The test results came back clean.
Both of them.
The SKYHAVEN medical team had been thorough — the kind of thorough that came from having designed protocols specifically for this scenario, which meant someone had thought about this scenario before it happened, which was its own uncomfortable fact to sit with. Blood panels. Neural response checks. Temperature monitoring. The specific battery of assessments that the infection's known profile required.
Clean.
The medical officer handed Nana her clearance card and she held it in both hands and looked at it for a long moment. Then she looked at Xavier, who had his own clearance card and was looking at it with the expression of someone receiving information they had been managing the uncertainty of for several days.
"We're okay," she said.
"Yes," he said.
She looked at the card.
She thought about the third floor balcony and the face that had been inches from hers and the book she had shoved into its mouth before Xavier's blade arrived. She thought about the blood on her jacket that she had left on a stranger's floor and the specific clinical reality of what she had been covered in for six days.
Clean.
She breathed.
"Xavier," she said.
"Yes."
"I want bubble tea."
He looked at her.
"I want bubble tea," she said again, more firmly, like saying it twice made it more immediately achievable. "And food. Real food. Hot food that someone made in a kitchen. And I want to sit somewhere that doesn't have a barricaded door and isn't seven stories up and has actual chairs." She paused. "And bubble tea."
He was quiet for a moment.
"You said bubble tea twice," he said.
"I meant it twice," she said.
Something moved in his face.
"There's a canteen on level three," he said. "I was told there's a cafe section."
She grabbed his hand.
She was already moving.
He saw them from the upper walkway.
SKYHAVEN's medical wing was built vertically — the walkway ran along the upper level, looking down into the main corridor below, and he had come this way because it was the most direct route from the operations center to the briefing room and he had a briefing in eight minutes.
He saw them at the bottom of the staircase.
She was pulling him by the hand — he recognized the grip, he knew every variant of it, the particular urgent pulling-toward of Nana Wang when she had decided they were going somewhere and the somewhere was better than here. Xavier was following with the expression Caleb had been cataloguing since the carrier — the expression he could not quite name, the one that was composed and present and somehow more present than composed when she was involved.
They were laughing.
She said something — he couldn't hear from the walkway, not over the ambient sound of the medical wing — and he laughed, which was — Caleb had been assembling a picture of Xavier Shen from field records and the brief encounter at the carrier and the past few hours, and the picture he had been assembling did not feature laughter prominently. And yet.
She pulled him into the stairwell.
He followed.
From above: the sound of her laugh disappearing down the stairs.
Caleb stood at the walkway railing.
He had a briefing in eight minutes.
He stood at the railing for a moment longer.
He had known — he had always known, in the way he knew things he filed away and did not examine because examining them served no useful function. He had watched her grow up. He had watched her become the person she was, cheerful and chaotic and entirely herself, and he had — he was not going to complete that thought in the middle of a walkway before a briefing, he had learned over years of practice exactly which thoughts he completed and which ones he walked away from.
He walked away from it.
He went to the briefing.
DING!
The cafe was small and warm and smelled of coffee and sugar, which were two smells that had no blood in them and no fear in them and were therefore the most welcome smells she had encountered in six days.
She stood in the entrance and she breathed.
"What do you want?" Xavier said, beside her.
She looked at the menu board. She looked at the counter. She looked at the person behind the counter, who was looking back at her with the mild professional patience of a person who had been serving SKYHAVEN personnel for some time and had seen people walk in looking like she presumably looked.
"Everything," she said.
"Specifically," he said.
"The taro bubble tea," she said. "And the chocolate one. And the honey milk one. And whatever that warm thing is that's third on the left." She squinted at the board. "And the —"
"I'll order," he said.
She looked at him.
"Trust me," he said.
She looked at the menu.
She looked at him.
She sat down at the nearest table.
He ordered. She watched him order from across the cafe — watched him talk to the person at the counter, the economy of it, the specific way he communicated what he needed without excess. He pointed at the menu. He held up two fingers. He nodded once.
He came back with:
The taro bubble tea. The chocolate one. Two hot drinks that smelled of something warm and sweet. A plate of food that was hot and real and made in a kitchen.
Two sets of everything.
She looked at the tray.
She looked at him.
"You ordered for both of us," she said.
"Yes," he said.
"How did you know what I wanted?"
He sat down. He pushed her tray toward her. "You've been talking about bubble tea for three days. You mentioned taro twice and chocolate once. The hot drink is red bean, which you described in detail during the second day on the balcony when you were listing things you were going to eat when this was over." He picked up his own drink. "I listened."
She stared at him.
He looked at his drink.
"You remembered all of that," she said.
"I told you," he said. "I pay attention."
She looked at the tray. At the taro tea and the chocolate tea and the hot red bean thing and the food. She looked at him.
She picked up the taro.
She took a long pull of it.
She set it down.
She pressed both hands flat on the table.
She breathed.
"Okay," she said. "Okay. I'm going to cry a little bit and then I'm going to eat all of this."
"Okay," he said.
"Mmn—sniff—"
She cried a little bit.
Not the grief-crying or the relief-crying or the fear-crying — none of the six days' varieties of crying, all of which she had done extensively. This was a different kind. The kind that happened when something small was exactly right, when after an extended period of things being exactly wrong something landed precisely where it was supposed to land.
Bubble tea.
Taro, because he had listened.
She wiped her face.
She ate.
She ate with the focused devotion of someone who had been living on tinned food and instant rice for six days and had a great deal of time to make up for. This was not a practice in savoring. This was the efficient consumption of a person whose body had been making requests that went unmet for an extended period and was now making them very loudly.
Xavier ate across from her.
He ate more slowly. He always did — this was something she had noticed across the partnership, the pace of him, the deliberate quality. He chewed properly. He set things down between bites. He was, she thought, probably the most thorough eater she had ever encountered.
She stole some of his food.
He saw her do it.
He didn't say anything.
She did it again.
"Nana," he said.
"Yours looked better," she said.
"It's the same thing."
"It tastes different from your plate."
He looked at his plate. He looked at her. He picked up a piece from his plate and held it out and she took it from his chopsticks and ate it.
"Better?" he said.
"Much better," she said. "Completely different when it's from your plate."
He looked at her for a moment with the expression of someone who had identified that they were being managed and had made peace with it.
She grinned.
He went back to eating.
She took his chocolate tea.
She replaced it with her taro.
He looked at the taro.
He looked at her.
She smiled her most innocent smile, which was not a very innocent smile.
He picked up the taro and drank it.
He set it down.
"It's good," he said, which she knew was high praise from Xavier because Xavier said nothing unless it was accurate.
"Share?" she said, holding out the chocolate.
He looked at it.
He took it.
She leaned her chin on her hand and watched him drink the chocolate tea and thought about the claw machine and the fountain and the bench where they had held hands and talked about Lily's ribbon color, the whole ordinary geography of knowing him that felt like it belonged to a different life and was also the only thing that had made the not-different life survivable.
She thought about the question she still hadn't asked.
She thought: *soon.*
She was trying to show him the chocolate smear situation.
This was not, in her defense, a plan — it had started as pointing, specifically pointing at the corner of his mouth where a small amount of the chocolate from the tea had transferred during the drinking-of-the-chocolate-tea-she-had-given-him, and then her finger had been close and he had been looking at something across the cafe and she had — made a small decision.
She touched the corner of his mouth.
He went still.
She giggled.
She tried to pull her hand back.
He turned his head.
And his lips —
She stopped giggling.
His lips pressed, very lightly, to the tip of her finger. The one that had just smeared chocolate on his face. His eyes were on her face and they were very steady — that particular steadiness she knew, the kind he produced from the decision to be steady rather than the absence of feeling — and the pressure of his lips on her fingertip lasted exactly as long as it lasted, which was not very long, which felt like a very long time.
He released.
He looked at her.
Her face was — she could feel the heat of it, the specific temperature climb that started at the ears and moved inward, the traitorous physiology of her own face which she had never been able to manage and was not managing now.
She made a sound.
It was small and undignified and she was immediately going to pretend it had not happened.
She turned back to her food.
She picked up her chopsticks.
She applied herself to the food with a focus that was absolutely not about avoiding looking at him.
He said nothing.
From across the table she could see, in her peripheral vision, that he was also looking at his food.
She ate.
He ate.
The cafe made its warm small sounds around them.
After exactly enough time had passed for the moment to technically be over but not enough time for either of them to have fully processed it, she said: "You had chocolate on your face."
"I know," he said.
"I was being helpful."
"I know," he said.
A pause.
"Your face is red," he said.
"It's warm in here," she said.
He looked at the climate control panel on the wall, which was reading a completely standard temperature.
He said nothing.
She ate more aggressively.
.
.
.
.
.
The briefing was over.
Caleb stood at the upper walkway railing again — not deliberately, or not only deliberately, it was also genuinely the direct route back to the operations center — and he looked down.
They were still at the table.
She was waving her hand in front of his face about something, animated, and he watched Xavier's face do the thing he had been watching it do since the carrier, the thing he could not name — the loosening, the particular quality of loosening that happened in a person who held everything tightly and had found something they could set some of it down around.
He had read Xavier Shen's file three times.
He had read it with the specific attention he gave to things that mattered and that he needed to understand completely. He had noted the record. He had noted the profile. He had noted the partner reports and the field assessments and the performance evaluations that all said variations of the same thing: *exceptional operator, works better with a partner than anyone expected given the solo history, instinctively protective of his paired team member.*
He had noted all of it.
He was noting, now, from the walkway, the way Xavier's hand moved — the automatic reaching, the catching of her head as it dropped toward the table, the palm against her cheek. He was noting the way she blinked and smiled, that specific smile, the one she wore when she was happy in the uncomplicated way, and he was noting the color of Xavier's ears.
He was noting the way Xavier looked at her when she wasn't looking at him.
He recognized the way Xavier looked at her when she wasn't looking at him.
He recognized it precisely.
He turned from the railing.
*She's happy,* he thought. *Look at her. She went through six days of that city and she came out the other side and she's laughing at something and she's happy.*
*that's what matters. That's the only thing that matters.*
*if you love someone, you want them to be happy.*
*I do.*
He breathed.
He pressed his hand to his chest pocket.
The necklace was there. The butterfly phone case. His father's gun.
He held it all for a moment.
Then he took his hand away.
He went to the operations center.
He had work.
.
.
.
.
.
She was full.
She was the most full she had been in six days and she was warm and the cafe was soft and Xavier was across from her and the bubble tea was finished and her eyes were — very heavy.
"Xavier," she said.
"Yes."
"I'm going to fall asleep."
"I know," he said. "You've been falling asleep for ten minutes."
"I haven't been —"
"Your head dropped twice," he said.
"I was resting my eyes —"
"Nana."
"I'm fine," she said, and then her head dropped toward the table and she made the small sound of a person whose body had made an executive decision, and she felt his hand before the table did — his palm, against her cheek, warm and firm, the familiar pressure of it.
She blinked.
"Mmm?"
He was very close.
Up close Xavier Shen was — she processed this slowly, through the gauze of extreme tiredness — objectively remarkable. She had been aware of this in the abstract for months and was now receiving the close-up confirmation of it and her tired brain was filing it with a level of appreciation that was probably not appropriate for a person who was supposed to be pretending to be awake.
"You're very handsome up close," she said.
His ears went red.
She watched them go red with the specific delight of someone who had found a guaranteed response and was storing it.
He cleared his throat.
He stood up.
He looked at her.
She looked at him.
She looked at the table.
She looked at him.
"If you're going to —" she started.
He scooped her up.
The transition was smooth in the way all his movements were smooth — the one arm under her knees, the other at her back, the adjustment of her weight that he made look effortless because he was very tall and she was, as had been established, very small. She was upright against his chest, her head at his shoulder, the cafe very much looking at them.
She looked at the cafe.
The cafe looked back.
She looked at Xavier.
His ears were still red.
She put her head on his shoulder.
She was going to be dignified about this, she decided. She was going to accept this with grace and composure and not make a single comment about the fact that she was being carried through a SKYHAVEN cafe like — like —
"I'm a princess," she said.
"You're a person who fell asleep in a cafe," he said.
"A princess who fell asleep in a cafe," she said. "It's different."
He walked toward the exit.
"Xavier," she said.
"Yes."
"Your ears are red."
"They're not."
"They're completely —"
"Nana."
"Okay," she said.
She closed her eyes.
She was very comfortable, she thought. She was the most comfortable she had been in six days, which was not a high bar, but she was also the most comfortable she had ever been in a lift, which felt like it should mean something.
He carried her.
She let him.
She thought, as the tiredness finally won, about six days of him — the rooftop and the rope and the earphone and the pink bunny and the floor plan she had been learning and the feeling that had a name and the question she hadn't asked and all of it waiting, all of it patient, all of it going to be there on the other side of sleep.
She slept.
Somewhere in the operations center, a man with purple eyes and a chest pocket full of things he was carrying looked at the surface feeds for Luna City.
The evacuation continued.
The military perimeter held.
Somewhere in the residential south, sector fourteen, the building with the curtain rope on the fourteenth floor stood.
He looked at it.
He looked at the feeds.
He picked up his coffee.
He went back to work.
.
.
.
.
.
To be continued.