He was still in the hallway at ten thirty when Gareth came up from the floor below.

He came up the stairwell and into the sixth floor hallway and stopped when he saw Michael on the floor and looked at him for a moment and then came and sat down against the opposite wall with the particular lack of performance that Michael had seen from him twice now, the version without the easy look, the one that showed up late at night apparently.

They looked at each other.

"The variant," Gareth said.

"Yes," Michael said.

"It got away from us," Gareth said. "The second one. Fetch went for it and it was out of range before he closed half the distance." He paused. "I’ve been thinking about it since we came back."

"So has Dr. Kang," Michael said.

Gareth looked at the wall across from him. "She thinks it’s something new."

"She thinks it might be," Michael said. "She’s not certain."

"In my experience when a doctor says they’re not certain they mean they’re fairly certain and don’t want to be the person who said it definitively," Gareth said.

Michael looked at him. That was a perceptive thing to say and accurate and he let it sit.

"If it gets back to whatever group produced it," Gareth said. "With information about this building."

"I know," Michael said.

"The Aberrants have been watching us," Gareth said. "Five blocks out now. Not moving. The variant Stalkers are a different population, different area, different behavior pattern." He looked at Michael. "Two separate threats getting closer from two different directions."

"Yes," Michael said.

Gareth was quiet for a moment. He looked at his hands and then at the hallway and then at Michael. "The wall helps," he said. "The turrets help. But if what’s coming has variant Stalker speed and Aberrant intelligence the defense picture changes significantly."

"Yes," Michael said again.

"You’re already thinking about it," Gareth said.

"All day," Michael said.

Gareth looked at him for a long moment. The hallway was quiet between them and the building hummed around them and outside the city was dark and patient and full of things that were changing in directions nobody had a full map for.

"I can help with that," Gareth said. Not the easy version of it. The actual version. "The defense planning. I’ve been managing survival under pressure for five weeks and I’m good at reading how threats develop and where they’re going to push." He paused. "Not as your number two. Not as a position. Just. I can help with that specific problem if you let me."

Michael looked at him.

Gareth looked back and the arithmetic was not running, or if it was running it was running on something different to what it usually ran on and Michael couldn’t read the difference well enough to be certain but he looked at Gareth’s face and thought about Damon saying *this is real* in the cooling afternoon air and Cole’s nod in the courtyard and the specific version of Gareth that appeared late at night without the easy look in place.

"Tomorrow," Michael said. "After Dr. Kang finishes with the body. The three of us look at the defense picture together."

Gareth held his gaze for a moment.

"Alright," he said.

He got up and went back down the stairwell and Michael sat in the hallway alone and looked at the pulse for a long time. The variant Stalker was still eleven blocks north and stationary now, had been stationary for two hours. The Aberrant signatures were five blocks southeast, the same position, patient and still.

Two threats. Two distances. One building between them.

He pulled up the Tier 4 blueprint list and looked at the Advanced Turret System and the Blast Walls and the Underground Expansion option that he hadn’t looked at seriously yet and started running new calculations with the particular focused calm of someone who had been doing this for thirty six days and had gotten good at it.

The turrets went up tomorrow regardless of the shoulder.

Dr. Kang would have opinions about that.

She was probably right.

He built anyway.

---

Maya appeared in the hallway at eleven.

She came from the barracks room and looked at him on the floor and looked at the Blueprint Interface he was clearly working through and sat down beside him and looked at the same empty air he was looking at.

"What are you building," she said.

"Advanced turret system," he said. "Then blast walls. Then I want to look at the underground expansion."

She was quiet for a moment. "The underground expansion," she said. "That’s the shelter option. If something gets over the wall and through the blast walls and into the building the underground level is the final fallback."

"Yes," he said.

She looked at the empty air where the blueprint was. "You’re planning for the worst case," she said.

"I’m planning for every case," he said.

She nodded and pulled her knees up and looked at the hallway wall in front of her with the focused expression she had when she was processing something structural. "The underground expansion. What’s the access point."

"Ground floor. Northeast corner. The system builds the shaft and the chamber."

"Chamber size," she said.

"Scales with SP investment," he said. "Basic at five hundred, expanded at twelve hundred."

She thought about it. "Expanded," she said. "If it comes to that you want everyone in it with room to not be on top of each other." She paused. "And a separate access point. One entrance is a trap if something finds it. Two gives you an exit option."

He looked at the blueprint in his vision and at the underground expansion specs and she was right, the secondary access point was in the specs as an add-on and he hadn’t looked at it yet.

"Added," he said.

She nodded. They sat in the hallway together and he worked through the blueprint sequence and she looked at the wall and occasionally said something specific and technically accurate that improved the sequence and he incorporated it and they did this for about forty minutes in the comfortable working quiet that they’d developed over the past two weeks without either of them formally deciding to develop it.

"Maya," he said at some point.

"Yeah," she said.

"The supermarket find today. That was good work." 𝚏𝕣𝐞𝗲𝐰𝕖𝐛𝐧𝕠𝕧𝚎𝚕.𝐜𝚘𝗺

She looked at him with the direct eyes. "I know," she said, which was always her answer to that kind of thing and which he’d stopped finding surprising and had started finding its own kind of reassuring.

"You’ve been useful since the first week," he said. "More useful than you know."

She was quiet for a moment. "I know how useful I am," she said. "I keep track." But the way she said it was different to usual, the certainty was the same but underneath it something was less defended than normal, the late night version of Maya that was probably closer to accurate than the daytime version.

"Good," he said. "Keep track."

She looked at him and the something underneath relaxed a fraction more and she went back to looking at the wall and he went back to the blueprint and the hallway held them both in its quiet and the building settled around them into the deep still of midnight.

[Bond Event — Late Night Work: Maya. +1 Bond Point. Current BP: 7 — Maya.]

She fell asleep against the wall at midnight and a half with her knees still pulled up and her head tilted to the side and he looked at her for a moment and then pulled up the Blueprint Interface and kept working.

At one in the morning he got up carefully so as not to wake her and went and got a blanket from the barracks and put it over her shoulders and went back to the floor and kept planning.

She didn’t wake up.

The building was quiet and the pulse ran its sweep and tomorrow was going to be a hard day and he used the hours before it well.