It was already night.

The car was parked on the roadside. No infected in any direction, the plain doing its quiet thing, the specific stillness that meant nothing had picked up our scent yet.

I had told them everything.

Jenn was on the bonnet, sitting with her legs hanging, processing it the way she had decided to process it, which was outside and alone and in the dark. I wasn’t going to change that. Grief has its own geography and you don’t reroute it.

Mercury was inside the car.

She had known Major for less than an hour. That didn’t seem to matter. Some people connect fast and feel it fully and don’t apologize for the math not making sense. That was Mercury. I was learning her.

I walked back to the car and stopped at the bonnet.

"Hey," I said.

Jenn saw me coming and something in her decided she needed to hold onto something. She wrapped her arms around me suddenly, tight and desperate. Her grip pressed hard into my back and ribs, her body radiating steady heat against my chest and stomach. The pressure of her hold was solid, almost crushing in places, like she was trying to anchor herself through me. Her breath came warm and uneven against my shoulder, dampening my shirt slightly where her face pressed.

I let her hold.

"He was like a father to me," she said, quiet against my shoulder. "I always dreamt of leaving that city. Always dreamt of running away from him." A pause. "And now I have and it doesn’t feel how I thought it would."

I didn’t say anything. Some moments don’t need your words. They just need your presence.

"He wasn’t a perfect man," she said. "There were times I hated him for who he was. But he loved me. In our world that’s not nothing. Not many people love without wanting something back."

My hands had been hanging at my sides, searching for the right place. I finally settled them on her waist. Light. Just present. The fabric there was warm from her body, the curve of her sides soft and trembling faintly under my palms.

I thought about what Major had said at the window. The real enemy of the world is the walls. I thought about getting back inside them, which required either Sinn or the specimen or both, and about Owen sitting in that car watching Oddo go down and not changing his expression.

We slid down together against the car, backs against the car, the metal still radiating stored heat against my back. The sand beneath us was warm and powdery, shifting and molding to my body as we sat, pressing gently upward against my thighs and lower back.

Her hand found mine. Her palm was warm and slightly damp, fingers squeezing with a steady pressure that transmitted her grief directly into my skin. The contact grounded me as much as it did her, the warmth between our palms slowly building as we sat without speaking.

The outside had one consistent mercy. The nights weren’t cold.

"Why did you give me the clothes?" she asked eventually.

"I don’t know," I said. Which was the honest answer. I had just felt it.

"Yeah," she said. "You don’t. And I think you’ve stood up for other people the same way. Without knowing why. Just feeling it." She looked at the sand ahead. "That’s what’s missing in this world. People who live beyond themselves. Major was one of the few. I think you might have a bigger purpose than even him."

I sat with that.

I thought about Annabelle on the bathroom floor on day seven of a plague, and how I had gone in not knowing what I was doing but going anyway. Sherry’s hand in mine on the back seat of a car while she slept. Daphne feeding me rice when I couldn’t lift my own arm. The night in the corridor with Mute, when I could have finished it and didn’t. Mary Stam. Azure’s blue thigh. Fighting Vince without calculating whether I would survive it.

Maybe my life had never been only about me. Maybe the system had known something when it chose me that I was still working out.

"I’ve never thought about myself that way," I said.

"You should start," she said. "Because I think you’re different from all of us."

"Yeah," I said, still looking for the right words and not finding them.

She was nineteen and had never been to school and had grown up in a forsaken city under the care of a complicated man who loved her, and she was wiser than most people I had met inside the walls.

"You told me you were going to open the walls," she said.

"Yes."

"I don’t know why," she said. "But I actually believe you."

I looked at her. She was still facing the sand, calm, certain in it.

"I think I nee—"

"Go talk to her," she said, before I finished the thought. "She needs you more right now."

I let go of her hand and stood.

"I’m fine," she said, before I could ask. "I’m fine."

***

I opened the car door.

Mercury sat in the driver’s seat. The air around her felt different, heavier, more contained. I lowered myself into the passenger seat and pulled the door shut. The solid click of the door closing sealed us in, pressing the warm, stagnant air closer against my skin.

Her hands were in her lap and she was looking at the dashboard without seeing it. The specific posture of someone who has put their feelings somewhere they can manage them and is holding that position carefully.

I knew how Mercury handled grief. She had told us herself, somewhere between the walls and the forsaken city.

I didn’t say anything yet.

I just sat with her in the thick, warm darkness of the car, letting the heavy quiet wrap around both of us. The only sensation was the slow rise and fall of my own breathing and the faint, shared heat slowly building between our bodies in the confined space.