The bathroom door had exactly one lock, and three people needed it at exactly the same time every morning, which meant the apartment's first conversation of the day was reliably an argument about scheduling.
"Five more minutes," Lariya called through the door.
"You said that four minutes ago," Zeraya said, already dressed, already running a thumb along the edge of a trench knife with the absent efficiency of someone who'd done it ten thousand times.
"And it was true then too."
Will, hunting through the kitchen for the cookie pouch, found it exactly where he'd left it — except now there was something written on it in marker, in handwriting that was unmistakably fourteen years old.
"Did you write your name on this?"
Lariya emerged from the bathroom at that exact moment, fully dressed, hair somehow already perfect, looking entirely unbothered by the previous four minutes of negotiation.
"Yep."
Will looked at the pouch. Looked at her. "...Fair enough."
Explain to me again, Khan said, somewhere behind Will's left eye, in the tone of a man working through a translation problem, why the child walks willingly into a building every morning when nothing is making her.
It's school, Khan.
I am aware it is called school. I am asking why it still EXISTS. The world ended. Surely the schooling ended with it.
People still want their kids to learn things.
There was a pause — a real one, longer than Khan's pauses usually ran.
...That is — actually, that is the most hopeful thing I have heard in eight hundred years. Carry on. I withdraw the question. I am moved and I do not wish to discuss it further.
Will smiled at nothing in particular. Lariya, halfway out the door with a bag slung over one shoulder, caught it and gave him a look.
"What."
"Nothing," Will said. "Have a good day."
"Weirdo," Lariya said, and left.
The dispatch point used to be a PATH security office — Will remembered, vaguely, that it had once had actual purpose, cameras and badge readers and the specific bureaucratic hum of a building that existed to keep track of things. Now it was a job board. Runners and Mules moved through it in a low current, checking postings, comparing rates, the room thick with the particular tone people used when discussing money.
The job was simple. Escort run, cargo through a contested stretch two levels down. They'd done a dozen like it.
"Payment routes through the usual channel," the dispatcher said, not looking up from a ledger, sliding a chit across the counter. "Vesper's people will confirm on delivery."
"Fine." Zeraya took the chit. There was something — half a beat, no more, a stillness in her that wasn't there the second before and wasn't there the second after. Then, normally, easily: "Same rate as last time?"
"Same rate."
They walked. The job started the way these things started — checking gear, confirming the route, the easy professional rhythm of two people who'd worked together long enough to not need to talk much.
"You good?" Will asked, later, not looking at her, eyes on the corridor ahead.
"Yeah." Zeraya didn't look over either. "Why?"
"No reason."
He filed it. The way he'd filed the comm unit in the drawer — not a lie, exactly, nothing his gut flagged as a threat. Just a name she didn't love, attached to something she didn't explain. Eleven months down here had taught him that everyone had a name like that. He had a few of his own.
The job went clean. Cargo delivered, payment confirmed, nothing worth mentioning.
Dinner was something simple — scavenged ingredients, nothing fancy, the kind of meal that had become routine enough that nobody commented on it anymore. Lariya sat at the table with a stack of salvaged workbooks, half doing homework and half listening to the adults, which was its own kind of homework as far as she was concerned.
She pushed a piece of something gray and vaguely vegetable-shaped to the edge of her plate.
"I don't like this."
She does not LIKE it? Khan's voice arrived immediately, delighted outrage radiating off every word. Boy. BOY. There were winters my men ate their own boots and thanked the sky for the boots. This child has FOOD in front of her and is making a FACE.
Will almost laughed out loud. He caught it — mostly — turning it into something that could pass for a cough, except Zeraya was looking right at him, and Zeraya had started noticing these moments. The half-second delays. The way Will sometimes reacted to nothing at all.
"What's funny?" she asked, quiet, amused rather than suspicious.
"Nothing. Just—" He shook his head. "Nothing." A beat, and then, mostly to cover, mostly because it was true anyway: "Eat your food, Lariya."
"Why does he get to weigh in—"
"Because I'm an adult now, apparently."
"You're barely an adult."
"I'm technically an adult."
Zeraya watched the exchange with the specific contentment of someone who'd built something and was now living inside it. She didn't push the laugh question. Not tonight.
Later, dishes. Will washed, Zeraya dried — another small, unremarkable domestic task that neither of them would have predicted eleven months ago, back when "domestic" had meant a hazard zone with monofilament tripwire at the door.
Lariya was asleep. The apartment had gone quiet in the specific way apartments did at night, settled, the kind of quiet that didn't need filling.
"So," Zeraya said, drying a bowl, not looking at him directly, which was how she asked the things she actually cared about. "What is it. The thing you're always listening to. The little pauses."
Will kept his eyes on the sink.
He could have deflected. Eleven months of practice sat right there, ready. But he didn't, quite — not all the way.
"There's an old voice in my head," he said. "Been there longer than I have. Mostly harmless." A pause. "Mostly."
Zeraya looked at him for a long moment. Whatever she'd been expecting, that apparently covered enough ground. She nodded, slow, and went back to drying the bowl.
"Okay," she said.
That was it. No follow-up, no push. She filed it — the way she'd filed plenty of things about him over eleven months, the same drawer where his unexplained survival lived, the same drawer, probably, where a sealed comm unit sat in the back of theirs.
Everyone had something. The dishes got finished. The apartment went dark.
"Mostly," is generous, Khan said, quiet, almost fond. Goodnight, boy.