The shower lasted twenty-three minutes.
She knew because she watched the clock on the wall of the hospital bathroom while the water ran over her and she thought about nothing, which was not the same as having nothing to think about — it was the deliberate choice to not think about any of it for twenty-three minutes, to just stand in the hot water and let the city wash off of her, the six days and the smell and the specific residue of everything that had happened to her body and her hands and the parts of her that would need more than a shower to come clean.
Twenty-three minutes.
Then she turned off the water.
She got dressed in the clothes someone had provided — hospital-issue, clean, soft in the way that clean soft things felt almost unbearable after days of wearing the same things — and she looked at herself in the mirror.
She looked like herself.
Different. She was different. She would be different, she understood this, had understood it somewhere around day three on the bus roof in the way you understood things that were too large to think about directly. But she looked like herself, the same face, the same eyes, and that was — sufficient. That was enough for right now.
She went to find Caleb.
He was at the desk in the small room they had given him — the working desk, the kind of desk that appeared wherever Caleb was because Caleb always had work, had always had work, would have work at the end of the world and apparently also during it. Documents on the screen. Reports from the surface teams. The ongoing arithmetic of a city in crisis and the people managing it.
He had his uniform on.
He was wearing the uniform and working and he looked — the same. Different in the ways she was different, the ways that didn't show in the surface, but the same. The dark hair and the purple eyes and the hands on the desk and the specific presence of him that had always meant safe.
She crossed the room.
She sat beside him on the couch against the wall — the small one, the visitor's couch — and she curled against his side without asking, because she had been doing this her entire life and she was not going to stop now, and he adjusted without looking up, one arm moving to accommodate her, and kept working with the other hand.
She looked at his face in profile.
*He's here. He's actually here. I am not on a bus roof dreaming him.*
She breathed.
He kept working.
After a while his hand came up and found her hair — the same gesture, the same steady weight — and he stroked it absently while he read whatever was on the screen, and she felt herself begin to decompress in the specific way she decompressed when she was with him, the particular safety of someone whose presence her nervous system had coded as home since she was five years old.
She watched his face.
She watched him frown slightly at something on the screen and type a response.
She watched him take a breath and look at another document and keep working.
He kept working. Even when —. He kept working and he was carrying all of it and he kept working.*
"Gege," she said.
"Mm."
"My necklace," she said.
He paused.
Just a fraction of a second — the pause of someone who had been expecting a question and was now receiving it. He continued looking at the screen.
"What about it?" he said.
"I wasn't wearing it," she said. "When you found us. I haven't been wearing it since the train — I took it off before the mission that morning because the chain kept catching on the blade kit and I put it in my apartment and I didn't go back to get it."
He said nothing.
"The rapid gunshots," she said. "The ones we heard from the rooftop. Xavier said —" she stopped. "Xavier said it sounded like someone who had lost something and needed to do something with it." She looked at his profile. "It was you, wasn't it."
A longer pause.
He looked at the screen.
"Caleb."
He breathed.
"There was a body," he said. His voice was very even. "In the street near the plaza. Small. Red hair. The necklace." He paused. "The height was right. The build was right. I couldn't see the face."
She was very still.
"I thought —" he stopped.
She looked at him. At the jaw. At the very careful evenness of his voice and what it was covering.
"How long did you think —" she started.
"Three hours," he said. "Between finding her and hearing you on the radio."
Three hours.
She sat up.
She turned to face him and he was still looking at the screen and she put her hand on the side of his face and turned it toward her, gently, and he let her, and she looked at him.
His eyes were very steady.
"Gege," she said.
He looked at her.
"I'm here," she said.
He breathed.
Something in his face moved — very small, controlled, the thing that happened when he let a fraction of something show and then contained it — and she kept her hand on his face and she let him have the moment, whatever it was, without filling it.
"I know," he said.
She pulled him in.
He came — she hugged him and he held her and it was different from the ground outside the carrier, no laughing this time, just the quiet holding of two people who had spent three hours each believing the other was gone and were now sitting on a couch in a hospital room in SKYHAVEN confirming the opposite.
"I'm—hic—I was think I never see you again"
She cried.
She had been crying on and off for hours and she had more crying in her, apparently, because the supply was not limited.
He held her.
After a while she pulled back.
She pressed the back of her wrist to her eyes.
"Tell me," she said. "About —" she breathed. "About our parents."
He looked at her.
She looked back.
"Tell me," she said again. "Don't protect me from it. I need to know."
He was quiet for a moment.
Then he told her.
He told her carefully.
Not the clinical version — not the version where feelings were filed away under operational language and what remained was just the fact. She would have known that version for what it was and she needed more than facts. He told her the version that included his mother in the kitchen chair with the careful knots and what the careful knots meant about who she was, and his father's gun on the floor and what the gun on the floor said about his father's love, and she listened to all of it with her hands in her lap and her face very still.
She was building something as she listened. He could see it — the same thing she had been doing since the train, the structure, the framework she constructed over the things that were too large to sit in directly. But she was building it with the real material this time, not the structure of *maybe they're okay, maybe the entrance held* — the real thing, the weight of it, the facts that were not going to change.
She listened.
When he finished she sat in silence for a moment.
Then she broke.
"No...."
Not the way she had broken at the airport, the open complete breaking of someone who cried without self-consciousness. This was different — quieter, deeper, the grief that had been underneath the structure the whole time, and now the structure was built with the real material and she could finally let the grief be what it was.
He held her.
She cried properly, into his shoulder, and he held her and said nothing because there was nothing to say that was more useful than holding her, and he had learned this a long time ago and did not forget it.
She cried for a long time.
When she was done she straightened, wiped her face, breathed.
She was quiet for a moment.
"The burden you carried alone," she said. "These past three hours. And before that. The whole —" she stopped. "You carried all of it alone."
"I had work," he said.
"Caleb."
He looked at her.
"You don't always have to carry things alone," she said. "You know that. Right?"
He held her gaze.
He didn't answer.
She looked at him.
She wanted to say more — there was more, there was always more between them, the whole sediment of everything they had never quite said — but he looked tired, genuinely tired, the tiredness of someone who had been carrying everything for days and had now set down a fraction of it and was feeling the weight of the rest more clearly in the contrast.
She pressed her hand to his face again, briefly.
"I'll be back," she said. "I'm going to check on Xavier."
He nodded.
She stood.
She looked at him for a moment — at the desk, the documents, the work he would return to — and she thought about the necklace, wherever it was, and the butterfly phone case, and all the things he had carried in his chest pocket across six days of the city.
She would ask him about that later.
For now she went to find Xavier.
.
.
.
.
.
She found him in the corridor outside the ward.
There was a bench against the wall — the simple kind, institutional, the kind of bench that existed in hospitals because people needed to sit outside rooms while they waited for things — and he was on it. His blade was across his knees. He had cleaned it — she could see that, the meticulous care of the cleaning, the blade immaculate now, every trace of the past six days removed — and he was holding it and looking at it with his eyes half-closed.
He looked tired.
She knew what his tired looked like by now — the specific kind of tired that he carried differently from how other people carried it, the weight behind the eyes rather than in the posture, because his posture never gave anything away. The eyes were different. The eyes always told her.
She sat down beside him.
He did not look up immediately.
She waited.
After a moment he looked at her. He read her face — she was aware of him reading it, the way he always read her, the fast comprehensive reading that she had stopped trying to hide from because there was no point.
"You've been crying," he said.
"I have," she said.
He was quiet.
"I'm sorry," he said. Not the reflexive kind. The kind that meant something, the specific weight of genuine condolence from someone who did not use words without meaning them.
"Thank you," she said.
She looked at the blade in his lap.
She thought about six days of watching it move, learning the form of it by observation, understanding it not as a weapon exactly but as an extension of how he thought — precise, economical, no motion wasted.
"How are you?" she said.
He looked at the blade.
"Managing," he said.
She looked at him.
"Xavier," she said.
He met her eyes.
"How are you," she said again. Not the surface version.
He held her gaze.
He breathed.
"I don't know yet," he said. "There are things I haven't —" he paused. "My family. Lily. I don't know yet. I won't know until I ask and I'm —" he stopped.
"Afraid of the answer," she said.
"Yes," he said. Quietly. "Yes."
She nodded.
She reached over and put her hand on his — the hand on the blade's handle, the larger hand, the one she had been holding for days in corridors and on rooftops and in the dark. She put her smaller hand on top of it and she felt him look at her hands and she felt what his hand did under hers.
It relaxed.
Just slightly. Just the degree of relaxation of someone who had been holding something very tightly and found they could hold it slightly less tightly now.
She looked at their hands.
"Yours are bigger," she said.
He looked at them.
"Yes," he said.
"Every time," she said. "I keep thinking eventually the size difference will make sense and then I look at them and —"
She watched him look at their hands. She watched him look at the size difference. She watched something move in his face — the almost-smile, the one she had been cataloguing since the claw machine, the one that lived in the same house as a smile and sometimes came to the door.
It came to the door.
"You have small hands," he said.
"I have correctly sized hands," she said. "You have abnormally large ones."
"My hands are proportionate to my height."
"Your height is excessive."
He looked at her.
She looked at him.
The smile was there now — fully there, quiet and genuine, the one she had been collecting for months. She felt it somewhere in her chest, the feeling that had a name now, the feeling she had named on a rooftop during the end of the world while holding a pink bunny.
She thought about the question she hadn't asked yet.
She looked at him — at his face in the hospital corridor's light, the silver hair and the tired eyes and the hand under hers and the blade across his knees — and she thought: *later. There's time now. We made time.*
"We're going to find out about your family," she said. "Today, if you want. I'll be with you when you ask."
He looked at her.
"You don't have to —"
"I know I don't have to," she said. "I want to."
He was quiet.
He looked at their hands.
He thought — she could see it, the processing, the thing he did when he was deciding whether to say something or not say it. The internal calculation she had been learning to read.
He decided not to say it.
She knew he had decided not to say it.
She also knew what it was.
She had known what it was since she named the feeling on the rooftop. She had known what it was in him since the pink bunny, maybe before, maybe since the earphone in the dark, maybe since the first time she'd seen the almost-smile at the claw machine. She had been building the understanding of it alongside the feeling itself, two things growing in parallel.
She was going to let him say it when he was ready.
He would be ready.
She had learned enough about him to know: he was deliberate. He did things when he had decided to do them and not before. He held feelings in the other room until he understood them completely and had decided what to do with them.
She could wait.
She had survived six days on a rooftop and a bus and a floor-by-floor descent through a city. She could wait for Xavier Shen to decide he was ready to say something.
"Xavier," she said.
"Yes."
"What do you want to do? After. When this is —" she looked at the corridor, at the hospital, at the window that showed the sky above the city. "When there's an after."
He thought about it.
She let him think.
"I don't know yet," he said. "Everything I thought I was doing —" he paused. "The Association may not exist the same way. The sectors, the missions, the whole structure of it." He looked at the blade. "I have Lily. Whatever else — I have Lily to think about."
"She's going to need her person," Nana said.
He looked at her.
"Her person," he said.
"That's what you are," she said. "Your mother told you and you know it and she's going to need you." She paused. "So you have that. That's a direction."
He was quiet.
"And beyond that?" she said.
He looked at her.
She looked at him.
Something moved between them in the space of the look — the specific charged air of two people who were both thinking about something and both aware that the other was thinking about it and both choosing to let it sit for now, the mutual acknowledgment of a thing that existed and was not yet being named out loud.
"Beyond that," he said, "I'll figure it out."
She nodded.
"Mmn"
She squeezed his hand.
He squeezed back.
They sat on the institutional bench in the corridor outside the ward and the city below them was still becoming what it was going to be and above them SKYHAVEN did its steady floating thing against the sky, and Nana held Xavier's hand and thought about the question she hadn't asked yet and the feeling that had a name and the pink bunny in her pack and all of it waiting for the time that was now, finally, beginning.
*later today. I'll ask it today.*
*he'll be ready.*
She rested her head on his shoulder.
He went still for exactly one second.
Then he stayed.
In the room down the corridor, Caleb sat at the desk.
He had taken the necklace out of his chest pocket.
He was holding it — the star, her name on the back.
He set it on the desk.
He looked at it.
He looked at the documents on the screen.
He looked at the necklace.
He picked it up.
He put it back in his chest pocket.
He went back to work.
Down the corridor, through the wall, he could not see her.
He knew exactly where she was.
He kept working.
.
.
.
.
.
To be continued.