Everyone was awake.

Michael had eexpected this, he knew they wouldn’t be able to sleep with the amount of new faces in the room.

Dr. Kang was at the workbench with the cold storage supplies from the warehouse laid out in front of her doing a proper inventory with the focused expression on her face which no one would dare to disturb.

On the other hand Shin was in the barracks doorway and Maya was at the viewport. While Sera was sitting on the kitchen counter with her axe across her knees and the expression she wore when she had things to say and was waiting for the right moment.

Anya was on the floor in the corner of the living room with her knees up and her eyes moving around the apartment trying to figure out the room, doing her own version of the arithmetic that seemed to be the universal activity of everyone who walked into this building for the first time.

Rei was on the couch and she was asleep, lost in deep unconscious sleep it seemed like her body had decided this was the first genuinely safe place it had been in long enough that it wasn’t going to ask permission before shutting down.

Michael looked at her sleeping and something settled in his chest that he chose not to look into.

He sat down on the floor in his spot against the kitchen cabinet and looked at the room.

"Where’s Gareth," Sera said placing it in the air so everyone knew that was the conversation they were having.

"He’s in 607," Michael said. "His men are in 603 and 605."

"And that’s where they’re staying," Sera said.

"For now."

She looked at him obviously having something more to say about this and but choose her order carefully. "His two women are here."

"They chose to be here."

"He’s not going to leave that alone."

"I know." Michael looked at the closed door. "That’s why they’re in here and not out there."

Sera was quiet for a moment. "He’s a problem."

"He’s a problem I put in check," Michael said. "For now he needs this building more than he needs to cause trouble in it and he’s smart enough to know that." He paused. "He should be smart enough to wait."

"Wait for what," Maya said from the viewport.

"For whatever he thinks is going to change," Michael said. "Which means we make sure nothing changes in his favour."

Dr. Kang looked up from the supply inventory. "The two women. Anya and Rei." She said it carefully in the way she said things she’d already formed a full opinion on and was deciding how much of it to share. "How long were they with his group."

"I don’t know yet."

"We should know."

"Yes," Michael agreed. "We should."

Dr. Kang looked at Anya in the corner. Anya had been listening to the whole conversation with the stillness of someone who had learned that being still was how you stayed out of trouble and was still running on that instinct even here.

"Not tonight," Michael said quietly, and Dr. Kang looked at him and then at Anya and nodded once.

Not tonight.

---

Maya left the viewport and sat down on the floor across from Michael and looked at him with the direct eyes she always used when she’d been saving something up.

"You got hurt," she said.

"It’s just my shoulder. It’s fine."

"Dr. Kang should look at it."

"Later."

"Michael."

"Maya."

She held his gaze for a second and then looked at Dr. Kang who was already standing up from the workbench with the expression of someone who had been waiting for permission that she didn’t actually need.

He let her look at the shoulder because arguing with Dr. Kang about medical things was an activity with a known outcome and he had used up his energy budget for the day. She pressed and rotated and asked him to move it in three directions and he moved it in three directions and she said it was bruised deeply but nothing was torn and wrapped it with something from the supply bags and told him to not use it as a primary arm for two days.

He thanked her.

She went back to her inventory.

Shin appeared from the barracks doorway and sat beside him on the floor and didn’t say anything for a while and he didn’t say anything either and it was the specific quiet that he’d come to associate with Shin, the kind that wasn’t empty.

"The girl," Shin said eventually. Quietly. "Rei."

"Yeah."

"She hasn’t said much."

"No."

Shin looked at the couch where Rei was still sleeping. "She will. When she’s ready." She paused. "Some people just need somewhere safe first before they can figure out what they want to say."

Michael looked at her. Shin was looking at the couch and her expression had the quality of someone who understood something from the inside.

He didn’t ask. She’d tell him when she was ready too.

[Bond Event — Quiet Understanding: Shin. +1 Bond Point. Current BP: 4 — Shin.]

---

Anya was still in the corner when the others started drifting toward the barracks for the night. Maya went first, then Dr. Kang, then Shin who paused at the barracks doorway and looked at Anya and said simply "there’s a bunk" and went in, and Anya looked at the doorway for a moment and then got up and followed her.

Sera was last. She stopped at the kitchen counter and looked at Michael on the floor.

"You should sleep," she said.

"I know."

"Your shoulder needs it."

"I know."

She looked at him for a moment with the expression that had been evolving for twenty one days into something neither of them had named yet and then she went to her bedroom and the door closed and the apartment went quiet.

Michael sat alone in the dark with the Blueprint Interface open in his vision and the pulse running across nine blocks and the new signatures of twelve extra people in his building sitting in the tracker like a variable he was still calculating for.

Gareth in 607. The easy expression and the thing underneath it. The arithmetic that never stopped running.

He pulled up the Tier 3 blueprint list and looked at the perimeter wall option and the expanded barracks and the things after those and thought about timelines and pressure and the particular kind of patience that building required.

Then he looked at the pulse.

Eight blocks southeast the scatter from the horde was still settling. But at the very edge of the range, past the scatter, something was there that hadn’t been there before the horde moved. A signature that wasn’t a Rotter and wasn’t a Brute and wasn’t anything he had a category for yet, sitting still in the dark city like it had been waiting for exactly this moment to appear.

He looked at it for a long time.

Then he closed the interface and lay down on the floor and closed his eyes and told himself he’d figure it out in the morning.

He was asleep in four minutes.