Nova POV
His full name is Patrick Osei, but he says Patch because Patrick sounds like someone who has his life together, and he does not have his life together; he is very clear about this; he explains it on the walk back to the safe zone in the kind of unfiltered ramble that comes from four months of talking mostly to himself.
Zero walks ahead of them both and does not participate.
Nova listens. She has always been good at listening; it is a skill you develop when you grow up in a house where what people don't say is usually the more important sentence. Patch says everything. Loudly, and in order, and with digressions. He was nineteen when the Game took him, studying for an exam he would never sit, no memory of dying, just a sudden nothing, and then the timer and the creature and four months of elaborate, systematic, deeply committed running away.
"It's not cowardice," he tells her seriously. "It's probability management."
"Sounds right," she says.
"My class is SCOUT. Speed and perception, basically zero fighting. The Game built me for gathering information and then being somewhere else immediately."
"And have you gathered information?"
"So much information," he says. "I know this city better than anyone. I know every patrol route, every safe tunnel, and every faction territory boundary. I just had nobody to" He stops. Clears his throat. "Nobody to give it to."
She looks at him sideways.
He is looking straight ahead, jaw tight, doing the thing people do when they've said something more honest than they meant to and are hoping nobody noticed.
She noticed.
She doesn't say so.
Zero's objection is not a speech. It is three words delivered at the safe zone door while Patch hovers uncertainly on the threshold.
"This is temporary."
He is looking at Nova when he says it.
She looks back at him with the same steadiness she has been practicing since hour one of being in this place, the steadiness that is not calm, exactly, but is the thing you build on top of fear when fear cannot be the thing in charge.
"He can stay tonight," she says.
Zero's expression does not change.
Something behind it does.
She has been watching him long enough now, which is honestly only about thirty-six hours, but thirty-six hours in the Game compresses differently; thirty-six hours here is a semester somewhere normal to know the difference between his blankness and his active blankness. The first one is just his face. The second one is what his face does when something has caught him off guard, and he is deciding how to classify it.
This is the second kind.
She holds his gaze.
He looks at her for a long moment, the way you look at a door you were certain was locked that has turned out not to be. Then he steps aside. Not agreement. Not warmth. Just space, which from him she is beginning to understand is its own language.
Patch says "thank you" to Nova and gives Zero a very wide berth and finds the kitchen in under forty seconds, which is frankly impressive.
She helps him find food.
The Game's reward system has stocked the kitchen in the way it stocks everything here: functional, sufficient, occasionally strange. There is bread that tastes real and coffee that is better than real, and a fruit she cannot identify that Patch eats without questioning because he has apparently been surviving on mission-drop rations for four months, and his standards have adjusted.
He talks while he eats. She lets him. She leans on the counter and asks small questions, and he fills in the answers, and the kitchen feels, briefly, like a place where people just exist instead of a room inside something trying to kill them.
From the doorway, Zero watches.
She is aware of him the way you are aware of a fireplace's directional warmth, constant, something that changes the temperature of the room without moving. She does not look at him directly. She does not need to.
Patch is describing a faction he encountered a week ago, organized, maybe twenty Players, occupying the eastern district when he pivots without signaling it, the way people do when memory surfaces mid-sentence.
"Actually, the strangest thing I've seen in a while was three days ago." He breaks off a piece of bread. "Solo Player, or looked solo, but she was clearly working with this big faction. Like a liaison or something. Kept meeting with their leadership and then leaving. No party bond
showing on her status panel."
Nova pours water. "Yeah?"
"Young. Maybe our age. She had this thing she did where she'd go completely still when she was thinking, like, not moving at all, just processing, you know? Reminded me of a cat." He chews. "And she cried when she thought nobody was looking. I was in a maintenance tunnel nearby, and I don't think she knew I could see her. Felt bad watching, honestly."
Nova's hands go still on the counter.
"Her class was something damage-based; I couldn't get a clear read on the panel. But her face I remember because I was there a while and I had nothing to do but look." He tears more bread. "Sharp face. Small scar on her jaw, left side. Brown skin, dark eyes. Hair in two braids. She kept looking north like she was waiting for something."
The water glass is in Nova's hand.
She does not remember picking it up.
Brown skin. Dark eyes. Two braids. The scar on her jaw is from when they were twelve and Mika fell off a fire hydrant trying to prove she could balance on it. Nova was the one who walked her to the clinic and held her hand while they closed it.
She put a knife in Nova's ribs, and she cried about it in a maintenance tunnel three days later.
Nova sets the glass down.
Slowly.
Carefully.
Like it is the only thing in the room she can trust herself to control right now.
"Which direction was the faction's territory?" she says.
Her voice is even. She is very proud of that.
Patch looks up, mildly surprised by the question. "Northeast. Maybe two kilometers past the old overpass. Why?"
She becomes aware, without turning, that Zero has gone very still in the doorway.
He does not ask if she knows the girl.
He already knows.
She can feel him knowing, the same way she can feel his attention when he focuses it, directional and certain, and a little bit like standing too close to something with real voltage.
She picks the glass back up. Takes a sip.
"Good to know," she says.
Patch goes back to his bread.
Nova looks at the window and the bruise-dark sky beyond it and thinks about two braids and a scar and a girl who is crying in tunnels but has not decided yet.
Yes, you have, Nova thinks, to no one, to Mika, to the version of this she already knows is coming.
You already decided.