It took me a while to make up my mind about what to do with Penny.

Longer than it should have, maybe. But the options weren’t exactly great whichever way I looked at them. Taking her back to the Boardwalk Community was out of the question, those people had enough on their plate already with Callighan’s group grinding against them week after week. The last thing they needed was me walking through the gate with someone carrying Symbiotic abilities and a recent history of trying to kill me. That conversation would not have gone well for anyone.

So that left our place.

Penny had gone quiet in the hours after the struggle, genuinely quiet, not the tight, coiled quiet of someone waiting for an opening. The wildness that had been moving through her earlier, the thing behind her eyes that hadn’t been her, seemed to have burned itself out somewhere after I’d gotten her on the ground and held her there long enough for it to pass. Now she just walked when I walked and stopped when I stopped, her wrists still bound, her head mostly down.

My working theory was that Gaspar’s hold on her wasn’t self-sustaining. It seemed like the kind of thing that needed him close, a direct line of contact or proximity to keep her locked in that state. Take her far enough away from him for long enough and the influence just... ran out of fuel. Like a signal losing its source.

Which meant right now, she was manageable.

I had told myself I was letting her rest for a couple of hours to be sure about that, to make sure she wasn’t going to suddenly flip back and take a swing at me the moment I relaxed. And that was true, technically. But if I was being honest, it was also three hours of me sitting at a careful distance and watching her for any sign that the thing Gaspar had put inside her was coming back around. It didn’t. She sat with her knees drawn up and her head leaning against the wall and eventually her breathing had evened out into something that was almost sleep, and I’d watched the whole thing and decided that yeah, she was probably safe enough for now.

By the time we got moving again, the sky had already started to deepen at the edges ,that particular shade of orange and bruised purple that meant the afternoon was running out faster than I’d planned for.

I glanced up at it and kept walking.

I wasn’t going to be around for the next week, that was just the reality. The exchange with Callighan was happening tomorrow, and after that there was still plenty to deal with. But Christopher would be there. Rachel. Sydney. Cindy. Between the four of them, keeping an eye on one woman wasn’t going to be some impossible task. They were more than capable, and more importantly, they’d been telling me for a while now that I needed to stop acting like I was the only person who could handle anything. They weren’t wrong. I had people I trusted with my life, actually trusted, not just in theory and this was exactly the kind of situation where leaning on that trust made sense.

I’d leave it to them. It would be fine.

The entrance came into view after a couple more minutes of walking, and the sight of it settled something in my chest without me entirely meaning to let it. A proper watch post, properly manned, Martin had wasted no time locking this place down after we’d taken it. Guy ran a tight operation.

I was still a few steps out when the figure on watch duty clocked us and straightened up, and then immediately broke into a grin.

"Oh, Ryan?" Malcolm called out, the grin already pulling toward a laugh. "What the hell, man, you already brought back another woman?"

I couldn’t help it. I shook my head but I was almost smiling.

Malcolm was good people, early twenties, easy to get along with, the kind of guy who found the humor in things even when the things in question were fairly grim. He and Martin went back to the Jackson Township days, the scavenging runs they used to do before everything collapsed further. I’d worked alongside them back then whenever I was there, and Christopher too. We knew each other in the comfortable, low-maintenance way of people who’d spent time together in stressful situations and hadn’t managed to annoy each other.

"She’s with Callighan’s group," I said as I got closer. "She came at me first."

"So you picked up another hostage." He laughed, moving toward the metal barrier that blocked the entrance, a heavy thing that scraped and rattled against the ground as he started sliding it aside. "Man, you work fast."

"Something like that," I said. "But heads up, this one’s different. She’s got abilities. You know what I mean when I say that."

The laugh cut off. Malcolm’s whole posture shifted in about half a second, shoulders coming up, the easy expression on his face replaced by something considerably more alert.

"She’s...wait, you brought someone like that here?" He looked at Penny, then back at me, the early stages of panic doing something interesting to his face. "Ryan, is that, is that actually a good idea, or—"

"We’ll be the ones watching her," I said, keeping my voice steady. "And you’ve spent three days watching us run escort during the move. You know we’re not exactly ordinary ourselves at this point, right?"

That landed. Some of the tension went out of him and he let out a breath, running a hand over the back of his neck.

"Yeah, I mean, yeah, fair point." He laughed again, quieter this time. "I clocked that pretty early on those drives, honestly. You guys are just built different."

"Then trust me," I said. "She’s not in control of what she’s been doing, Gaspar’s been manipulating her. This isn’t really her." I glanced at Penny briefly. She was looking at the ground, pretending she wasn’t listening. "She’s had it bad enough without us treating her like she’s the threat."

Malcolm looked at her for a moment, his expression shifting toward something more sympathetic. Then he exhaled slowly at the mention of the name.

"Gaspar," he muttered, the word coming out quieter and with a visible shudder attached to it. "God, that guy... even just hearing his name, man."

"I know," I said. "But it’ll be fine." I stepped past the barrier and gave his shoulder a single firm pat. "I’ll handle it."

"Yeah." He nodded, pulling the barrier back into place behind us. "Yeah, I believe you."

I paused just past the entrance, something occurring to me. "Actually, Cindy and Daisy. Did they make it back while I was out? I sent them ahead when I went after Penny but that was hours ago."

Malcolm scratched the side of his jaw. "Uh... no, haven’t seen them come through here. They’re probably still over at the Boardwalk if you told them to go back."

"Right," I said, nodding slowly.

I looked up at the sky again, darker now than it had been even ten minutes ago.

They were probably worried sick. Sitting somewhere and waiting and running through every possible bad outcome in their heads.

I’d have to move fast.

Walking Penny through the entrance and into our territory drew looks. Plenty of them. Eyes tracking us from doorways and over shoulders, heads turning as we passed, people doing that thing where they try to look like they’re not staring and fail at it completely. But nobody stopped me. Nobody called out or stepped in front of us demanding an explanation.

That meant something, even if I didn’t stop to think about it much in the moment. After everything, all the months, all the decisions that had looked questionable from the outside, all the times I’d asked people to trust me without being able to fully explain why, they still gave me that. They let me move through without making it complicated. I wanted to think it was because they’d seen enough to know I didn’t bring things through the door without a reason.

Though I was aware that wasn’t a universal sentiment. Brandon, Kyle, Billy, there was a whole corner of the group that had been eyeing me sideways since day one, still half-convinced I was playing some long game at everyone else’s expense. Some things you couldn’t do much about. People were going to think what they were going to think.

I pushed it out of my head and kept moving.

Christopher had been keeping Lucy in one of the smaller buildings, a squat, unremarkable thing that had probably been a storage unit or a back office in whatever the world used to need it for. I made my way there with Penny in tow, pushed the door open quietly, and stepped inside.

The hallway opened up into a small room and the first thing I saw was Christopher’s back. He was sitting in a chair with his legs crossed up on the table in front of him, head tipped back at the particular angle of someone fighting off sleep and losing. In front of him, Lucy sat tied to a chair, her head hanging forward and slightly to one side, either asleep or doing a very committed impression of it, which in that position couldn’t have been comfortable either way.

He hadn’t tortured her. Physically, at least of course. Whatever he’d put her through verbally over the past several hours was a separate question and probably worth not thinking about too hard.

My eyes moved to the armchair tucked against the wall to the side, the kind of chair that had absolutely not come with this room and had clearly been dragged in from somewhere else by someone with both the motivation and the stubborn energy to do it. Rebecca was in it, knees pulled up, arms crossed.

Christopher’s head turned when he heard the door. He looked at me, yawned once without covering it, and started to open his mouth.

Then his eyes found Penny and stopped there.

"Finally," he said, the greeting dying halfway out. He narrowed his eyes, head tilting just slightly. "Who the hell is that?"

"I’ll explain," I said, glancing over at Rebecca. "But I want everyone together for it. Can you go grab the others?"

Rebecca looked at me for a moment, a measured, slightly flat look and then uncrossed her arms and stood up from the armchair.

"Right," she said, her voice carrying just enough of an edge to be noticeable. "That’s the one thing I’m useful for, apparently." She walked toward the door without looking back.

I watched her go, then turned to Christopher. "What’s going on with her? She seems more upset than usual."

Christopher thought about it for a second, in the way he thought about things, quickly and without making it look like effort. Then he shrugged. "She and Rachel went at it again. Same argument, different day."

"Okay, but what’s she doing here actually?" I asked.

A face appeared in the doorway, Rebecca, who had apparently only made it as far as the hall before deciding this required a direct response. She looked at me with eyes that had moved from flat to fully expressive.

"Because someone told me to stay away from Kunta," she said, "and I have nowhere else to go!" She let that sit in the air for exactly one second and then was gone again, footsteps retreating down the hall.

The room was quiet for a moment.

"I’ll be honest with you," Christopher said, lowering his legs from the table and sitting up properly, the laughter in his voice barely contained. "Your relation with Rebecca might be the single most entertaining ongoing situation I’ve had the privilege of witnessing."

"Glad it’s working for someone," I muttered, groaning. "I really don’t know how to handle her. I’m trying, I am actually trying to be decent about it because she’s Rachel’s sister, but I don’t know what the right move is half the time."

"You’re thinking about it wrong," Christopher said, straightening up in his chair. "It’s not about what you say to her or how careful you are. She feels useless. Has for a while. And then Mei got taken and it got worse because now she feels like she couldn’t protect someone she cared about either." He looked at me evenly. "And then you tell her to hang back and stay out of it because there’s nothing she can do, and from where she’s standing that just confirms it. You see why that lands the way it does?"

I turned that over.

He wasn’t wrong. I hadn’t been thinking about it from that angle, I’d been thinking about keeping her safe, which in my head was obviously the right thing. But in her head, being kept safe and being kept aside probably felt like the same thing.

"I’m not saying she’s useless," I said. "I’m not thinking that."

"Doesn’t matter what you’re thinking," Christopher said. "Matters what she’s feeling." He paused for half a second, and then his expression shifted just slightly, the kind of shift that meant something was coming that I wasn’t going to enjoy hearing. "You want to know what she asked me earlier?"

"Do I?"

"She asked why you hadn’t given her any abilities," he said. "Like you did with Sydney and Rachel."

I stared at him.

"She actually said that."

"Word for word, more or less." He nodded, then leaned back amused. "My read is she thinks you hate her. Or at minimum that you trust her less than the others. Since it only seems to work on people you’re genuinely close to, and she’s noticed she’s been left out."

"It’s not like that," I said. "You don’t have anything either. Daisy doesn’t."

"She’s smarter than that and she knows it," Christopher said. "She’s figured out it’s only with girls it works and close relationship. She must think you hate her or something so why she didn’t awaken anything like the other girls."

"She’s wrong about the whole thing," i said.

"She is, but maybe you should just tell her you know how it works?" He grinned.

He gave me a look that finished the sentence without needing words.

"Wipe that grin off your face," I said.

He widened it instead. "I’m just saying. If she wants to know why, you could always explain how it actually works. I’d pay a reasonable amount to be a fly on the wall for that conversation and get to see her face afterward hearing that."

I thought about it for one second.

"Her first move would be to kill me in my sleep," I said. "Her second move would be to go find Rachel and kill her too."

And that was assuming she stayed calm about it, which was the optimistic version. The realistic version involved considerably more shouting before the killing started.

The thought of Rebecca’s face when she found out what I and her only family had been hiding these past months.... the progression from confusion to realization to incandescent anger was not something I was in any hurry to experience firsthand. Whatever conversation needed to happen there was going to require significantly more planning than I currently had bandwidth for.