge rather than the valley floor — better visibility, longer response window."
"Agreed," he said.
She looked up, slightly surprised that he agreed without a counter.
He was already looking at his own brief.
She went back to hers. The morning moved on.
.
.
.
.
.
The emergency room of Bethesda Hospital had seen most things.
This was a mid-district facility — not the largest in Luna City but well-established, with a trauma unit that handled overflow from the outer sectors and the particular mix of urban and industrial injuries that a city this size generated in steady supply. The staff had developed the specific efficient composure of people who could not afford to be surprised by very much.
Dr. Yuen had been on shift since six.
She stood at the bedside in the private room they'd moved the patient to after emergency treatment, looking at the chart and then at the wound, and doing the mental arithmetic that wouldn't quite resolve into something that made sense.
The bite was at the junction of neck and left shoulder. Deep — the kind of deep that spoke to significant force, the tearing pattern at the edges inconsistent with the bite radius of any animal she could immediately place. The wound had been cleaned and sutured, the infection management underway, the patient stable. The patient was in a deep coma that was — she looked at the neural monitoring again — not fully explained by blood loss alone. The coma was too complete. Too immediate.
Across the room, in the visitor's chair, the younger brother sat.
He had been there since they'd brought the patient up from emergency. He had answered the initial questions — the basic ones, the how and when and where — in a voice that was even in the way that voices were even when the person maintaining evenness was using most of their available resources to do so. His eyes kept going to the wound dressing.
Dr. Yuen pulled up a chair and sat.
"Ryan," she said. "I need to understand the circumstances better."
He looked at her. His eyes were very clear and very tired, the eyes of someone who had not slept and who was now deploying all available attention on the task of appearing functional. "I told the intake —"
"I know what you told intake." She kept her voice level. "I'm asking you now." A pause. "The wound pattern is unusual. The coma onset is faster than I'd expect for the injury as presented." She watched him. "I'm not looking to create a problem for you. I'm trying to understand what happened so I can treat him properly."
Ryan looked at his brother's face.
Adrian was still. The monitors registered his vitals in the steady, slow pattern of deep unconscious — the kind of coma that sat below dreaming, below the eye movements, below almost all the markers of a brain doing anything but the most fundamental maintenance work.
"He was bitten," Ryan said. "I told you."
"By what."
A long pause.
"An animal," Ryan said. "Stray. We were in the outer district. It was — fast. We didn't see it clearly."
Dr. Yuen looked at the chart. At the wound pattern. At the bite radius measurements the trauma team had logged, which did not match any stray animal native to the Luna City outer district.
She did not push.
Not yet.
She wrote in the chart. She updated the infection protocol. She would run the bloodwork and see what came back and make a decision then.
"We'll monitor him closely," she said. "The coma may lift on its own as the body stabilizes. We'll know more in twenty-four hours."
Ryan nodded.
She left the room.
Ryan sat in the chair and stared at his brother's face and thought about the blood on the lab floor and the sound behind the reinforced door and the fact that he had called the emergency line with a story that got Adrian into a hospital bed and not into a research detention facility, and he told himself that was the right call. That buying time was the right call. That he could fix this — reverse the serum process, develop a counter-agent, find some way to reach his mother through whatever the experiment had done to her — before anyone figured out what had actually happened in that basement.
He was very young, and very scared, and he was very wrong about most of this.
But he sat in the plastic chair and he watched his brother breathe and he believed all of it, the way people believed things when the alternative was to stop.
Three days, and the coma would become something else.
He didn't know that yet.
In the hall outside, the regular morning sounds of the hospital continued — footsteps, the distant roll of a cart, someone paging a doctor over the intercom. Normal. Ordinary.
The bloodwork went to the lab.
Nobody recognized what they were looking at.
.
.
.
.
.
To be continued.