Three weeks of two toothbrushes in the same cup, and neither of them had said a word about it.
The tunnel two levels down from Union Station was flooded to the ankle, the water cold enough to feel like its own ongoing argument with their boots. Condensation dripped in a steady, wet rhythm off the ceiling. Somewhere down the line, a section of track that had no business still settling let out another long, groaning shift.
"Did the contract say 'nest' or 'colony'?" Zeraya called over the noise, knee-deep in spawn at this point, trench knives moving with the bored efficiency of someone doing the eleven-hundredth version of a job she'd done a thousand times before. "Because this is very much a colony."
"I read it as 'nest.'" Will caught one of the smaller ones across the jaw with the flat of a bracer, more annoyed than threatened.
"You read it wrong."
"I read it optimistically."
This is an insult, Khan said, somewhere behind Will's eye, watching the whole engagement with the specific contempt of a man being asked to attend a children's recital. I once put down a rebellion with less effort than you are currently spending on rats.
Something cracked, deep in the tunnel wall. A pipe, old, corroded, exactly the kind of thing a contract should have flagged, gave way all at once. Water that had been ankle-deep became knee-deep in the time it took Will to register the sound.
Oh, for— Khan's tone shifted, not to alarm, but to something closer to professional outrage. They did not even check the pipes? Boy, whoever wrote this contract should be flogged. Mildly. For paperwork reasons.
"Did you hear that?" Zeraya was already moving toward higher ground, hauling a spawn off her leg by its scruff and discarding it into the rising water.
"I heard it." Will followed. "We're definitely overcharging for this one."
They walked back through Union Station two hours later, soaked from the knees down and covered. Genuinely, undignifiedly covered in the kind of mess that came from fighting through a colony in close quarters with rising water. Will's coat was beyond saving. Zeraya had something in her hair she was very deliberately not investigating.
Nobody around them so much as glanced over. Down here, two people covered in spawn remains was Tuesday.
"—anyway," Will said, mid-thought, like he was picking up a conversation that had been running the whole walk, "we should restock the cookies, and also you should move in. Properly. Not the toothbrush thing. All the way."
Zeraya's step hitched. "...What?"
"I said the cookie thing first so it wouldn't sound like a big deal." Will glanced over. "Did it work?"
"You're covered in spawn guts."
"I'm aware."
"You're asking me to move in while covered in spawn guts."
"I think that's actually more romantic." He kept walking, like this was a perfectly normal thing to be discussing while dripping tunnel water onto the platform. "Lower the bar enough and every future thing I do looks great by comparison. Next time I'll just open a door for you and you'll be amazed."
Zeraya stopped walking entirely.
She looked at him. He was fully covered in gore. Something unidentifiable was still tangled in her own hair. Both of them smelled like a dumpster behind a butcher shop. Something in her face went very still and very open, just for a second, the way it had three weeks ago when she'd walked through the door and found a man who'd actually been scared for her.
"...Yeah," she said. "Okay. Yes."
FINALLY, Khan said, immediately, with the volume of a man who had been holding something in for entirely too long. I have officiated worse ceremonies in worse conditions. This is practically a palace wedding by comparison.
Her place was small. It was built for one person, secured the way someone built a space when they'd learned the hard way that security wasn't optional. There was a second cot in the corner of the main room. Will had seen it before. He'd never had a reason to ask.
"There's a thing I should probably mention before this gets official," Zeraya said, once they were inside, once the door was locked behind them.
"Okay."
"I have a sister. Lariya. She's fourteen." She gestured at the cot, and something in her voice went careful in a way Will hadn't heard from her before. "She's why I take the jobs I take. She's why I don't take other jobs."
Will looked at the cot. Looked back at Zeraya.
"Okay," he said. No joke. No beat where he was deciding how to feel about it. Just okay.
Zeraya blinked. "...Okay?"
"Okay." He nodded, already thinking ahead, the way he thought about everything. "So we need a bigger place. With actual walls. And probably not one that smells like this."
A door at the back of the apartment creaked open.
A girl stood in the doorway. She was fourteen, sharp-eyed, her hair a mess from sleep. She wore an expression that suggested she'd heard most of the conversation and had already drawn her conclusions. She looked at Will. Looked at the state of him. Looked at her sister.
"Is this the guy," Lariya said.
"This is the guy," Zeraya confirmed.
Lariya looked Will up and down, slow and thorough, completely unbothered by the fact that he appeared to be wearing a layer of dead monster.
"He's got guts in his hair."
"It's been a long night," Will said.
"Cool." Lariya was already turning back toward her room, the verdict apparently rendered. "Is there food."
One week later, the new place had three rooms. It had two bedrooms and something resembling a kitchen that actually had walls separating it from everything else, a genuine novelty after eleven months of single-room hazard zones.
Lariya claimed her room within about four minutes of arriving. It mostly consisted of taping a single faded photograph to the wall above where her bed would go. It was the same two girls, the same destroyed tennis court, the picture Will had first seen on a workbench behind a stack of cleaning rags. Except now it lived somewhere visible. Somewhere that wasn't hidden.
Will carried boxes. Most of them were gear. Knives, ammunition, the practical accumulation of eleven months of staying alive. He hauled one of Zeraya's bags onto the bed and started unpacking it, not snooping, just helping. His hand closed around something small and sealed near the bottom. It was old tech, deliberately non-standard, nothing that matched the rest of her kit.
"What's this?" he asked, holding it up.
Zeraya glanced over from across the room, and took it from him. Maybe half a second too quickly, maybe not. It was hard to tell with all the boxes.
"Old job thing." She turned it over once, then set it aside. "Doesn't even turn on anymore."
She put it in a drawer. She didn't throw it away.
Will's instinct, the same one that read rooms, read people, the one that had kept him fed and unstabbed for eleven months, registered something. Not a lie, exactly. Nothing his gut would flag as threat. More like a sentence that was technically true and wasn't the whole sentence. It was the kind of small, deniable gap everyone had somewhere, the same drawer where his own unexplained eleven months went, the questions nobody asked because asking would mean answering questions of your own.
He didn't push. It was moving day. There was a lot to unpack.
That night, the three of them sat among half-unpacked boxes. Lariya was already asleep in her new room, door cracked, the photograph of the tennis court the first thing visible on her wall. Will and Zeraya sat on a couch that matched nothing else in the apartment, neither of them in any hurry to move.
I had a tent like this once, Khan said, quiet, taking in the scene with something that, on a living man, might have been the start of a smile. Before the empire got complicated. Just the things that mattered, and the people you'd die for, and nothing else yet.
A pause.
Don't let it get complicated, boy.