Peter slept for most of the first day back, curled up small in the infirmary bed with a fresh round of bandages and a dose of the last real painkillers we had left, and I sat with him for a while just to watch him breathe, needing the proof that this one, at least, had ended right.Ruby had checked on him twice already that day, more gentle with him than I'd ever seen her be with anyone, fussing over his bandages and forcing water on him even when he grumbled about it. Ward hovered near the doorway for a while too, not saying much, just wanting to see with his own eyes that Peter had actually made it home."You shouldn't have come for me," he said, waking briefly sometime past midnight, voice hoarse. "Not like that. Not alone.""I wasn't alone.""You know what I mean." His eyes found mine, exhausted but clear. "What you did back there. The way those things just... listened to you. That wasn't small, Mateo. That scared me more than Rourke did."I didn't have a good answer for that, so

The alarm turned out to be a false one this time, a small, disoriented pack of shamblers wandering too close to the eastern sensors, cleared within twenty minutes without a single injury on our side. Small mercy, though it didn't do much to settle the adrenaline still coursing through me hours later, or the memory of how close Jaxen's mouth had gotten to mine before the world interrupted us again.He'd squeezed my hand once before we split up to cover different sections of the wall, a silent promise that whatever had almost happened on the watchtower wasn't finished, just postponed. I held onto that small comfort through the rest of the false alarm, grateful for something steady to think about besides the cold, disoriented shamblers stumbling harmlessly into our perimeter lights.Ruby found me in the command room near midnight, still awake, still turning the night over in my head instead of sleeping."You'll want to see this," she said, tablet already in hand, expression tight with so

Nobody slept well after the interrogation. We released the soldier at dawn, per Jaxen's insistence that we weren't the kind of people who executed scared kids for information freely given, and watched him stumble off toward the treeline with a canteen of water and a warning never to come back armed, his footsteps unsteady all the way until the trees swallowed him from view.Jaxen had been quiet through most of the morning too, his own thoughts clearly circling something he hadn't voiced yet, though he squeezed my shoulder before heading off to oversee the morning watch rotation, a small, wordless acknowledgment that he understood exactly how much the soldier's words had cost me to hear the night before.I spent the rest of the morning in Ruby's workshop instead of resting, unable to shake the soldier's words from my head. She is the hive, now. I turned the sentence over and over, trying to find some angle that made it less horrifying, and kept failing, my mind circling

I found Jaxen at the fence line, and he must have read something in my face before I said a word, because he crossed the distance between us fast, hands already reaching for me."What happened?"I showed him the screen instead of explaining, and watched his expression shift through the same disbelief and dread I'd cycled through myself, though he settled on something steadier than I'd managed, some old soldier's instinct for absorbing bad news without letting it knock him fully off balance."Okay," he said finally, quiet. "Okay. You're Subject 001. That doesn't change who you are now, Mateo. It just tells us what they used to build the frame.""That's easy for you to say.""I know." He didn't argue the point, didn't try to talk me out of the anger still simmering under my skin. He just pulled me in, arms wrapping around me tight enough that I felt the steady thud of his heartbeat against my ear, an anchor I hadn't asked for but needed anyway. "I'm

Ruby didn't say a word when we finally rejoined her in the command room, but the look she gave us, slow and deliberate, sweeping from my kiss swollen mouth to Jaxen's uncharacteristically loose shoulders, said more than enough on its own."So," she said, drawing the word out with obvious delight. "Something happen while I was gone?""Ruby.""I'm just asking a normal follow up question about the status of my workshop." Her grin widened, entirely unrepentant. "Since I left two people arguing about the nature of free will in it, and came back to find them both looking distinctly less tense.""We're not discussing this," Jaxen said, though the corner of his mouth twitched in a way that undercut the sternness he was clearly aiming for."Fine, fine, I'll be professional." Ruby cleared her throat, straightening in her chair, though her eyes still danced with barely contained satisfaction. "Ward owes me twenty caps, for the record. He bet you'd need anothe