Will limped into the apartment. The physical reality of walking on a fresh, wrench-set compound fracture chewed at his nerve endings. Heat burned through the meat of his thigh with every step. He ignored the agony. Swallowing the bile rising in his throat, he kept his weight shifted over his good leg.
The bed sat empty. Cold sheets tangled near the footboard. Mara had left after he vanished in the middle of the night without explanation. He felt no panic. A heavy, specific exhaustion settled directly into his bones. He possessed zero plausible excuses to offer a reasonable person.
"She didn't even take the good pillows."
He spoke to the empty room on pure muscle memory. He didn't realize his mouth was open until the words hit the stale air. He waited. Khan usually had something to say about this. A man who had buried four wives and married three of their sisters possessed very specific, contemptuous opinions about modern relationships and the absolute softness of men who checked pillow inventory after a bloodbath.
The silence dragged. It carried no punchline.
Standing in the center of the room, Will leaned heavily on his bent rifle-barrel crutch. The specific quality of Khan's absence pressed against the inside of his skull. A shape cut out of his own mind. He probed the quiet the way a tongue probes a knocked-out tooth. The gap felt jagged. Wrong.
He dropped the crutch and hobbled to the kitchen sink.
Protein paste sat in the dispenser. He ignored the gray tubes. Ripping open a hidden foil pouch, he dug into his stash of black-market sugar cookies. He chewed the dry, sweet grit over the stained porcelain. The cracked mirror above the faucet showed a bruised face smeared with dried blood.
"I know. Terrible macronutrients. We'll burn it off before lunch."
A physical pause hung over the running tap. No booming insults about eating garbage echoed in his head.
"Right," Will said quietly. He swallowed the last bite.
Cold water washed the rust-colored flakes off his jaw. Strapping heavy syndicate armor over a ruined leg required biting down until his molars popped. He loaded Zeraya's knives into his forearm sheaths — still warm with whatever the bracers had fed them in the dome. He did not look at the empty bed again.
Three sharp raps rattled the door.
Zeraya stood in the hallway. She operated on strict, high-energy professional momentum. No questions about the heavy limp. No lingering stares at the purple bruising around his left eye.
"You look like you fought a cement mixer and lost," she said.
"I won." Will grabbed his heavy coat. "But the cement mixer made some extremely valid points."
"Vesper bumped us up the roster. We're playing support for a high-tier ISLAND party today."
"Support. Fantastic. I love carrying heavy things for people with better dental plans."
Zeraya spun on her heel. "Don't act like you hate the hazard pay. Grab your gear. You're moving too slow."
Union Station swallowed them whole.
The massive transit hub functioned as a loud, suffocating underground bazaar. Harsh neon signs bled pink and green light over cramped vendor stalls. Will navigated the chaos on pure instinct. He ducked hanging spark-wires without looking up. He stepped over a puddle of synthetic engine grease he had memorized through eleven months of transit.
"The vendor by the stairs just tried to sell me a certified goblin femur," Zeraya said, dodging a rusted hover-cart. "It was a PVC pipe painted brown."
"Did you buy it?"
"I negotiated him down to a synthetic bagel. It tasted exactly like drywall."
"Fiber is important for a growing Mule."
Zeraya shoved past a grimy gear-mechanic. "You're literally eating a cookie for breakfast."
"This is medicinal sugar."
"Don't judge the cookie," Will muttered to the empty air near his shoulder. "You eat raw horse heart."
Zeraya glanced back. "What?"
"Nothing. Chewing out loud."
The void in his skull offered absolutely zero rebuttal. He kept his head down and kept walking.
The old terminal gates loomed ahead. An ISLAND team waited in the neon glare of the designated rendezvous point.
The gear gap felt physically aggressive. Pristine, unblemished armor threw off clean, arrogant white light. The polished metal completely rejected the grimy, lived-in reality of the station dirt.
"Look at that plating," Zeraya murmured. "Not a single scratch. They probably polish it with unicorn tears."
Will read the party leader the way he read everyone — the same instinct from the workbench that morning, the one that had kept him fed and unstabbed for eleven months. The man held his arms loose at his sides. Relaxed. The specific posture of someone who had never needed to decide whether his fingers should hover near a weapon. His armor lacked scratches because it had never been tested. He stood with the particular ease of a man who was protected rather than a man who had survived.
The read came back clean. Mild boredom. Faint contempt for the underground environment. The anticipatory satisfaction of someone expecting a transaction to go entirely his way.
It was a completely ordinary read.
It was the most inaccurate read Will had received all year, and the part of him that should have caught the gap — the part that was already moving up from the posture to the face — hadn't synced with the part that had just finished filing the threat assessment. For one full second, Will's gut told him nothing here while his eyes were already climbing toward the answer.
His eyes reached the leader's face.
He recognized that face. Isaac.
The physical reaction hit before his conscious mind caught up. A violent, suffocating heat spiked in his chest. Raw adrenaline flooded his nervous system. The fractured tibia — which had been a constant, grinding presence since the dome, a low fire he'd been walking around all morning — simply wasn't there anymore. He didn't feel it stop. He just noticed, the way you notice a sound has cut out, that it was gone. His peripheral vision went dark. The ambient roar of the crowded bazaar dropped to a heavy, ringing static.
The heavy silence in Will's skull broke.
It didn't break the way it had in the dome — not the rage, not the conqueror's roar. It broke quiet. Khan's voice arrived low, almost careful, the way a man might lower himself into a chair he hadn't sat in for a very long time and wasn't sure would still hold his weight.
Well, well.
A pause. Will could feel him looking — not at Will, through him, at the man across the platform.
I know that face. I have known that face for longer than you have been alive, boy, and I did not expect to see it again on this side of anything. Another pause, and when Khan spoke again the warmth had drained out of his voice in one motion, like a curtain dropping. We will discuss what I know later. Right now — take the arm first. The eyes are a luxury we can afford after.
Will's lips moved. He whispered aloud, perfectly synced with the ghost.
"Arm first."
The air pressure around him plummeted.
"Will? Hey. You're zoning out on me." Zeraya waved a hand.
He provided absolutely zero response. He just stared forward.
Somewhere beneath the boiling heat and the narrowed vision, a quieter part of his brain observed the spiral. The cold, clinical precision that kept him alive for eleven months watched his own decision-architecture degrade in real time. The emotional load crushed his analytical framework. He knew exactly what he was about to do. He correctly named the catastrophic mistake he was making.
He could not stop it.
That inability terrified him. Not the violence. The sheer impossibility of hitting the brakes while watching his own hands steer into traffic.
Zeraya operated as a Mule. Her entire build relied on carrying dead weight and avoiding the crossfire. She possessed no heavy plating to absorb a hit. Her survival instincts instantly reclassified the man standing next to her as a lethal, unpredictable hazard.
She took one deliberate half-step backward. She was standing next to a detonating explosive. She had no idea what tripped the wire.
Will slid his hands under his heavy coat. His fingers wrapped tightly around the grips of Zeraya's knives.
He did not stop walking.