Yuki woke up before he did.
Kairo opened his eyes to grey morning light and the immediate awareness that his neck was destroyed. The couch had not been designed for two people, one of whom was 6'4", and at some point in the night they had both just accepted that and stayed anyway.
Yuki was already sitting up, looking at the window. She'd opened the curtains at some point without waking him, which was impressive given that he could detect a heartbeat through a concrete wall.
He watched her for a moment. She was completely still, just looking at the sky outside, her white hair a mess from sleeping, his t-shirt falling off one shoulder. She hadn't noticed he was awake yet.
Then without turning around she said, "Good morning."
He stared at the ceiling. "Detection?"
"You stopped snoring."
"I don't snore."
"You do a little."
He said nothing. She turned around with the expression of someone winning a very small argument and looked entirely too pleased about it for this early in the morning.
"I want to go outside," she said.
"No."
"Kairo."
"It's dangerous."
"You just said you don't snore and we both know that was a lie, so your credibility is currently very low."
He looked at her.
She looked back at him.
"Fine," he said. "Get dressed."
She looked down at herself. "I don't have anything to wear."
"I know."
He picked up his phone. She crawled over and looked over his shoulder while he ordered clothes, her chin on top of his head, which she had apparently decided was a valid resting position.
"You're ordering everything in white," she said.
"It suits you."
She was quiet for a second. "That's the nicest thing you've ever said to me."
"I've said nicer things."
"Name one."
He couldn't immediately think of one. She made a soft victorious sound and he very deliberately did not respond to it.
The delivery arrived in forty minutes.
Yuki opened the bag on the floor and held everything up one by one with the focused seriousness of a scientist cataloguing specimens. Hoodie, jeans, trainers. She put the hoodie on and the sleeves went past her hands completely.
She looked up at him through the white fabric. Just her eyes visible, red and unimpressed.
"You said this was my size," she said, muffled slightly by the sleeve she was accidentally talking into.
"It is your size."
"My hands are gone."
"Roll the sleeves up."
"They won't stay."
"Then leave them."
She looked at her sleeve-covered hands. Then she used one covered hand to very gently poke him in the side. He looked down at the shapeless white fabric where her hand should have been.
"What are you doing," he said.
"Seeing if I can still use my hands like this." She poked him again. "I can."
"Great," he said. "Get your shoes on."
She stopped the second they stepped outside.
Just stood on the pavement and looked up at the sky and didn't move. He waited. She took a breath, slow, through her nose, and he watched her figure out what cold air felt like from the outside for the first time.
"It smells different," she said.
"From what."
"Your apartment." She paused. "Your apartment smells like you. Outside smells like everything."
He didn't have anything to say to that, so he held out his hand. She took it without looking, the sleeve of the hoodie flopping over their joined hands, and they walked.
They found a sightline to the gate from the roof of a parking structure eight blocks west.
Yuki looked at it for a long time. It sat in the intersection below, dark and patient, the number 7 visible on its face. Even from this distance Kairo could feel the faint pull of it, a pressure at the edge of his Detection like a stone dropped in water.
"It's uglier in person," Yuki said.
"Most things are."
"Not everything." She glanced at him sideways. He looked at the gate. "I'm talking about the city," she said. "The city is nicer in person."
"Sure."
She bumped her shoulder into his arm. He didn't move. She did it again, harder. He still didn't move. She looked up at him with mild outrage.
"You're so tall," she said, like it was a personal complaint.
"Yes."
"It's unreasonable."
"I'll work on it."
She made a sound and turned back to the gate, tucking herself under his arm in the way she had already started doing like it was muscle memory, even though she had only had muscles for about sixteen hours.
Below them, at the cordon line, a figure in tactical gear was having a visible argument with two others. Kairo watched them without particular urgency.
"They're going to send someone in," Yuki said.
"Yep."
"You're not going to stop them."
"Nope."
She didn't say anything else about it. That was one of the things about her — she didn't push. She'd said her piece and she left it there.
The figure below broke away from the argument and started walking toward the gate. Too fast, wrong angle, no awareness of the pull radius. Kairo clocked it immediately.
"Support build," he said.
Yuki looked at the figure. Looked at the gate. Looked back at the figure.
"How can you tell from here," she said.
"The way they're walking. No combat instinct. They think the danger is the thing inside, not the threshold itself."
The figure lurched forward. Scrambled. Vanished.
Someone at the cordon started shouting.
Yuki was quiet for a moment.
"Will they be okay," she said.
Kairo thought about the Floor 7 crawler. Its attack patterns, its range, the acid spit it telegraphed three seconds out. He thought about someone with a support build, no combat experience, dropped into a dark stone environment with thirty seconds before something the size of a transit bus started moving toward them.
Yuki was watching him. Not the gate. Him.
"Maybe," he said.
She nodded once. Turned back to the gate. Her hand found the front of his jacket and held it loosely, the way she held his sleeve at home, and he put his arm around her properly and she leaned in and they stood there while the city below them tried to figure out what had happened to it.
After a while she said, very quietly, "I feel guilty."
He looked down at her.
"Not about them specifically," she said. "Just. I came from that. The tower. Whatever is in those gates came from the same place I did." She paused. "I don't know what that means about me. And I don't know if it should bother me more than it does."
He didn't say it doesn't mean anything, because that was the kind of thing people said when they wanted someone to feel better and he wasn't built for that. He thought about it instead, properly, the way she deserved.
"You were sitting in grass looking at clouds," he said. "Whatever is in those gates is pacing in the dark waiting to kill something." He paused. "Same origin doesn't mean same nature."
She looked up at him.
"That was the nicest thing you've ever said to me," she said. "Actually this time."
"You said that about the white clothes."
"I was wrong about the white clothes. This is actually the nicest."
He looked at the gate. She stayed looking at him for another second, then turned away and rested her cheek against his arm.
"Kairo," she said.
"Mm."
"Thank you for bringing me outside."
He didn't answer. But his arm tightened around her, just slightly, and she felt it, and neither of them said anything else for a long time.
The wind came off the buildings steady and cold. Below them the cordon lights blinked orange against the grey morning. The gate sat in the intersection and pulled.
Eventually Yuki looked up at the sky again, the same way she had from the pavement when they first stepped out, like she was still not entirely done being surprised by how big it was.
"Can we get food on the way back," she said.
"What kind."
"I don't know. I've never eaten outside before." She thought about it. "Something warm."
"Fine."
She looked at him. "You're not going to ask me what I want?"
"You just said you don't know what you want."
"I said I don't know. That doesn't mean you shouldn't ask."
He looked at her.
She looked back at him with complete sincerity.
"What do you want," he said.
"I don't know," she said. "Surprise me."
He stared at her for a long moment.
"You did that on purpose," he said.
The corners of her mouth moved. Just barely. She turned and started walking toward the stairwell and he followed, and the gate behind them continued to pull at the morning air, patient and indifferent, while below the city began the slow and painful process of learning what it was now living inside of.